Corporations

Vote “no” on everything

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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13

All this year’s candidates are unopposed incumbents, which is lame. It’s a sign of an unhealthy democracy that we don’t even have a choice. Why isn’t anyone running? The citywide races on this ballot have no term limits and no public financing, so we’re stuck with career politicians until they decide to move on. Even if they’re okay at their jobs, that’s problematic.

We aren’t necessarily opposed to Treasurer Jose Cisneros or City Attorney Dennis Herrera. They each have admirable accomplishments on their résumés, but they aren’t the type of pioneering progressive leaders that we’re comfortable endorsing in uncontested elections — and Herrera has a couple ugly marks on his record (gang injunctions and invalidating a people’s referendum on Bayview/Hunters Point development).

We are, however, strongly opposed to the Guardian’s endorsements of Carmen Chu and Katy Tang. Back in the day, they worked together in Mayor Gavin Newsom’s budget office. Then he appointed Chu as District 4 supervisor and Tang became her legislative aide. Then Mayor Ed Lee appointed Chu as Assessor and it was Tang’s turn to be District 4 supervisor.

Are you sensing a trend? If Tang goes on to serve two full terms, the Sunset will go from 2007 until 2022 without a contested election. That’s crazy pants!

Odds are that will also mean 15 years without the District 4 supe ever disagreeing with the mayor. Chu was on the opposite side of virtually every contested vote The League has ever cared about: free Muni for youth, the Sit-Lie law, increasing the hotel tax, Election Day voter registration, and CleanPowerSF.

Tang hasn’t been around long, but she’s already voted against CleanPowerSF and carried the mayor’s water by trying to weaken John Avalos’s Due Process for All ordinance. She attempted to insert exceptions that would’ve made undocumented San Franciscans unsure if they could call the police without risking family members’ deportation. When she used the fearmongering image of the city becoming a “safe haven for criminals,” she was rightfully booed by hundreds of immigration and domestic violence advocates in the audience.

And then there’s the golden rule of politics: Follow the money! Chu and Tang have racked up over $150,000 each. Huge chunks of that money come from developers, property managers, consultants, and others looking to strike it rich with land use deals approved by the new board.

That’s especially troubling for Assessor-Recorder Chu. She’s responsible for assessing property taxes, most of which come from skyscrapers downtown. She should be all up in the business of those corporations: Every time a building changes hands or a company’s ownership changes, the company owes a real estate transfer tax. But Chu is buddy-buddy with the Building Owners and Managers Association, taking piles of cash from the real estate industry. That sucks.

This business of the mayor appointing his buddies who then go on to win uncontested races has got to stop. It’s troubling that the mayor — our executive branch — unilaterally fills out our legislative branch. Hello? Did the folks writing our City Charter ever hear of “checks and balances?”

We think all mayoral appointees should be placeholders, legally prohibited from running in the following election. None of this pledging not to run and then “changing your mind” (we’re looking at you, Ed Lee). That reform would be a proposition we could say yes to — and a welcome change of pace from this November’s ballot.

The San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters is an all-volunteer local chapter of the National League of Young Voters.

Activists score big victory as Jack Spade gives up on the Mission

Sasha Cuttler
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275

Score one for people power. Anti-gentrification activists in the Mission scored a major victory last night in their months-long battle to keep Jack Spade, an upscale men’s clothing chain, from opening a store on 16th Street — first by winning over the Board of Appeals, then by convincing the company to just give up.

So Jack Spade won’t be opening in the site of the old Adobe Book Store location near Valencia Street, an outcome engineered by the grassroots activism of the Stop Jack Spade Coalition, Valencia Corridor Merchants Association, and progressive politicians who supported the cause.

At issue at last night’s packed hearing was an appeal of the Planning Department’s ruling that Jack Spade didn’t fall under formula retail rules because it had one short of the 11 stores needed to meet the definition, even though it’s an expanding part of 5th and Pacific Co. and a brother brand to Kate Spade, which has dozens of stores around the country.

Activists considered it a long shot given the supermajority needed to overrule the decision and force a conditional use permit hearing before the store could open, particularly after falling short with the board in August. But this time, the activists won, with the board voting 4-1 to set a full rehearing for Dec. 11.

As representatives of the corporation left the hearing, they told a few activists and business owners that they “were done.” And when the Guardian reached 5th and Pacific CEO Bill McComb by email today, he confirmed that the company is giving up on this controversial location, where activists were concerned its deep-pocketed presence would accelerate gentrification of the neighborhood.

“[We’re] not going to war with the neighbors. We like those people and their neighborhood and we are not fighting the issue. There are many a fine location for Jack Spade. Peace to the city!” McComb wrote to us.

It was a thrilling surprise for the activists that have been organizing against the project for months, and it was reminiscent of the successful 2009 effort to stop American Apparel from opening up shop on Valencia, involving some of the same activists and organizing tactics.

“We’re very pleased about last night,” said Andy Blue, an activist working with local merchants. “We saw a significant shift in momentum and a tremendous community showing. It was clearly a victory for the neighborhood.”

It was a big turnaround from just a few weeks ago, when it looked like Jack Spade had won, and a sign of the rising importance of gentrification issues to San Franciscans who face rising residential and commercial rents fueled by the latest dot-com boom and Mayor Ed Lee’s corporate welfare policies.

“Six months ago, a lot of people in San Francisco felt powerless with the rapid displacement of residents,” said Blue. “It was like, ‘What can we do, you know?'”
But then, as Blue said, “the resistance started boiling up.”

The local merchants decided to appeal the Planning Department decision that would have allowed Jack Spade to simply open its doors with no public hearing. “So many people who were being affected by it started sharing their stories, and things started happening. People had had enough,” said Blue. “The San Francisco that we love is this diverse, unique place and we were watching  it transform into something totally different.”

Simply getting to yesterday’s hearing was a huge step for the activist population standing up against the retailer, Blue said. But after the rehearing request was granted, the local merchants still needed to prove that “manifest injustice” had taken place during Jack Spade’s permit acquisition process if the merchants wanted the actual rehearing. 

This presented a problem to the VCMA and others. To prove “manifest injustice” had taken place during the permit application process, the merchants needed to prove that Jack Spade not only applied for their permits under a dubious guise, but that they were well aware of just how dubious it was. To be manifestly unjust, the unfairness must be “direct, obvious and observable,” a list that isn’t always easy to satisfy. 

While the two sides can’t seem to come to a consensus on how much the rent will actually increase in the surrounding area due to Jack Spade’s arrival, this controversy arose at a time when neighborhoods throughout the city have been rising up against gentrification.

And this may not be the last time that this company is in the crosshairs of that concern. Asked whether its decision applies to the whole city or just this one location, McComb told us, “Just that spot. We have many brand fans in SF.” 

Activists try again to stop Jack Spade

Sasha Cuttler
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67
Activists try again to stop Jack Spade

The fight to keep suspected formula retailer Jack Spade out of the Mission resumes this evening (Wed/9) when The Stop Jack Spade Coalition lays out it’s case against the men’s clothing chain before the Board of Appeals in an attempt to force the business to go through a conditional use permit hearing. [UPDATE: Activists say they won a big victory last night, not just winning that vote but maybe convincing Jack Spade to withdraw its application completely. We’re working on confirming things now and we’ll have more details soon.]

The new push against Jack Spade comes less than two months after an original appeal found the retailer not to be in violation of the neighborhood’s formula retail ban, with the opposition campaign getting written support of Sups. Eric Mar, John Avalos, and David Campos. They join a growing list of those opposed to the retailer, one that currently features former Board of Supervisors presidents Matt Gonzalez and Aaron Peskin and Assemblymember Tom Ammiano.

If the coalition is granted a rehearing, it will be the second time an appeal is heard on the matter. On Aug. 21, the Board of Appeals ruled against the retailer in a 3-2 majority decision, but the decision still lacked the four votes required to revoke the building permits.

Jack Spade — currently slated to rent the former Adobe Bookshop storefront at 3166 16th Street — was originally granted its business and building permits sans conditional use hearing, an act that was supposed to be unheard of for a prospective national retailer inside a neighborhood with a formula retail ban.

The 2004 formula retail ordinance requires a businesses to get a conditional use permit before moving into certain San Francisco neighborhoods if they meet the “formula retail” criteria. Part of that criteria states that a store can have no more than 11 “retail sales establishments located in the United States.” Jack Spade, pre-Mission store, has just 10 unique stores, which allowed them to circumvent the hearing process.

But according to 5th & Pacific’s public records, the holding company (formerly known as Liz Claiborne) that owns Jack Spade, the high-end men’s clothing store is not an independent business but rather a sub-brand of Kate Spade; a women’s clothing store with 94 locations in the United States alone.

The coalition opposing Jack Spade’s now-imminent Mission migration is using this piece of information as Exhibit A in their fight against the retailer. The coalition is claiming that by not acknowledging the fact that Jack Spade itself was part of a far larger corporation, the retailer violated the formula retail ban by claiming “independent business” status.

As the move-in date for the Mission’s unwanted addition grows near, the coalition has taken up the cause once again, mustering support from nearly every constituency available.

It will be bringing its revamped case to the Board of Appeals, this time with testimony seemingly focused on the misleading nature of Jack Spade’s classification as an “independent business.” That should prove to be an effective move for the coalition, because Jack Spade isn’t an independent business, and they don’t try to classify themselves as such outside of San Francisco.

In fact, according to 5th & Pacific’s 10-K filings with the SEC, the “Kate Spade brand offers fashion accessories for women under the Kate Spade and Kate Spade Saturday trademarks, and for men under the Jack Spade trademark.” The two brands even share the same CEO: Craig Leavitt. Declaring that the two companies are independent of each other based on product offering is like saying beef and milk are independent of  other because they come from different parts of the cow.

Now, armed with an updated defense, the Coalition is taking a second stab at the appellate process, one they feel good about. In a letter to the Board, executive director of the Valencia Corridor Merchant Association (VCMA) Luis Granados said, “If the findings section were fully taken into account [last time], we believe the Board will see that Jack Spade is formula retail, as set forth under the law.”

Or as Gonzalez wrote in a letter to the Board of Appeals: “Issues of corporate ownership and/or corporate structure have been a matter of debate in previous hearings regarding Jack/Kate Spade’s permits.  While nowhere in the planning code does it require the consideration of corporate ownership/structure, neither does the ordinance forbid a consideration of corporate ownership/structure.  Indeed, in order to fulfill the clear intent of the law in a common sense manner, it will be necessary, in some cases, to consider corporate ownership/structure.

I urge you to grant the VCMA’s request for a rehearing of Jack/Kate Spade’s permits in order to prevent manifest injustice.”

And considering the momentum that the anti-Jack Spade movement is now gaining, the optimism isn’t unreasonable.

Activist Andy Blue, who helped organize the protest, acknowledged the high bar needed to overrule the flawed ruling by the Planning Department, telling us, “We’re cautiously optimistic, but it’s a long shot.”

Friends in the shadows

Michael Redmond
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Friends in the shadows

rebecca@sfbg.com, joe@sfbg.com

It’s a simple fact of life: Money buys influence. But in San Francisco, despite strict sunshine laws to illuminate donations to city agencies and gifts to the regulators from the regulated, money still circulates in the shadows when it flows through the coffers of “Friends” in high places.

Major real estate developers, city contractors, and large corporations often lend financial support to San Francisco city departments, to the tune of millions of dollars every year. But the money doesn’t just flow directly to city agencies, where it’s easily tracked by disclosure laws. Instead, it goes through private nonprofits that sometimes label themselves as “Friends Of…” these departments.

They include Friends of City Planning, Friends of the Library, a foundation formerly known as Friends of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Friends of SF Environment, and Friends of San Francisco Animal Care and Control.

The Friends pay for programs the departments supposedly cannot cover on their own. Bond money can build a skyscraper, but sometimes not fill it with furniture. Agencies are barred by law from funding an employee mixer or a conference trip, so departments turn to their Friends to fill in the gaps. Adding bells and whistles to city websites, holding lunchtime lectures, hiring a grant writer — or, in the case of the Department of Public Health, bolstering health services for vulnerable populations — these are all examples of what gets funded.

The extra help can clearly be a good thing, but the lack of transparency around who’s giving money raises questions — especially if it’s a business gunning for a major contract or a permit to build a high-rise.

City agencies receive outside funding from a wide variety of sources. Sometimes grants are made by the federal government, or a well-established philanthropic foundation — and according to city law, gifts of $10,000 or higher must be approved by the Board of Supervisors. But in the case of organizations like Friends, which are created specifically to assist city government agencies, the original funders aren’t always identifiable. And the collaboration is frequently much closer, with city staff members serving on Friends boards in a few cases.

the circle of donations to "friends of" foundations

Friends board members told the Guardian that their partnership with government helps bolster city agencies in a time of increasing austerity, in service of the public good. But do the special relationships these influential insiders hold with high-ranking city officials come into play when awarding a contract, issuing a permit, making a hiring decision, or determining whether a developer’s request for a rule exemption should be honored? Without more transparency, it’s tough to tell.

City disclosure rules state that any gift to a department must be prominently displayed on that department’s website, along with any financial interest the donor has involving the city. But Friends and other outside funders are under no obligation to share their supporters’ names, much less financial ties, when they distribute grants. Meanwhile, the disclosure rules that are on the books seem to be frequently ignored, misunderstood, or unenforced, our investigation discovered.

How are donors repaid for their support? Consider the controversy earlier this year around Pet Food Express, which won approval in June for another store in the Marina District despite opposition from four locally owned pet stores in the area that fear competing with a large national chain. Pet Food Express won the unlikely support of the city’s Small Business Commissioners, some of whom reversed their 2009 positions opposing the chain’s previous application.

SF Animal Care and Control Director Rebecca Katz personally lobbied the commission to support Pet Food Express, at least partially because the company has donated pet supplies valued at $50,000 to $70,000 per year to the department. That’s a lot of money for a cash-strapped city department, but a pittance compared to the profits of an expanding national chain.

It’s moments of clarity like those, when the public can easily trace the line from donations to political influence, that show why disclosure is so crucial. But those moments are few and far between when trying to trace the funders of private foundations and Friends organizations, where deals often happen in the dark.

 

WHEN DEVELOPERS ARE FRIENDS

At the Merchant Exchange Building in May, a crowd of high-profile real-estate developers mixed and mingled with city planners, commissioners, and even Mayor Ed Lee, wine glasses in hand. Sources told the Guardian that most of the planning staff was present, and not all were happy about having ribbons and name tags affixed to their shirts, as if they were being auctioned off.

With around 500 in attendance, the event was an annual fundraiser hosted by the Friends of San Francisco City Planning, a nonprofit organization that accepts contributions of up to $2,500 per individual to lend a helping hand to the Planning Department. This year’s event was titled “Incubator Startups, New Jobs for the Future,” hinting that the development community shares the mayor’s affinity for new tech startups and the droves of high-salaried IT professionals they’ve attracted to the city.

Some Friends of City Planning board members are major real-estate developers who routinely seek approval for major construction projects. Others are former planning commissioners, or have a background in community advocacy.

Amid widespread concern about displacement, gentrification, and the overall character of San Francisco’s built environment, no city department has greater influence than Planning. An individual’s interpretation of the Planning Code can carry tremendous weight; it’s a series of small decisions that shape a project’s profits and the look and feel of San Francisco’s future. And with cranes dotting the city’s skyline and market-rate construction catering to the wealthy while middle income residents get priced out, the amount of capital flowing through the development sector these days is astonishing.

In this dizzy climate, there might seem to be something askew about affluent developers and land-use attorneys rubbing elbows with city regulators, all eager to pass the hat for the Planning Department. Whiff of impropriety or no, the fundraiser appears to be totally legal.

“We aren’t violating the law — that I know,” Friends of City Planning Chair Dennis Antenore told the Guardian. “We’ve had legal advice on that for years.”

There is close collaboration between Friends of San Francisco City Planning and the Planning Department — a partnership so entrenched that it’s almost as if the nonprofit is an unofficial, private-sector branch of the agency.

“We are certainly thankful and appreciative,” Planning spokesperson Joanna Linsangan told the Guardian. “They’ve helped us for many, many years.” The additional funding is needed, she said, because “there isn’t a lot of wiggle room” in the departmental budget.

Each year, Planning Director John Rahaim submits a wish list to the Friends, outlining projects he wants funding for. This year, he requested $122,000 for a variety of initiatives, including training support to help planners assess proposals for formula retail (read: chain stores). That’s a hot-button issue lately, and one that shows how seemingly small decisions by planners can have big impacts.

When the department’s zoning administrator ruled that Jack Spade, a high-end clothing chain that opened up in the old Adobe Books location on 16th Street, wasn’t considered formula retail and therefore didn’t need a conditional use permit, neither widespread community outrage nor a majority vote by the Board of Appeals could reverse that flawed decision. It was a similar story with the Planning Commission’s Oct. 3 approval of the 555 Fulton mixed use project, where Planning Department support for exempting the grocery store for the area’s formula retail ban made it happen, to the delight of that developer.

Even though the planning director makes specific funding requests each year to the Friends and pitches the projects in person at their meetings — and the Friends publishes a list of the grants it awards to the department online — the Planning Department is not reporting those gifts to the Board of Supervisors.

“I confirm that the Planning Department did not receive any gifts,” Finance and IT Manager Keith DeMartini wrote in official gift reports submitted to the Board of Supervisors for the years 2011-12 and 2012-13. Those reports were sent to the board on Oct. 7 and Oct. 4, respectively, well after the July filing deadline and after the Guardian requested the missing reports.

The Friends typically funds two-thirds of the requests, said board member Alec Bash, totaling around $80,000 a year. In 2012, the Friends awarded a $25,000 grant to make the department’s new online permit-tracking system more user-friendly, making life a lot easier for developers.

When asked what safeguards are in place to prevent undue influence when the director is soliciting funding from a nonprofit partially controlled by developers, Linsangan responded, “those are two very separate things. One does not influence the other.”

She stated repeatedly that planners are not privy to information about individual contributors — but the fundraisers are organized by a board that includes identifiable developers, and anyone who attends can plainly see the donors in attendance. Nevertheless, Linsangan insisted that planners would not be swayed by this special relationship, saying, “That’s simply not the way we do things around here. We do things according to the Planning Code.”

But as the ruling on Jack Spade shows, as well as countless rulings by planners on whether a project is categorically exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act, interpreting the codes can involve considerable discretion.

The public can’t review a list of who wrote checks to the Friends of San Francisco City Planning for the May fundraiser. Since the organization waits a year between collecting the money and disbursing grants, donors stay shielded from required annual disclosures in tax filings.

But Antenore says the system was established with the public interest in mind. “We don’t reveal the contributors, because we don’t want anybody to have increased influence by a donation,” he insisted. Bash echoed this idea, saying the delay was to “allow for some breathing room.”

Unlike some of his fellow board members from the high-end development sector, Antenore has a history of being aligned with neighborhood interests on planning issues, helping author a 1986 ballot measure limiting downtown high-rise development. He emphasized that the developers on the Friends board are balanced out by more civic-minded individuals.

Still, developers who regularly submit permit applications for major construction projects sit on the Friends board. Among them are Larry Nibbi, a partial owner of Nibbi Bros.; Clark Manus, CEO of Heller Manus Architects; and Oz Erikson, CEO of the Emerald Fund development firm.

“We’re not making use of [the funding] in a way that benefits these people,” Antenore said. “I wouldn’t do this if I thought otherwise. I have been careful to maintain the integrity of this organization.” The money is meant to facilitate better planning, he added. “I don’t think there’s any conspiracy,” he said. “We’re not financing anything evil.”

Both the Planning Department and its Friends dismissed the idea that the donations could open the door to favoritism or undue influence. So why isn’t the department reporting gifts it receives from the Friends to the Board of Supervisors, or disclosing them on its website, as required by city law?

According to a 2008 City Attorney memo on reporting gifts to city departments, when an agency receives a gift of $100 or more, it “must report the gift in a public record and on the department’s website. The public disclosure must include the name of the donor(s) and the amount of the gift [and] a statement as to any financial interest the contributor has involving the city.”

John St. Croix, director of the San Francisco Ethics Commission, confirmed that’s the current standard, telling us, “The actual disclosure should be on the website of the department that received the gift.”

Linsangan said records of the gifts are indeed available — listed as “grants” in the department’s Annual Report. But while the 2011-12 report lists grants from sources such as the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, there was no mention of Friends of City Planning.

The memo also says any gift of $10,000 and above must first be approved by a resolution of the Board of Supervisors. But last year, when the Friends provided $25,000 to upgrade the permit-tracking system, it wasn’t sanctioned by a board resolution. Asked why, Linsangan made it clear that she was not aware of any such requirement.

As is common, when it comes to adhering to disclosure laws, confusion abounds. And sometimes, only sometimes, politicos get caught.

 

READING UP ON DISCLOSURE LAWS

When the head of a city agency fails to report gifts totaling $130,000, how much do you think he is fined?

City Librarian Luis Herrera failed to report receiving that amount in gifts and he was fined exactly $600 by the California Fair Political Practices Commission on Sept. 19. Specifically, Herrera had to file a form 700 with the FPPC to state the gifts he received. From 2008-2010, the forms he turned in had the “no reportable interests” box checked.

The money was used in what he calls the City Librarian’s Fund, which is the money he keeps on hand to pay for office parties and giving honorariums to poets and speakers who perform at the library’s branches, money that wasn’t disclosed on the very forms designed for reporting it.

There are two stories of how the fine came about. Longtime library advocate James Chaffee said that it was the result of a complaint he filed with the FPPC in April, and indeed, he sought and obtained many public documents revealing the money trail. San Francisco Public Library spokesperson Michelle Jeffers disagreed, saying that the fine was the result of an ongoing conversation with the FPPC to figure how exactly to file the gifts appropriately.

“The law wasn’t clear around these forms and it wasn’t clear if he had to report them,” she told the Guardian. “For amending the reports you have to pay a $200 fine for every year it was proposed. We keep scrupulous records on every pizza party we have.”

When government officials receive “gift of cash or goods,” they must report them annually in statements of economic interest, known as a Form 700, to the city Controller’s Office. The form is kind of a running tally of who is receiving gifts from whom, a way for the public to track money’s influence in government.

The gifts came from the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, another nonprofit that bolsters city agency funding. Now Herrera has to list the $130,000 gifts from fiscal years 2008-09 and 2009-10 on his website.

What exactly does that accomplish? As it turns out, not a whole lot.

City Administrative Code 67.29-6 defines the reporting of gifts to city departments, and one of those requirements is to make a statement of “any financial interest the contributor has involving the city.” Now that Herrera lists the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library as donors on the department website, the statement of financial interest by the friends group is this: “none.”

There are myriad donors to the Friends of the SFPL, and the group doesn’t have to state the economic interests of its donors, or even mention who its donors are. The code requires gifts be reported to the controller, and the deputy city controller told us this doesn’t apply to the “friends of” organizations, or any nonprofit foundation arms of city departments.

“If gifts are made to a department, yes, they have to disclose, so people don’t get preferential interest in getting city contracts,” Deputy Controller Monique Zmuda told us. “I know it’s a fine line. The foundations don’t provide us with anything.”

Friends of the SFPL doesn’t provide money just for pizza parties. A breakdown of a funding request from the library to its Friends shows requests up to $750,000 to advertise the library on Muni and in newspapers, funding for permanent exhibits, and the City Librarian’s personal fund. That’s just the money it gives to the library. Other monies are spent directly on activities supporting the library.

As Jeffers pointed out to the Guardian, the money isn’t spent on “trips to Tahiti.” Friends of the SPL do good city works, from a neighborhood photo project in the Bayview branch library to providing books for children. But the question is: Who’s buying that goodwill and why?

The millions of dollars in donations made to the Friends of the SFPL don’t need to be approved by the Board of Supervisors, like gifts to departments do. They’re not checked for conflicts of interest or financial interest by any governmental body. Donors give and the Friends of SFPL spend freely, financial interest or not.

When our research for this story began, no financial statements were available of the Friends of the SFPL website. After a few days of inquiries, the most recent year’s financial statements from 2011-12 were posted to the website.

Ultimately, the San Francisco Public Library is one of the smaller city departments, with an annual budget that hovers around $86 million. The Department of Public Health is a much bigger beast, with a 2011-12 budget of around $1.5 billion.

One of its main foundations, the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation, is also one of the largest nonprofits that supplements city spending. In many ways, it could be described as the model of disclosure for city foundations, although its disclosures are not by law, but by choice.

 

FOUNDATION OF FRIENDS

The Department of Public Health relies on a few entities that fundraise on its behalf: the San Francisco Public Health Foundation, the Friends of Laguna Honda Hospital, and the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation.

“They’re private nonprofit entities that are separate from the department,” CFO Greg Wagner told us. “But their roles are to support the department in its efforts.” He cited examples such as sending its staff to conferences or hosting meetings, “things that we don’t have the budget for or don’t have the staff or resources.”

The lion’s share of the DPH’s gifts are funneled through the SFGHF. Unlike many of the assorted Friends groups or foundations that support city services, the SFGHF extensively reports the sources of its $5 million in donations. The donors include a veritable who’s who of San Francisco: the Giants, Sutter Health, Xerox, Pacific Union, and Kohl’s all donated between $1,000 and $10,000 in the past two years.

But the largest gifts to the SFGHF came from Kaiser Permanente, and its financial interests in the city run deep. Kaiser came into the city’s crosshairs in July, when the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution calling on Kaiser to disclose its pricing model after a sudden, unexplained increase in health care costs for city employees. Kaiser holds a $323 million city contract to provide health coverage, and supervisors took the healthcare giant to task for failing to produce data to back up its rate hikes.

In the meantime, Kaiser has also been a generous donor. It contributed $364,950 toward SFGHF and another $25,000 to SFPHF in fiscal year 2011-12.

The funding from Kaiser and a host of other contributors — which include Chevron, Intel, Genentech, Macy’s, Wells Fargo (another city contractor), and a pharmaceutical company called Vertex — does support needed programs. They include research into the health of marginalized communities, services through Project Homeless Connect, screening for HIV, and immunization shots for travelers.

But because DPH doesn’t count much of this support as “gifts” formally received by the city, it isn’t subject to prior approval by the Board of Supervisors, or posted on the department’s website along with the contributors’ financial interests. Major contributions are disclosed in a report to the Health Commission, something Wagner described as a voluntary gesture in response to commissioners’ requests.

“Most gifts to foundations are donations to a nonprofit and do not come through the city or DPH at all,” he noted.

This distance is maintained on paper despite close collaboration with the department. In the case of Project Homeless Connect, a program that holds a bimonthly event to aid the homeless, it supports programs headquartered in city facilities. Penny Eardley, executive director of SFPHF— which used to be called Friends of San Francisco Public Health — noted that her organization occasionally makes grants or seeks funding in response to department requests. And Deputy Director of Health Colleen Chawla is a foundation board member. It’s almost like these foundations are extensions of the department, except they’re not.

SFPHF also earns revenue as a city contractor. When DPH received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control, it contracted with SFPHF to manage subcontracts with about a dozen community-based organizations.

The web gets even more tangled. The president of SFPHF is Randy Wittorp — who’s also Director of Public Affairs for Kaiser Permanente’s San Francisco Service Area. It’s a similar story with SFGHF, whose board includes several General Hospital administrators, including CEO Susan Currin.

Former Health Commissioner James Illig said people shouldn’t worry, that hospital the staff would never direct foundation funds to pet projects or mishandle funds. “They maintain a separation and a firewall,” he said, for example noting, “Sue Currin is not directing funds to her own hospital.”

But he did admit that since SFGHF’s minutes are not public documents, that “raises a few concerns,” arguing the public should be able to inspect financial documents to decide if the foundations are directing funds lawfully to city departments.

Even when the public by law has a right to access financial records of a city department, rooting out corruption can be like pushing a boulder up a San Francisco hill.

 

FROM PATIENTS TO PARTIES

In 2010 and 2011, Laguna Honda Hospital administrators and staff used money from the hospital’s patient gift fund to throw a party. And then they spent it on airfare. And then they gave laser-engraved pedometers to the staff. All told, they spent nearly $350,000 meant for the dying and the infirm, nearly half of the total funds.

The incident was big, messy, and out in the public eye. It was an all-too-rare glimpse into the shady use of public funds by public officials. But when hospital staff members Dr. Derek Kerr and Dr. Maria Rivero blew the whistle on Laguna Honda’s misuse of patient funds in 2010, they were drummed out of their jobs.

Eventually litigation on behalf of the whistleblowers and their complaints of corruption were found to have merit.

Kerr’s vindication came at a meeting of the Health Commission in April 2013. In the packed City Hall meeting room, the public watched as Laguna Honda Executive Director Mivic Hirose read her apology to Kerr and Rivero aloud, even announcing a plaque in Kerr’s honor.

“The hospital will install the plaque in the South 3 Hospice,” she read, stiltedly, from a written statement, surrounded by microphones at the podium. “The plaque will say: In recognition of Derek Kerr MD of his contributions to the Laguna Honda’s hospice and palliative care program 1989-2010.”

Kerr received a settlement of $750,000 and something more important: His good name cleared.

But that conflict of interest was rooted out only after years of litigation that revealed the financial abuse through legal discovery of the department’s documents — documents that should’ve been public in the first place. ABC 7’s I-Team broke the story and did much of the reporting at the time, otherwise the entire affair may have been swept under the rug.

The misuse of funds was only brought to light with the revelation of public documents — revelations not possible with most Friends groups. The Laguna Honda Hospital Foundation has also had financial dealings with potential conflicts and a lack of transparency.

The now-defunct LHHF’s board chair, former City Attorney Louise Renne, made an interesting choice for her vice chair after she formed the nonprofit in 2003. Derek Parker was vice chair of the LHHF while simultaneously heading architecture firm Anshen-Allen, with a $585 million city contract to rebuild the hospital.

So he was not only rebuilding Laguna Honda under city contract, but soliciting and spending donations meant to supplement his project. Renne wrote to the Health Commission in December 2011 that LHHF’s purpose was to manage over $15 million in donations meant to furnish the hospital with beds, chairs, and other necessities. Eventually, then-Mayor Willie Brown found funding for the hospital, reducing the foundation’s role.

In a phone interview with the Guardian, Renne said the goals of the LHHF were only ever to furnish the newly christened hospital. “Our purpose was to fill the void, if you will, for what the city and its services could not do,” she said.

But in her letter, Renne advocated for LHHF to take an active role in fundraising for the hospital for years to come. “Today, the members of the Board of Directors of the Foundation continue to assist the hospital in various phases of its new projects and operations with projects approved by the City and/or the hospital administration,” she wrote to the Health Commission.

And Parker would have potentially managed millions of dollars flowing through donations for countless other hospital projects, while heading an architectural firm with contracts to build in San Francisco. We were unable to reach Parker for comment.

“I never saw Derek use his position as an architect or position for any political gain, I never saw it,” Renne told us. But no one else would see it either, because organizations like the now closed Laguna Honda Hospital Foundation operate without public oversight.

The Health Commission itself even noted this in its March 2012 meeting, the minutes describing then-commissioner James Illig as critiquing the foundation for not being open about its source of funding.

“Commissioner Illig thanks Ms. Renne and Mr. Parker for coming to the Commission,” the minutes read. “Because (LHHF) is a project of Community Initiatives, a fiscal sponsor for nonprofits, it is not possible to find basic financial information about the Foundation or its activities.”

Divided interests on hospital board

Due to a quirk of her foundation being under the “umbrella” of a separate entity, Community Initiatives, Illig was never able to even get the LHHF’s IRS forms, he told us. “We tried to get information and reports, and the Community Initiatives [Form] 990 was giant,” Illig said. “It didn’t separate anything out.”

Illig told us that it made sense to have Parker on the board because he is monied and well connected, making it easier to solicit donations. But insiders close to the board told us that Parker’s position may have made it easier to swing getting other contracts for his firm.

Parker got another city contract building the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital at Mission Bay, slated to open in 2015. No doubt his firm got the job partly due to his reputation as pioneering architecture that leads to healthy patient outcomes — but then again, the board he served on also approved donations to research at UCSF.

Laguna Honda Hospital Foundation may now be defunct, but it serves to illustrate the lack of controls and oversight of the foundations beyond even gift disclosure.

 

OFF THE BOOKS

It might be characterized as a web of influence, cronyism, or just the way business is done. But is there something improper about all of this?

Private funding often represents a needed boost that allows for important work to take place beyond what could happen under ordinary budgeting. At the same time, it smacks of privatization. While departments and funders point to lean times in the public sector to justify the need for this help, the funding continues to flow whether it’s a good year or a bad year for city government. And at the end of the day, the most glaring issue of all seems to be the lack of transparency.

Are city departments ever tempted to bend the rules to lend a little help to their Friends? As long as the funding is in the dark, the public has no way of knowing.

Ethics chief St. Croix told us his office lacks the resources to visit every city website and check up on whether departments are following the disclosure rules. “If someone brought it to my attention that a department received a gift and didn’t post it [on the website],” he said, “we would look into it.”

But if the watchdogs need watchdogs, citizens who can’t even review documents that should be publicly available, then these quasi-governmental functions and the people who fund them will remain in the shadows.  

Danielle Parenteau contributed to this report.  

ADDENDUM  

When city funders operate in the dark, one of the best ways to learn about corrupt influence, misuse of funds, and other transgressions is from whistleblowers. If you have a tip for us, send us snail mail at SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN, 225 Bush, 17th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94104. Or email us at news@sfbg.com. Just make sure not to use an email address provided by your workplace, which is less secure.

Chain store ban and affordable groceries at issue in 555 Fulton debate UPDATED

Sasha Cuttler
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Chain store ban and affordable groceries at issue in 555 Fulton debate UPDATED

UPDATED San Francisco’s resistance to formula retail stores will be put to the test tomorrow (Thu/3), when the San Francisco Planning Commission will vote on the 555 Fulton St. project.

The project — a five-story, 136-unit residential building with a ground-floor supermarket, complete with up to 275 total parking spaces— has been bobbing in purgatory since 2010, when developers were stalled by the withering economy.

But dried-up finances aren’t what’s now holding up the development of this project in an area governed by the Market and Octavia Better Neighborhood Plan and the Formula Retail Use Ordinance, both of which discourage national chains in favor of locally owned businesses.

Debate is centering on the question of whether the formula retail ban prevents an affordable grocery store from going in at the site, as the developer contends. The politics surrounding the project have gotten heated, with Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association supporting the ban on chain stores; the Mayor’s Office, Chinatown power broker Rose Pak, and Planning Director John Rahaim supporting the developer and project contractor Walter Wong; and Dist. 5 Sup. London Breed caught in the middle.

Last week, her legislative aide Vallie Brown told HVNA that Breed would support their request for a continuance at tomorrow’s meeting while they explore ways to attract an affordable local grocer, but Breed seems torn between what she told the New Yorker recently were desires to make affordable groceries available and prevent the boutiqueing of Hayes Valley, and her support for the formula retail ban.

“Breed said that despite the ban, she’s willing to allow a chain grocery store into the area to make it more affordable for residents,” reporter Lauren Smiley wrote in the article. The Guardian has been unable to reach Breed or Brown this week.

[UPDATE: Breed told the Guardian that her biggest concern is that the grocery store is affordable to the three low-income housing projects located right across the street, and she has yet to be convinced that can happen without breaking the formula retail ban at the site, despite working on the issue with both activists and the developer.

“It’s a challenge, I get that,” Breed told us. “I want the developer to operate with me in good faith and make a serious long-term commitment to me that this will be an affordable grocery store.”

But she doesn’t yet have that full commitment, and she says that she’s planning to honor her commitment to activists and ask that the formula retail waiver be delayed today even if the rest of the project goes through. “Ultimately, I asked them to be a good community partner,” she told us.]

For Hayes Valley, this has been a near decade-long process. In 2004, the Board of Supervisors first outlawed these generic retailers from opening up shop within the Hayes-Gough Neighborhood Commercial Transit (NCT) District when it passed Ordinance No. 62-04, classifying “formula retailers” and limiting their impact within unique neighborhoods. The ordinance keeps local businesses viable, keeping deep-pocketed corporations out.

The 555 Fulton project falls somewhere between the Hayes-Gough NCT and the Residential Transit Oriented District (RTO), and currently, a two-story, 19,620-square-foot office and industrial building with about 70 surface parking spots inhabits the address.

Both the neighborhood residents and the developers have historically felt that the property would make for an excellent grocery store. “What” has never been an issue with the property. “Who” on the other hand, has been the biggest issue.

In order for 555 Fulton to be developed by a “formula retail” outlet — which have been the only types of occupants the current developers believe to be able to pay the exorbitant established rent costs  — the property technically located in the Hayes-Gough NTC needs to be designated as a “Special Use District” (SUD).

An SUD adjusts the land use controls and height restrictions for a specific piece of property, in this case allowing for a “grocery store larger than 15,000 square feet of gross occupied floor area, as well as residential uses meeting a minimum density of one dwelling unit per 600 feet of lot area.” And up until April, the property was an SUD.

Back in 2008, 555 Fulton was granted its SUD by Section 249.35A of the Planning Code Section, which established the “Fulton Street Grocery Store Special Use District.” In 2010, the Planning Commission approved both a Conditional Use Authorization and a Planned Unit Development, allowing the developer of the subject property to build their mixed-use grocery store-residential building. Neither of these exceptions allowed for a “formula retail” outlet at the time, but interest still seemed solid.

Then everything stalled. And stalled. And stalled some more. Things have remained idle for so long that the five-year window given to the Fulton Street Grocery Store SUD expired this past April. Now, the developers are asking for five more years on the same Fulton Street Grocery Store SUD that was allowed to a different development group in 2008.

But it isn’t exactly the same request this time: Now the developers are trying to get an SUD without a provision on “formula retail” outlets, and both sides are expected to turn out big numbers on each side of the question at tomorrow’s hearing, which starts at noon in City Hall Room 400.

Project Censored

Michael Redmond
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Project Censored

joe@sfbg.com

This year’s annual Project Censored list of the most underreported news stories includes the widening wealth gap, the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning for leaking classified documents, and President Obama’s war on whistleblowers — all stories that actually received considerable news coverage.

So how exactly were they “censored” and what does that say of this venerable media watchdog project?

Project Censored isn’t only about stories that were deliberately buried or ignored. It’s about stories the media has covered poorly through a sort of false objectivity that skews the truth. Journalists do cry out against injustice, on occasion, but they don’t always do it well.

That’s why Project Censored was started back in 1976: to highlight stories the mainstream media missed or gave scant attention to. Although the project initially started in our backyard at Sonoma State University, now academics and students from 18 universities and community colleges across the country pore through hundreds of submissions of overlooked and underreported stories annually. A panel of academics and journalists then picks the top 25 stories and curates them into themed clusters. This year’s book, Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fearful Times, hits bookstores this week.

What causes the media to stumble? There are as many reasons as there are failures.

Brooke Gladstone, host of the radio program On the Media and writer of the graphic novel cum news media critique, The Influencing Machine, said the story of Manning (who now goes by the first name Chelsea) was the perfect example of the media trying to cover a story right, but getting it mostly wrong.

“The Bradley Manning case is for far too long centered on his personality rather than the nature of his revelations,” Gladstone told us. Manning’s career was sacrificed for sending 700,000 classified documents about the Iraq war to WikiLeaks. But the media coverage focused largely on Manning’s trial and subsequent change in gender identity.

Gladstone said that this is part of the media’s inability to deal with vast quantities of information which, she said, “is not what most of our standard media does all that well.”

The media mangling of Manning is number one on the Project Censored list, but the shallow coverage this story received is not unique. The news media is in a crisis, particularly in the US, and it’s getting worse.

 

WATCHING THE WATCHDOGS

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which conducts an annual analysis of trends in news, found that as revenue in journalism declined, newsrooms have shed 30 percent of their staff in the last decade. In 2012, the number of reporters in the US dipped to its lowest level since 1978, with fewer than 40,000 reporters nationally. This creates a sense of desperation in the newsroom, and in the end, it’s the public that loses.

“What won out is something much more palpable to the advertisers,” says Robert McChesney, an author, longtime media reform advocate, professor at University of Illinois, and host of Media Matters from 2000-2012. Blandness beat out fearless truth-telling.

Even worse than kowtowing to advertisers is the false objectivity the media tries to achieve, McChesney told us, neutering its news to stay “neutral” on a topic. This handcuffs journalists into not drawing conclusions, even when they are well-supported by the facts.

In order to report a story, they rely on the words of others to make claims, limiting what they can report.

“You allow people in power to set the range of legitimate debate, and you report on it,” McChesney said.

Project Censored stories reflect that dynamic — many of them require journalists to take a stand or present an illuminating perspective on a set of dry facts. For example, reporting on the increasing gulf between the rich and the poor is easy, but talking about why the rich are getting richer is where journalists begin to worry about their objectivity, Gladstone said.

“I think that there is a desire to stay away from stories that will inspire rhetoric of class warfare,” she said.

Unable to tell the story of a trend and unable to talk about rising inequality for fear of appearing partisan, reporters often fail to connect the dots for their readers.

One of Project Censored stories this year, “Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent,” is a good example of the need for a media watchdog. Researchers point to interest payments as the primary way wealth is transferred from Main Street to Wall Street.

It’s how the banks are picking the pockets of the 99 percent. But if no politician is calling out the banks on this practice, if no advocacy group is gaining enough traction, shouldn’t it be the media’s role to protect the public and sound the battle cry?

“So much of media criticism is really political commentary squeezed through a media squeezer,” Gladstone said, “and it comes out media shaped.”

 

SHAPING THE MEDIA

McChesney says journalism should be a proactive watchdog by independently stating that something needs to be done. He said there’s more watchdog journalism calling out inequity in democracies where there is a more robust and funded media.

And they often have one thing we in US don’t — government subsidies for journalism.

“All the other democracies in the world, there are huge subsidies for public media and journalism,” McChesney said. “They not only rank ahead of us in terms of being democratic, they also rank ahead of us in terms of having a free press. Our press is shrinking.”

No matter what the ultimate economic solution is, the crisis of reporting is largely a crisis of money. McChesney calls it a “whole knife in the heart of journalism.”

For American journalism to revive itself, it has to move beyond its corporate ties. It has to become a truly free press. It’s time to end the myth that corporate journalism is the only way for media to be objective, monolithic, and correct.

The failures of that prescription are clear in Project Censored’s top 10 stories of the year:

1. Manning and the Failure of Corporate Media

Untold stories of Iraqi civilian deaths by American soldiers, US diplomats pushing aircraft sales on foreign royalty, uninvestigated abuse by Iraqi allies, the perils of the rise in private war contractors — this is what Manning exposed. They were stories that challenge the US political elite, and they were only made possible by a sacrifice.

Manning got a 35-year prison sentence for the revelation of state secrets to WikiLeaks, a story told countless times in corporate media. But as Project Censored posits, the failure of our media was not in the lack of coverage of Manning, but in its focus.

Though The New York Times partnered with WikiLeaks to release stories based on the documents, many published in 2010 through 2011, news from the leaks have since slowed to a trickle — a waste of over 700,000 pieces of classified intelligence giving unparalleled ground level views of America’s costly wars.

The media quickly took a scathing indictment of US military policy and spun it into a story about Manning’s politics and patriotism. As Rolling Stone pointed out (“Did the Media Fail Bradley Manning?”), Manning initially took the trove of leaks to The Washington Post and The New York Times, only to be turned away.

Alexa O’Brien, a former Occupy activist, scooped most of the media by actually attending Manning’s trial. She produced tens of thousands of words in transcriptions of the court hearings, one of the only reporters on the beat.

2. Richest Global 1 Percent Hide Billions in Tax Havens

Global corporate fatcats hold $21-32 trillion in offshore havens, money hidden from government taxation that would benefit people around the world, according to findings by James S. Henry, the former chief economist of the global management firm McKinsey & Company.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists obtained a leak in April 2013, revealing how widespread the buy-in was to these tax havens. The findings were damning: government officials in Canada, Russia, and other countries have embraced offshore accounts, the world’s top banks (including Deutsche Bank) have worked to maintain them, and the tax havens are used in Ponzi schemes.

Moving money offshore has implications that ripped through the world economy. Part of Greece’s economic collapse was due to these tax havens, ICIJ reporter Gerard Ryle told Gladstone on her radio show. “It’s because people don’t want to pay taxes,” he said. “You avoid taxes by going offshore and playing by different rules.”

US Senator Carl Levin, D-Michigan, introduced legislation to combat the practice, SB1533, The Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, but so far the bill has had little play in the media.

Researcher James Henry said the hidden wealth was a “huge black hole” in the world economy that has never been measured, which could generate income tax revenues between $190-280 billion a year.

3. Trans-Pacific Partnership

Take 600 corporate advisors, mix in officials from 11 international governments, let it bake for about two years, and out pops international partnerships that threaten to cripple progressive movements worldwide.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a trade agreement, but leaked texts show it may allow foreign investors to use “investor-state” tribunals to extract extravagant extra damages for “expected future profits,” according to the Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

The trade watch group investigated the TPP and is the main advocate in opposition of its policies. The AFL-CIO, Sierra Club, and other organizations have also had growing concerns about the level of access granted to corporations in these agreements.

With extra powers granted to foreign firms, the possibility that companies would continue moving offshore could grow. But even with the risks of outsized corporate influence, the US has a strong interest in the TPP in order to maintain trade agreements with Asia.

The balancing act between corporate and public interests is at stake, but until the US releases more documents from negotiations, the American people will remain in the dark.

4. Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

President Obama has invoked the Espionage Act of 1917 more than every other president combined. Seven times, Obama has pursued leakers with the act, against Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Bradley Manning, Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and most recently, Edward Snowden. All had ties to the State Department, FBI, CIA, or NSA, and all of them leaked to journalists.

“Neither party is raising hell over this. This is the sort of story that sort of slips through the cracks,” McChesney said. And when the politicians don’t raise a fuss, neither does the media.

Pro Publica covered the issue, constructing timelines and mapping out the various arrests and indictments. But where Project Censored points out the lack of coverage is in Obama’s hypocrisy — only a year before, he signed The Whistleblower Protection Act.

Later on, he said he wouldn’t follow every letter of the law in the bill he had only just signed.

“Certain provisions in the Act threaten to interfere with my constitutional duty to supervise the executive branch,” Obama said. “As my Administration previously informed the Congress, I will interpret those sections consistent with my authority.”

5. Hate Groups and Antigovernment Groups on Rise across US

Hate groups in the US are on the rise, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. There are 1,007 known hate groups operating across the country, it wrote, including neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, border vigilantes, and others.

Since 2000, those groups have grown by over half, and there was a “powerful resurgence” of Patriot groups, the likes of which were involved in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Worst of all, the huge growth in armed militias seems to have conspicuous timing with Obama’s election.

“The number of Patriot groups, including armed militias, has grown 813 percent since Obama was elected — from 149 in 2008 to 1,360 in 2012,” the SPLC reported.

Though traditionally those groups were race motivated, the report noted that now they are gunning for government. There was a smattering of news coverage when the SPLC released its report, but not much since.

6. Billionaires’ Rising Wealth Intensifies Poverty and Inequality

The world’s billionaires added $241 billion to their collective net worth in 2012. That’s an economic recovery, right?

That gain, coupled with the world’s richest peoples’ new total worth of $1.9 trillion (more than the GDP of Canada), wasn’t reported by some kooky socialist group, but by Bloomberg News. But few journalists are asking the important question: Why?

Project Censored points to journalist George Monbiot, who highlights a reduction of taxes and tax enforcement, the privatization of public assets, and the weakening of labor unions.

His conclusions are backed up by the United Nations’ Trade and Development Report from 2012, which noted how the trend hurts everyone: “Recent empirical and analytical work reviewed here mostly shows a negative correlation between inequality and growth.”

7. Merchant of Death and Nuclear Weapons

The report highlighted by Project Censored on the threat of nuclear war is an example not of censorship, strictly, but a desire for media reform.

Project Censored highlighted a study from the The Physicians for Social Responsibility that said 1 billion people could starve in the decade after a nuclear detonation. Corn production in the US would decline by an average of 10 percent for an entire decade and food prices would make food inaccessible to hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest.

This is not journalism in the classic sense, Gladstone said. In traditional journalism, as it’s played out since the early 20th century, news requires an element of something new in order to garner reporting — not a looming threat or danger.

So in this case, what Project Censored identified was the need for a new kind of journalism, what it calls “solutions journalism.”

“Solutions journalism,” Sarah van Gelder wrote in the foreword to Censored 2014, “must investigate not only the individual innovations, but also the larger pattern of change — the emerging ethics, institutions, and ways of life that are coming into existence.”

8. Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent

Does 35 percent of everything bought in the United States go to interest? Professor Margrit Kennedy of the University of Hanover thinks so, and she says it’s a major funnel of money from the 99 percent to the rich.

In her 2012 book, Occupy Money, Kennedy wrote that tradespeople, suppliers, wholesalers, and retailers along the chain of production rely on credit. Her figures were initially drawn from the German economy, but Ellen Brown of the Web of Debt and Global Research said she found similar patterns in the US.

This “hidden interest” has sapped the growth of other industries, she said, lining the pockets of the financial sector.

So if interest is stagnating so many industries, why would journalists avoid the topic?

Few economists have echoed her views, and few experts emerged to back up her assertions. Notably, she’s a professor in an architectural school, with no formal credentials in economics.

From her own website, she said she became an “expert” in economics “through her continuous research and scrutiny.”

Without people in power pushing the topic, McChesney said that a mainstream journalist would be seen as going out on a limb.

“The reporters raise an issue the elites are not raising themselves, then you’re ideological, have an axe to grind, sort of a hack,” he said. “It makes journalism worthless on pretty important issues.”

9. Icelanders Vote to Include Commons in Their Constitution

In 2012, Icelandic citizens voted in referendum to change the country’s 1944 constitution. When asked, “In the new constitution, do you want natural resources that are not privately owned to be declared national property?” its citizens voted 81 percent in favor.

Project Censored says this is important for us to know, but in the end, US journalism is notably American-centric. Even the Nieman Watchdog, a foundation for journalism at Harvard University, issued a report in 2011 citing the lack of reporting on a war the US funneled over $4 trillion into over the past decade, not to mention the cost in human lives.

If we don’t pay attention to our own wars, why exactly does Project Censored think we’d pay attention to Iceland?

“The constitutional reforms are a direct response to the nation’s 2008 financial crash,” Project Censored wrote, “when Iceland’s unregulated banks borrowed more than the country’s gross domestic product from international wholesale money markets.”

Solutions-based journalism rears its head again, and the idea is that the US has much to learn from Iceland, but even Gladstone was dubious.

“Iceland is being undercovered, goddamnit! Where is our Iceland news?” she joked with us. “Certainly I agree with some of this list, Bradley Manning was covered badly, I was sad the tax haven story didn’t get more coverage. But when has anyone cared about Iceland?”

10. A “Culture of Cruelty” along Mexico–US Border

The plight of Mexican border crossings usually involves three types of stories in US press: deaths in the stretch of desert beyond the border, the horrors of drug cartels, and heroic journeys of border crossings by sympathetic workers. But a report released a year ago by the organization No More Deaths snags the 10th spot for overlooked stories in Project Censored.

The report asserts that people arrested by Border Patrol while crossing were denied water and told to let their sick die. No More Deaths conducted more than 12,000 interviews to form the basis of its study in three Mexican cities: Nacos, Nogales and Agua Prieta. The report cites grossly ineffective oversight from the Department of Homeland Security. This has received some coverage, from Salon showcasing video of Border Patrol agents destroying jugs of water meant for crossers to a recent New York Times piece citing a lack of oversight for Border Patrol’s excessive force.

The ACLU lobbied the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to call international attention to the plight of these border crossers at the hands of US law enforcement.

If ever an issue flew under the radar, this is it.

Mayor Lee supports PG&E’s monopoly

Sasha Cuttler
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21
Mayor Lee supports PG&E’s monopoly

After watching Mayor Ed Lee and his appointees subvert the launch of CleanPowerSF and support PG&E’s illegal monopoly control of local energy users — and PG&E’s regular attempts to greenwash its dirty power portfolio — artist Michael Ortlieb developed and submitted this editorial cartoon. Enjoy. 

Expand protections for small businesses

Sasha Cuttler
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40

EDITORIAL Corporations and chain stores are crafty, and they can always find creative ways to get around whatever barriers that cities and counties erect to protect their local small businesses. And such barriers are important because most large corporations enjoy economies of scale, the ability to absorb sustained losses while gaining market share, and other unfair competitive advantages.

San Francisco voters and legislators have approved and expanded so-called formula retail legislative protections over the last decade, requiring stores with 11 or more locations that want to open in neighborhood commercial districts to obtain a conditional use permit, allowing the public to weigh in and city officials to reject disfavored projects.

But as we observed in last month’s saga involving chain store men’s clothier Jack Spade’s planned move into the old Adobe Bookstore space on 16th Street near Valencia, it’s still too easy for deep-pocketed corporations to make stealthy inroads into some of San Francisco’s most beloved and sensitive commercial districts.

First, Jack Spade disguised its corporate connections in pulling a building permit, then it won over the zoning administrator by claiming only 10 stores (despite the fact that it’s a national chain owned by Fifth & Pacific, aka Liz Claiborne, which also has a string of Kate Spade women’s clothing stores), and then, even when activists and small businesses won the argument and a 3-2 vote by the Board of Appeals on Aug. 21, that wasn’t the supermajority needed to overturn the flawed decision.

As they say in the neighborhood: That shit ain’t right.

Clearly, something needs to change because Jack Spade isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last, corporate-owned chain store that wants to move into the Mission and other gentrifying commercial districts in the city, including Western SoMa (where development forces have been unleashed by the city’s approval of its local area plan earlier this year), Hayes Valley, Polk Gulch, and the Divisidero corridor.

And when one deep-pocketed chain store moves in — a corporation that is willing to invest early in an up-and-coming neighborhood — it creates a strong upward pressure on commercial rents that forces out small businesses, nonprofits, and community-based organizations. And then residential rents follow suit.

Only governmental and political will can break this pattern, and it’s a pattern that must be broken if San Francisco is going to retain its economic vitality. Study after study shows that small businesses circulate their revenues within the community instead of siphoning them off to Wall Street and the corporate headquarters, and that helps the overall local economy.

Flawed ideas about consumer choice and the supposed wisdom of the supposedly free market shouldn’t distract San Francisco and other cities from focusing their economic development efforts on local small businesses, a sympathetic symbol that gets disingenuously trotted out in the rhetoric of Mayor Ed Lee and his allies even as he stacks the Small Business Commission with bankers and right-wing ideologues.

Now, with the Board of Supervisors back from its summer recess, is the time to redouble our efforts to resist corporate dominance. That should include support for Sup. Eric Mar’s legislation to change the metrics for what’s considered “formula retail,” support for Sup. London Breed’s efforts to expand protections in Hayes Valley and Sup. Jane Kim’s similar efforts along Market Street, and consideration of changing the vote threshold for the Board of Appeals and giving neighborhoods more tools to resist stores like Jack Spade.

Nothing less than the soul and face of San Francisco is at stake, and it’s up to all of us to fight for it and not be fooled by self-serving and simplistic “jobs” rhetoric. We need to call a Spade a Spade, and a corporation a corporation, and defend what makes San Francisco special: real, local people serving real, local people, not the interests of Wall Street.

 

 

How I learned to stop worrying and just trust Larry

Sasha Cuttler
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8

As I leave for Burning Man, I wanted to share an article that I wrote for the on-playa BRC Weekly. Enjoy, and I’ll see you all on the on the other side:

This is as good as it gets, burners, right here and right now in beautiful, bountiful Black Rock City. And this is the way it’s always going be, year after year, like a dusty Groundhog Day on acid. Only the numbers and faces of the citizens and the things we create for one another will change.

It’s perfect, right? No reason to change a thing. What God (or, rather, Larry Harvey) has created, let no burner presume to alter.

That’s an idea that most burners seem to embrace, despite the beloved pastime of veteran burners to kvetch and celebrate some storied golden age, whether it be 1986, 1996, or 2006. We all just appreciate the chance to build a city for ourselves each year and the leaders of Burning Man for giving us that opportunity, again and again.

And I’m now joining those who accept Burning Man as it is, hereby officially dropping my struggles against Larry, Maid Marian, and the rest of Black Rock City LLC board to create some form of representative or democratic leadership for the Burning Man and its culture.

It’s been a lonely and frustrating crusade anyway, so I’m happy to be done with it (as I’m sure they are). I’ve been regularly covering Burning Man for my newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, since 2004. My reportage formed the basis of my book, The Tribes of Burning Man, which came out in 2011 just as the LLC board was being torn apart by internal divisions that they resolved by deciding to turn control of Burning Man over to a new nonprofit they were creating, The Burning Man Project.

“Why not act to change the world, a world that you won’t be in? And that’s what we want to do,” Larry told a roomful of grateful burners when he announced the plan in April 2011. “We want to get out of running Burning Man. We want to move on.”

The prospects of that change in leadership seemed exciting, and I imagined a council of veteran burners representing our community’s constituent communities – artists, DPW, sound camps, volunteers, art car makers, regional leaders, maybe the biggest villages – gathering around a table to plan the future of Burning Man. It might get messy, but things worth doing usually are.  

First, I took issue with Larry’s announced plans to create secret payouts for the six board members, but nobody except Chicken John seemed to care about that. The predominant view seemed to be that they had done us all a great service and they deserved whatever it was they wanted to pay themselves.

Fine, so then I publicly questioned the hand-picked nonprofit board, which seemed chosen for their fundraising ability more than the communities they represented. Again, no resonance, so I accepted it and moved on. Maybe money was what was important in the early stages, and new leadership would come later.

And I was totally willing to just let it go and move on, until earlier this year when I watched the new documentary, “Spark: A Burning Man Story,” which concludes with the claim “the organization is transitioning into a nonprofit to ‘gift’ the event back to the community.”

So I decided to plug back into covering Burning Man to check on the status of this gift with just a year to go until Larry had said that control of the event would be transferred to the new nonprofit. But rather than relaxing their grip on the event and entrusting it to the community, I learned that they consider their leadership “more important than ever,” as Marian put it.

Not only are The Burning Man Project board members still not representative of the overall community, but they have no authority over the event, which Larry wants to continue as is “without being unduly interfered with by the nonprofit organization.”

Sure, the LLC and its various fiefdoms can unilaterally change its contracts with artists, its policy on what kinds and how many art cars to license, its ticket pricing structure, and size of the city (the max population this year jumped to 68,000 from 60,000 last year), all without any input from the community. It can cut lucrative side deals with corporations and propagandists. But we can’t have the new nonprofit board making these sorts of decisions, that would be unthinkable. 

“The nonprofit is going well, and then we have to work out the terms of the relationship between the event and the nonprofit. We want the event to be protected from undue meddling and we want it to be a good fit,” Larry told me.

And when I wrote about these issues in the Guardian, where they were read by tens of thousands of people, few people seemed to care. Two articles I wrote on these issues this year got two online comments each, comparing to the 259 comments and vigorous public discussion that ensued after I wrote “Burning Man ticket fiasco creates uncertain future” in February of last year.

The lesson: as long as we can get to Black Rock City, we don’t really care who’s calling the shots. After all, it’s really all of us who create the city each year for our own enjoyment, and that’s what matters, not the six people who control the $23 million we all spent on tickets this year.

So I’m just going to enjoy myself this year and forever after, safe in the faith that “participation” and “radical self-reliance” are things I do in my own camp and immediate surroundings, and that the larger Burning Man project itself is in the same safe and benevolent hands that it’s always been and always will be.

Amen.

 

 

Chronicle: Don’t question the City College takeover, just submit to the flawed ACCJC

Sasha Cuttler
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71
Chronicle: Don’t question the City College takeover, just submit to the flawed ACCJC

I have very low expectations from editorials in the San Francisco Chronicle, which generally share a worldview with the Chamber of Commerce and carry water for some powerful Establishment figure or another. But today’s editorial on City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s lawsuit defending City College is so bad and illogical that it reads like an Onion parody of a Chronicle editorial.

Clearly put up to it by some of the most reactionary figures in the Mayor’s Office, Chronicle Editorial Page Editor John Diaz or one his lackeys parrot the submissive stance that Mayor Ed Lee has taken toward outsiders with corporatist agenda that have seized control of City College and sought to make a high-profile example of it.

“The city’s leaders should be calling for tough love, not coddling dysfunction. Fortunately, Mayor Ed Lee has done just that – but, regrettably, the city attorney is going in the opposite direct [sic],” the Chronicle wrote.

And by “tough love,” they apparently mean obedient and unquestioning compliance with an obscure accrediting agency’s demand that City College slash community-based curriculum; close facilities relied on by both students and local nonprofit groups; rip up contracts with faculty and force instructors to live on part-time wages; distill course offerings down to just what serve corporations, universities, and banking interests; and other aspects of an educational agenda that hasn’t been properly vetted in public hearings or approved by any elected body.

Herrera is to be applauded for pointing out the overreach and conflicts-of-interest on the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges, which were also recently criticized by the US Department of Education. And we’re excited to see what Herrera uncovers during the discovery process in his lawsuit against a secretive, corporate-connected, document-shredding agency that broke its own internal rules in its treatment of City College.

The Chronicle graciously refers to these unavoidable facts in a brief paragraph, writing that the ACCJC “is not without flaws. It’s secretive, and its internal policies drew a rebuke from the U.S. Department of Education after City College faculty filed complaints about its conduct.”

But then it dimisses that and shows a suspicious incuriosity about why the ACCJC is being so secretive and what its agenda might be, instead doubling down on criticizing City College in a way that is so over-the-top that this fine institution is unrecognizable to anyone who is actually familiar with it, which Diaz and company clearly aren’t.   

“The needed changes include hiring a comptroller to organize financial controls, making sure students pay for classes, and overhauling a loose-fit governance system that puts faculty, students and staff in charge of operations with inadequate administrative controls. Lee has strongly endorsed an overhaul of City College’s ramshackle operations,” the Chronicle writes.

Unlike us here at the Guardian, where I’ve written two recent editorials in support of democracy and local control and critical of Lee and others who have been too quick to cooperate with the toppling of the locally elected Board of Trustees, the Chronicle apparently believe in more authoritarian methods of governance.

“The first repairs are now under way. The powers of the elected community college board are on hold, and a special trustee dispatched by state Community College Chancellor Brice Harris is in charge,” the Chronicle writes.

And as we report in our upcoming issue, that special trustee also has no interest in questioning the ACCJC’s process or methods or even allowing the public to review internal communications. It’s a shame that bootlickers like Lee and the Chronicle have sold out such an important local institution to their corporate masters, but luckily for San Francisco, Herrera, the California Federation of Teachers, the Guardian, other progressive media voices, and hundreds of our community partners aren’t giving up so easily, instead pushing for an open, truthful, democratic, and transparent discussion about City College’s mission and its future.

Activists say a pair of Spades could beat culture and small business in the Mission

Sasha Cuttler
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94

[UPDATE: The Board of Appeals last night voted to 3-2 that Jack Spade should be considered a formula retail business, short of the four-vote supermajority that activists needed to sustain their appeal.]

Progressive activists and small business owners in the Mission are trying to draw the line against the creep the of corporate chain stores — with their homegeneity and tendency to drive up commercial rents — and they’re drawing that line at the old Adobe Bookstore where the Jack Spade corporate clothing chain was trying to quietly sneak in.

“I’m strongly opposed because of its potential to destroy the culture of this area,” Michael Katz, owner of Katz Bagels across 16th Street from the site, told the Guardian. “If they start allowing chains to come, it will be one chain store after another.”

Katz has already been experiencing the flipside of these economic boom times, recently forced to close his shop on Mission Street near 2nd in SoMa because of rising rents and competition from both food trucks and corporate-backed competitors. Now, he’s fighting to defend his Mission District turf against deep-pocketed competitors.

“This will change the special personality of the 16th and Valencia corridors,” Katz said. “It’s turning it into a commodity.”

Katz is among the dozens of people planning to show up tomorrow for the San Francisco Board of Appeals’ hearing (Wed/21, 5:00 PM, City Hall Room 416) on the Jack Spade store. The Valencia Corridor Merchants’ Association is organizing the challenge to the legal standing of a building permit issued to Jack Spade by the Planning Department in June.

Last week, that same group of activists experienced a minor setback when the Board of Appeals denied a late filing request. Tomorrow, however, they’ll get the opportunity they were seeking to argue that the store is “formula retail” and needs to submit to a public hearing before being sanctioned by the Zoning Administrator to open a new Mission location.

Mission resident Kyle Smeallie has been working with the VCMA to oppose the mens’ clothier’s advances on 16th street. In the case of Jack Spade, the Planning Department has enforced only the narrowest definition of “formula retail” as a business with 11 or more locations, while failing to defend the broader spirit of the law.

Since Jack Spade is owned by Fifth & Pacific (aka Liz Claiborne), according to Smeallie, it is a corporate chain store. Though it indeed has only 10 locations, Jack Spade “has a complete imbalance of power and resources, which is exactly what the formula retail legislation aimed to remedy in the first place,” said Smeallie.

Fifth and Pacific also makes clear on its website the Jack Spade is an expanding chain: “Under Fifth & Pacific, Jack Spade has begun to spread its wings and is now poised for broader expansion. Although management would not disclose a precise volume breakdown, Fifth & Pacific’s CEO William L. McComb said on an earnings call last year that Jack Spade ‘can be a $100 million men’s business with very high margins.’”

That’s “margins” as in profit margins, meaning that this corporate chain can has an economies of scale that allows it to buy goods for cheap and sell them for whatever people will pay, which is an ever-increasing amount in the rapidly gentrifying Mission.  

Experts have advised the activists that their best approach is to argue that Kate Spade and Jack Spade are essentially the same store, with well over 11 locations nationwide, since corporate parentage is not explicitly prohibited in the formula retail legislation approved by voters in 2006.

“We’re going to make the case that, since it’s named Spade, it has benefitted from the association with Kate Spade,” Smeallie explained. “Legally, we have a case to say a Spade is Spade and they should be considered one and same.”

In the past, this strategy was successful in thwarting an effort by “Black Fleece by Brooks Brothers” to open a neighborhood location by claiming that it was, effectively, just another Brooks Brothers. In that case, however, the full name of the large-scale retailer was present in the subsidiary’s label.

America’s Cup organizers sell small-scale naming rights at Pier 27 to pay their debt to the city

Sasha Cuttler
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0

The Port Commission has approved a proposal by the America’s Cup Organizing Committee (ACOC) to sell bricks, benches, and other assets at Pier 27 to offset budget shortfalls, but community activists fear that corporate naming rights are undermining plans for a public recreation space.

A presentation at the Tuesday meeting by Kyri McClellan, the former city staffer who now serves as CEO of the ACOC, and Mike Martin of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development outlined the sale of up to 1,000 bricks to be set in pathways and 72 benches to dot the Northeast Wharf Plaza, which will bear the names of donors. Benches will be priced at $25,000, which McClellan cited as the going rate at other high-profile locations throughout the city.

McClellan emphasized that “none of what we’re proposing today as a pilot program includes what may previously have been alluded to as naming rights for this particular park, the piers, or the buildings.”

Milo Hanke and Alex Walker of San Francisco Beautiful, a local advocacy organization, didn’t have a problem with the smaller scale elements of the ACOC proposal. “The tiles and the bricks that are being offered here for $150, $300, for instance,” Hanke told the crowd, “that’s a gratifying opportunity for ordinary citizens who have already invested in our port to volunteer to express additional support for this proud port.”

But Hanke and Walker expressed concern about bigger ticket items that McClellan addressed with less specificity. “We want to make sure that this is a thing that’s going to be place-making and not place-taking,” commented Walker.

In addition to bricks and benches, the wharf’s lawn and adjacent walkway, an open plaza area, and a point at the pier’s end are earmarked for recognition of donors. So too are an event space and an exterior concourse on the second floor of the James R. Herman Passenger Cruise Terminal, slated to open at Pier 27 next spring.

“Corporate naming rights,” explained Hanke, “come with an intangible cost and I think that, given San Franciscans’ historic aversion to excess commercialization of our public realm, corporate naming rights are well worth taking a bypass on.”

Diagrams presented by ACOC did not include detailed renderings of larger donor fulfillments or clarification as to whether recognition would be restricted to individual and foundational donors and off limits to more commercial interests. “There is concern,” said Hanke, “of a creeping naming rights program if large areas are named for corporations.”

Pulling in $500,000 to $2.5 million a piece, however, bigger structures may be the revenue drivers ACOC is desperately seeking. As part of its host agreement with San Francisco, the organization is obligated to help offset the city’s expenses incurred in event preparations and operations.

Luckily, the race’s outsized budget is expected to be less than the $32 million originally projected, due to the paltry number of teams competing (four at last count) and the resulting decrease in spectatorship. Still, the ACOC needs to come up with as much as $20 million – a debt burden that’s got Mayor Ed Lee personally stumping in the fundraising effort. The fundraising flop belies early promises that the city would make money hosting the event.

San Francisco voters approved Proposition B last November, authorizing the city to apply public funds towards repairs and redevelopment of recreational spaces. The fact that the Northeast Wharf Plaza was a named site in that bond measure isn’t the only reason community activists are demanding to know what assets on its piers are being auctioned off and who’s buying them.

According to Jon Golinger, a spokesman for the Northeast Waterfront Advisory Group, the San Francisco Waterfront Special Area Plan limited development on the Pier 27 plaza until a 2000 amendment lifted port restrictions in exchange for guarantees of public recreation areas.

Since then, “we’ve been paying close attention to this park. It’s particularly needed and a long time coming,” explained Golinger, who said there’s been no citizen review of the ACOC’s donor recognition program proposal.

Neighborhood organizations hope ACOC’s tag sale of infrastructure doesn’t torpedo use plans for land long ago promised as a public recreation area. Golinger would like to see features like a kids’ play area, a dog run, and exercise equipment for seniors included in the final design – whether or not they are lucrative to race organizers now.

“After the Cup is done in October, it should look, feel, and be used like a true public park,” Golinger said of the plaza. “This corner of town is the most densely packed part of San Francisco with the fewest recreation areas per capita…. [the plaza] should be part of the neighborhood as opposed to a corporate event venue.”

The promise of infrastructure improvements was one reason the city of San Francisco agreed to host the America’s Cup race in the first place. Residents are now left to hope that ACOC won’t forgo investments of lasting civic value for single-use vanity projects intended to float its budget deficit.

Concluding the discussion of the ACOC’s proposal on Tuesday, Port Commissioner Leslie Katz offered assurances that, “we’ll definitely oversee and be mindful of the aesthetics of anything going forward… This is not a selling off of the port, but really an opportunity to thank and acknowledge those that have allowed us to move forward.”

This opportunity, of course, assumes that donors actually surface. Mayoral spokesperson Christine Falvey said, “We will learn from [this] effort about how we can raise private dollars to improve our waterfront and engage city residents in the effort.”

If ACOC’s efforts to court private dollars from city residents aren’t fruitful, however, taxpayers-turned-debt-collectors may have no option but to sign former District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s online petition and to demand that America’s Cup billionaire defending champion Larry Ellison pick up the tab for his boat race all by himself.

Jack Spade tries to sneak into a beloved Mission spot, triggering a community backlash

Sasha Cuttler
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16

The Stop Jack Spade Coalition is throwing an impromptu fundraiser tonight (Wed/7) at the Make-Out Room to help support local business and oppose chain store blight in the Mission.

Jack Spade, an upscale men’s clothing chain owned by Liz Claiborne, has plans to set up shop at 3166 16th Street, once home to Adobe Bookstore. The community bookseller of 25 years moved south to 24th Street in June, having been ousted from the space by two consecutive rent hikes. The second time, Adobe General Manager Chris Rolls tells us, “the landlord rejected continuation of the lease, which was outrageously expensive and, for this neighborhood, a bit alarming.”

Opponents of the deal say the men’s clothing retailer signed a $12,000 per month agreement on the storefront shortly after Adobe failed to meet its landlord’s exorbitant demands. (Note: A Jack Spade representative contacted the Guardian after this story was published to say this figure was “exaggerated,” but would not disclose any other financial details.)

Jack Spade has gotten this far by failing to apply for a conditional use permit, a pesky little measure imposed by voters in 2006 to thwart corporations chomping at the bit to turn San Francisco neighborhoods into sanitized strip malls.

Turns out Jack Spade is a subsidiary of one such corporation, Liz Claiborne, a fact downplayed in the chain’s original application to the Planning Commission. Even a modest 10 storefronts nationwide, sadly, doesn’t confer small business cred on a menswear line owned by a company with a $2.88 billion market capitalization.

Conveniently, the Jack Spade label has just one too few stores to be formally defined as “formula retail” by Proposition G.  But the Valencia Corridor Merchants Association has been hot on the case, circulating a petition that Jack Spade play by the rules of other big businesses and submit to a public hearing anyway.

A similar effort was successful in preventing an American Apparel store from opening just up the street in 2009 and in slowing the insatiable gentrification that has steamrolled local culture in many other once-unique and affordable cities.

Tonight’s event will feature live music and stand up comedy.  Chicken John Rinaldi promises to host an auction and “talks about what we can do to stop this bullshit.” Doors open at 7pm and $5-$15 will be collected at the door, with proceeds to benefit the campaign for a public hearing next week.

Get tough with defiant disrupters

Michael Redmond
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8

EDITORIAL It may sometimes seem like we at the Bay Guardian don’t like the technology industry, but nothing could be further from the truth. We tweet, click, post, and share, playing with all the hot new tech toys that spring from the innovative minds of Bay Area residents. This is an important sector of the local economy, one that often empowers people who were just getting by to remain in expensive San Francisco.

Yes, we do regularly criticize tech (and some of its biggest neoliberal cheerleaders in City Hall), as we do to Airbnb, Lyft, and other so-called “shareable economy” companies in this issue. But that’s only because we strongly believe in open and transparent discussions about public policy and the needs of city residents.

And frankly, that’s not happening these days.

Instead of engaging directly and honestly with the people and our elected representatives, Airbnb has chosen to duck its obligations to the city of its birth and dodge attempts to create a public dialogue about its dangerously flawed business model. Same thing with Lyft, another company that acts as if it’s entitled to undermine civic institutions without so much as a public conversation first.

Yes, these companies have come up with cool ideas that have become popular with Bay Area residents. In a city where it was tough to find a cab on Saturday nights, Lyft made it easier to find rides and allowed people to make some extra cash off their cars. Airbnb was also a great idea that makes travel cheaper and more personal.

The beauty of these ideas is their simplicity — but that is also their main flaw, because San Francisco isn’t a simple city. It’s a complex, dynamic city with difficult landlord-tenant dynamics, and a congested city that tries to achieve the right balance of cabs on the roadways, both systems that are the products of decades-long struggles that have spawned reams of regulations.

These tech-savvy fortune hunters, who don’t understand or appreciate that history, think it’s enough to have a good idea and some rich venture capitalists willing to back it. They espouse vaguely libertarian ideas about “disruptive” technologies empowering people, but then they wait for government officials to solve the problems with their business models, raking in millions of dollars in profits in the meantime and delaying their day of public reckoning as long as possible.

For example, in a May interview on KQED’s Forum, Airbnb’s David Hantman was asked why the company was defying a city ruling that it must pay the transient occupancy tax, he said they were waiting for the city to adopt a new regulatory structure first.

That’s not an acceptable or defensible position, and it is only continuing because Mayor Ed Lee has publicly supported the company’s defiance of city law and rulings. Mr. Mayor, if these are the types of “jobs” you’re creating — part time jobs with no benefits in an underground economy that cannibalizes other industries, breaks city laws, and won’t pay local taxes — then this city is in real trouble.

We’re happy to see Board President David Chiu trying to solve Airbnb’s problems, but he needs the support of other top city officials who are willing to put pressure on the company to bargain in good faith. And yes, we’re talking to Mayor Lee, Tax Collector Jose Cisneros, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera, among others.

If you make the city appear impotent to enforce its own laws or too willing to go easy on wealthy corporations, it will only embolden more young opportunists to disrupt the city’s regulatory authority and its social fabric. You work for us, not the venture capitalists, and it’s time to show some spine.

 

Yahoo and other tech companies are squeezing the Chronicle’s newsroom

Sasha Cuttler
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17

With high demand for office space in San Francisco these days — thanks largely to the latest technology bubble, Mayor Ed Lee’s economic development focus, and its amplification by the San Francisco Chronicle — Hearst Corp., which owns both the paper and the Chronicle Building, seems to be more focused on property management than journalism these days.

Following up on blogs that broke the story, Chronicle Technology Columnist James Temple today reported that Yahoo is negotiating with Hearst to move its headquarters into the Chronicle Building at 5th and Mission streets. What Temple didn’t say — and what sources at the Chronicle confirmed to the Guardian, despite the fact that it hasn’t yet been announced to Chronicle staff — is that the third floor newsroom will soon be relocated while the space undergoes a renovation.

It’s not clear whether the two pieces of news are related, and we’re still waiting for a response to our questions on the subject from Chronicle Editor Ward Bushee. But it certainly seems true that Hearst and the Chronicle are doing everything they can to profit from the commercial real estate market that they have helped to heat up while operating a newspaper that has struggled to become profitable in recent years.

Valued at more than $30 million and covering nearly a full city block in the heart of the city, the Chronicle Building has been steadily taken over by outside companies in recent years, many of them technology corporations such as Square, the online payment company. The newsroom that used to occupy the second and third floors has already been squeezed onto the third, and now even that space is getting an overhaul.

Meanwhile, Hearst has been working with Forest City and Strada Investment Group on a plan to redevelop the property, reportedly replacing the old Hearst headquarters and other buildings that share the block with an office and residential tower and trying to win historic landmark status for the Chronicle Building itself.

Chronicle staffers tell the Guardian that they were surprised to hear about the newsroom relocation last week and they don’t have many details, except that they will remain in the building. And given how valuable it has become, they say they’re just happy to not be totally squeezed out by the tech boom.

Burning Man event will benefit its new nonprofit, whose future role is still murky

Sasha Cuttler
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5
Burning Man event will benefit its new nonprofit, whose future role is still murky

There’s a pricey event in San Francisco this evening “exploring the past, present, and future of Burning Man,” with all proceeds going to The Burning Man Project, the nonprofit vessel that Black Rock City LLC created to supposedly take over operations of this venerable cultural phenomenon. With the murky, ever-evolving plan for what that allegedly imminent transition looks like and what the new governance structure will be, the forum could shed some light on the subject — but I wouldn’t bet on it.

For my latest cover story on Burning Man and its leadership, which ran last month, I sat down with founder Larry Harvey and LLC board member Marian Goodell to discuss the transition at length. Even after listening to the recording of that interview several times, I still had a hard time discerning what the plan is, mostly because I don’t think they even really know at this point.

Even though Harvey told me “we’re pretty much on schedule” to turn operations of the late summer event over to the new nonprofit board next year, it doesn’t seem that the hand-picked nonprofit board will have any real authority. And the relationship of the nonprofit to the LLC — which will continue to control all things Burning Man, despite Harvey indicating otherwise when he announced the plan two year ago — is still being defined.

“I would answer that a little more completely by saying what we’re really in the middle of doing is looking at the structure for Black Rock City LLC, which is an event production company and its infrastructure and doing the outreach to the world,” Goodell told me, adding the six current board members will still guide the event and culture and that “we’re more necessary than ever.”

Some veteran burners consider that to be a fairly bold statement coming from a business that derives its value mostly from the volunteer efforts of the 60,000 people who create Black Rock City every year, and whose “10 principles” (prominently posted on the front page of the Survival Guide circulated to all attendees this year) include Participation, Radical Inclusion, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, and Decommodification.

In the wake of my last story, I heard from sources within the LLC who appreciated me raising these issues and trying to keep the organization honest and true to its principles, but they’re all afraid to speak out publicly, mostly of Goodell’s wrath. They said that while four of the six LLC board members do seem willing to give up some control over the event and culture, Harvey and Goodell have gone the opposite direction and seem to be expanding their control as they travel the world as burner ambassadors.

In their interview with me, both Harvey and Goodell made clear their indispensible roles in protecting the event from “meddling” by the nonprofit board and with sheperding the larger burner culture.

“Oh no. We are giving up managing the event in favor of managing the culture in the greater world, that’s what we’re doing. And we can hardly do it fast enough because we don’t have time to manage the event,” Harvey said, later noting the LLC could become essentially a consulting firm that Burning Man regional organizations around the world pay for services. “That’s how things work in the real world.”

Tonight’s event is entitled “This is Burning Man,” named after the seminal burner book penned by the host of the event, Brian Doherty, who will lead the discussion with Harvey and co-founder Michael Mikel, aka Danger Ranger. The 7pm event is at Z Space Theater, 450 Florida, with tickets ranging from $20-$125.

I’ve always appreciated Doherty and his book, which I drew from for my own book on the culture’s modern era, The Tribes of Burning Man, and he contacted me after my last article to say he was glad to see me raising these issues. And he did tell me that one of the topics he plans to cover tonight is “the original corporate structure and why that might be changing.”

Yet Doherty, a libertarian who is a senior editor at Reason Magazine, doesn’t really share the view that the burner community has sweat equity in the event and therefore a right to help guide a culture that has evolved significantly since the LLC was formed in 1997.

“I no longer approach the event with a close-focus journalists eye, but do still consider it a fascinating unfolding story not just of a bunch of interesting people trying to ride a tiger they’ve let loose — and this applies to organizers and attendees — but about the most fun thing one can do with your time. I also maintain, I know controversially, that in most respects any attendee should care about, the event has been in most important respects the same since it got its current shape in 1998,” he told me. “Yes if you are dealing with the bureaucracy or burning big art or trying to get it funded or working for BMorg, a lot has changed. If you are one of the blessed 90 percent who are buying tickets and enjoying or paricipating in a way that does not have to intersect any of that, well, you still have the same Burning Man us boring old folk had, and please enjoy it. I would say preserve it; you can certainly try to evolve it, but it seems resistant to change in some respects.”

That may be true, but that isn’t what Harvey told the burner community two years ago, when he promised to “gift the event back to the community,” a meme that was uncritically repeated and amplifed in the documentary “Spark: A Burning Man Story,” that is now making the theatrical rounds.

“Arguments welcome, thanks for caring, the story of how this thing was built is still one of the great American culture stories of our time, with characters as fun and deep and resonate of great pantheonic virtues as you’ll find,” Doherty says. “This does not mean I worship them as Gods — merely respect them as representing virtues, vices, and concerns and ideas as old as human civilization.”

It may not always seem like it, but I also respect Harvey, Goodell, and the rest of the Burning Man leadership, even if I think a little more clarity and open public discussion is necessary now, so let me close with some more of their comments from our interview.

“We want to make sure the event production company has sufficient autonomy, they can function with creating freedom and do what it does best, which is producing the Burning Man event, without being unduly interferred with by the nonprofit organization,” Harvey said.

“That’s why you heard it one way initially, and you’re hearing it slightly differently now, and it could go back again,” Goodell said. “We don’t think it’s sensible, either philosophically or fiscally, to essentially strip away all these entities and take all these employees and plop them in the middle of The Burning Man Project.”

“So there’s directly administered by this huge collossus at the center,” Harvey added.

“That looks like the US government,” Goodell interjected. “We think it would look like a many tentacled beast. That’s what we’re all afraid of in the world, a government putting their paws into us too much.”

Yet it wouldn’t be a government, but a bunch of nonprofit board members and experienced burners who would represent Burning Man’s constituent communities. Harvey said something like that might eventually work, but for now, that’s not what’s happening.

“We might change our minds at any time, that’s our perogative, but right now we’re absolutely on the path that you heard at the talk at the Bently Reserve two years ago,” Goodell said.

“We are in fact relinquishing our control,” Harvey said. “We are delegating the authority that the partners held as executives to the staff that operates it.”

Last train

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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17
Last train

steve@sfbg.com

Last week’s four-day strike by Bay Area Rapid Transit workers dominated the news and made headlines around the country, marking the latest battleground in a national war between public employee unions and the austerity agenda pushed by conservatives and neoliberals.

Of course, that wasn’t how the conflict was framed by BART, most journalists, or even the two BART unions involved, all of whom dutifully reported the details of each sides’ offers and counter-offers, the competing “safety” narratives (new security procedures demands by unions versus spending more on capital improvements than raises), and the strike’s impact on commuters and the local economy.

But once this long-simmering labor standoff seized the attention of a public heavily reliant on BART, fueling the popular anger and resentment increasingly directed at public employee unions in recent years, familiar basic storylines emerged.

At that point, the Bay Area could have been placed in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, or Illinois — the most recent high-profile labor union battlegrounds, with their narratives of greedy public employees clinging to their fully funded pensions and higher than average salaries while the rest of us suffer through this stubbornly lingering hangover from the Great Recession.

Around water coolers and online message boards, there were common refrains: How dare those unions demand the raises that the rest of us are being denied! Pensions? Who has fully funded pensions anymore? Why can’t they just be more realistic?

When Bay Area residents were finally forced to find other ways of getting around, within a transportation system that is already at the breaking point during peak hours thanks to years of austerity budgets and under-investment in basic infrastructure, those seething resentments exploded into outright anger.

And those political dynamics could only get worse in a month. The BART strike could resume full strength on a non-holiday workweek if the two sides aren’t able to come to an agreement before the recently extended contract expires.

This is the Bay Area’s most visible and impactful labor standoff, and it could prove to be a pivotal one for the modern American labor movement.

 

BART AS BELLWETHER

Chris Daly was a clarion voice for progressive values while serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 2000-2010. Now, as political director of Service Employee International Union Local 1021, one of the BART unions, he says this standoff is about more than just the issues being discussed at the bargaining table.

“The terms and conditions of workers in the public sector is a buoy for other workers,” Daly told us, explaining how everyone’s wages and benefits tend to follow the gains and setbacks negotiated by unions. “The right understands this, which is why the right has been mercilessly attacking public sector workers.”

Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, confirmed that union contracts affect the overall labor market. “When unions improve wages and benefits, it does have a ripple effect,” Jacobs said. He agreed that the outcome at BART could be a bellwether for the question, “As the economy comes back, how much will workers share in that prosperity?”

Demonizing public sector workers as greedy or lazy also serves to undercut the entire labor movement, Daly said, considering that public employees make up a far higher percentage of union members than their private sector counterparts. And during election time, it is union money and ground troops that typically contest wealthy individuals and corporations’ efforts to maintain or expand power.

“Labor is one of the main checks on unbridled corporate power, and public sector unions are the backbone of labor,” Daly told us.

So in that context, BART’s battle is about more than just the wages and benefits of train drivers and station agents, with their average base salary of $62,000, just barely above the area median income, and their demand for raises after accepting wage freezes in recent years.

Daly sees this as part of a much broader political standoff, and he said there are indications that BART management also sees it that way, starting with the $399,000 the transit agency is paying its lead negotiator Thomas Hock, a veteran of union-busting standoffs around the country.

“He has a history of bargaining toward strikes, with the goal of breaking unions,” Daly said, noting that Hock’s opening offer would have taken money from BART employees, with new pension and healthcare contributions outweighing raises. “It was a takeaway proposal when you add it up, while they have a $100 million surplus in their budget and the cost of living in the Bay Area is shooting up.”

But BART spokesperson Rick Rice told us that Hock is simply trying to get the best deal possible for this taxpayer-funded agency, and he denied there is any intention to break the union or connection to some larger anti-worker agenda.

“There is definitely a need to start funding the capital needs of the district,” Rice told us. “I don’t see that we’re pushing an austerity agenda as much as a realistic agenda.”

 

AUSTERITY AND EXPANSION

But Daly said the very idea that austerity measures are “realistic” excuses the banks and other powerful players whose reckless pursuit of profits caused the financial meltdown of 2008. The underlying expectation is that workers should continue to pay for that debacle, rather than bouncing back with the rebounding economy.

“They get in this austerity mindset, and we see it in every contract we’re negotiating,” Daly said, noting that capital needs and benefits have always needed funding, despite their elevation now as immediate imperatives. “You have good people with good intentions like [BART Board President] Tom Radulovich pushing this austerity mindset.”

Radulovich, a longtime progressive activist, told us he agrees with some of how Daly is framing the standoff, but not all of it. He said that BART is being squeezed into its position by unique factors.

Radulovich said that healthcare and pension costs really are rising faster then ever, creating a challenge in maintaining those benefit levels. And he said that Hock isn’t simply carrying out some larger anti-union agenda. “He’s negotiating what the district wants him to negotiate,” he said.

Radulovich said that while BART’s workers may deserve raises, most of BART’s revenues come from fares. “So it’s taking from workers to give to other workers,” Radulovich said. “It’s a little more complicated because it is a public agency and Chris is aware of that.”

Yet Radulovich acknowledged that BART has opted to pursue an aggressive expansion policy that is diverting both capital and operating expenditures into new lines — such as the East Contra Costa, Oakland Airport, and Warm Springs extensions now underway — rather than setting some of that money aside for workers.

“And for a lot of those, we were being cheered on by the [San Francisco] Labor Council, one of many ironies,” said Radulovich, who favors infill projects over new extensions. “These are some of the conversations I’ve had with labor leaders in the last few weeks, how we think strategically about these things.”

But if BART wanted to defeat the union, it may have miscalculated the level of worker discontent with austerity measures.

“What they didn’t plan on is some high-level Bay Area political pressure,” Daly said, referring to the local uproar over the strike that led Gov. Jerry Brown to send in the state’s two top mediators, who made progress and created a one month cooling off period before the strike can resume.

 

RETIREMENT SECURITY

One of the hardest issues to overcome in the court of public opinion may be the fully funded pensions of BART employees. “Times are changing, costs are escalating rapidly, and we’re asking for a modest contribution,” Rice said of BART’s demand that employees help fund their pensions.

Daly acknowledges the resentments about the pension issue, even though it was essentially a trap set for public employee unions back in the 1980s, when BART and other public agencies were the ones offering to pay for employee pensions in lieu of raises.

But rather than resenting public employees for having pensions, he said the public should be asking why most workers don’t have retirement security and how to fix that problem.

“At what point do we organize and demand retirement security for all workers?” Daly said, noting that SEIU is now leading that fight on behalf of all workers, not just its members. “What we ought to be talking about is how we restore the social contract.”

Jacobs confirmed that SEIU has indeed been pushing the retirement security issue at the state and federal levels. And it’s a crucial issue, he said, noting that just 45 percent of workers have pensions and that the average retirement savings is just $12,000.

“The retirement problem we have is not the pension crisis, it is the lack of pensions crisis,” Jacobs said.

That’s one reason that he said this standoff has implications that extend far beyond the Bay Area.

“The fight goes beyond these particular workers,” Jacobs said. “It’s an important set of negotiations and an important strike in terms of looking at what happens in this country as the economy improves.”

Daly agrees there’s a lot at stake, for more than just his members.

“Losing on this means we’d be hard pressed to win elsewhere, anytime,” Daly said. “It is important symbolically, and it is important to the strength and morale of the movement.”

 

Stage Listings

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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Chance: A Musical Play About Love, Risk, and Getting it Right Alcove Theater, 415 Mason, Fifth Flr, SF; www.thealcovetheater.com. $40-60. Previews Fri/5-Sat/6, 8pm. Opens Sun/7, 5pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm); Sun, 5pm. Through July 28. New Musical Theater of San Francisco presents Richard Isen’s world premiere work inspired by the writings of Oscar Wilde.

Oil and Water This week: Dolores Park, 18th St and Dolores, SF; www.sfmt.org. Free. Thu/4, 2pm. Also Peacock Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.sfmt.org. Free. Sat/6, 2pm. Also Washington Square Park, Columbus at Union, SF; www.sfmt.org. Free. Sun/7, 2pm. Also Mitchell Park, South Field, 600 E. Meadow, Palo Alto; www.sfmt.org. Tue/9, 7pm. Free. At various NorCal venues through Sept. 2. The San Francisco Mime Troupe presents its 54th annual summer season; this year’s performance is comprised of two one-act musicals about corporations and the environment: Crude Intentions and Deal With the Devil.

ONGOING

Abigail’s Party San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-100. Wed/3-Thu/4, 7pm; Fri/5-Sat/6, 8pm (also Sat/6, 3pm). Although it’s tempting to compare Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party to Edward Albee’s rancorous Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Abigail‘s escalating nastiness skews emphatically British, giving it as much in common with televised exports such as Fawlty Towers and the Ricky Gervais version of The Office. As with these, the humor in Abigail’s Party is of the bleakest and cruelest kind, and there are moments when the five Americans onstage don’t quite convey the wit that lurks beneath the ire, but when they do the results are hysterical and uncomfortable in equal measure. Though the party we witness is not Abigail’s (she’s having a teenage house party next door, the music of which keeps throbbing through the walls of Bill English’s attractively-appointed set) the adults-only cocktail party is just as awkward as any high school mixer. Hosted by the fiercely self-absorbed Beverly (Susi Damilano) and her obnoxiously classist husband Laurence (Remi Sandri), the guest list includes the mousy Angela (Allison Jean White), her monosyllabic husband Tony (Patrick Kelley Jones), and Abigail’s ill-at-ease mum, Susan (Julia Brothers), who’s agreed to keep out of the house during her daughter’s wild soiree. The acting — as well as Brendan Aanes’ sound design, Jacqueline Scott’s props, and Tatjana Genser’s costuming — is pitch perfect, but unless you haven’t already been to enough bad parties, you might find it difficult to sit through this one. If you do, don’t be surprised if you find yourself secretly envying Laurence by the end of the play — at least he finds a way out. (Gluckstern)

Betrayal Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, Sixth Flr, SF; www.offbroadwaywest.org. $40. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through July 20. Off Broadway West Theatre Company performs Harold Pinter’s out-of-sequence drama about an unfaithful married couple.

Can You Dig It? Back Down East 14th — the 60s and Beyond Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Aug 25. Solo performer Don Reed returns with a prequel to his autobiographical coming-of-age hits, East 14th and The Kipling Hotel.

Dark Play, or Stories for Boys Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.theexit.org. $5-20. Fri-Sat, 9pm. Through July 13. Do It Live! Productions offers a steadily engrossing production of this slippery play from Chicago playwright Carlos Murillo, wherein a less-then-trusty teenage narrator, Nick (a clever, tightly wound, darkly charming Will Hand), addicted to “making shit up,” recounts his fateful internet-baiting of a fellow teen upon whom he had become fixated. As the unwitting object of Nick’s desire, sweet guy Adam (Adam Magil) gets pulled into an online love affair with Rachel (Amy Nowak), his first love, and — as fate and Nick would have it — Nick’s sister. But Rachel exists only online. And her equally fantastical evil stepdad (Nathan Tucker) soon intercedes, throwing Nick and Adam closer together. All of this disembodied desire floating around the ether leads to a physical climax even Freud might find a bit much, but the way there proves increasingly tense and interesting — if also a little frustrating itself at times in some strained plot points and, especially, its overwrought psychopathologizing of homoerotic desire. (Erik LaDue’s awkward set design also takes a little getting over.) But despite various flaws, the story intrigues, thanks to the solid performances from director Logan Ellis’s sure cast. Tucker and Kelly Rauch are dependable throughout in a varied range of sharp and often hilarious supporting roles. Nowak’s take on the vital (albeit imaginary) teen heroine is refreshingly straightforward. And Hand, while slightly slower to catch fire, ends up a persuasively complex figure at the center of it all. (Avila)

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

God of Carnage Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sheltontheater.com. $26-38. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through Sept 7. Shelton Theater peforms Yasmina Reza’s award-winning play about class and parenting.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $27-43. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. John Cameron Mitchell’s cult musical comes to life with director Nick A. Olivero’s ever-rotating cast.

In A Daughter’s Eyes Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. $15. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through July 14. Brava! For Women in the Arts and Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience presents the West Coast premiere of A. Zell Williams’ tale of two women: the daughter of a man on death row, and the daughter of the man he’s been convicted of killing.

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50″ plasma flat panel. Update: new episodes began May 15. (Avila)

So You Can Hear Me Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through July 20. A 23-year-old with no experience, just high spirits and big ideals, gets a job in the South Bronx teaching special ed classes and quickly finds herself in over her head. Safiya Martinez, herself a bright young woman from the projects, delivers this inspired accounting of her time not long ago in perhaps the most neglected sector of the public school system — a 60-minute solo play that makes up for its relatively slim plot with a set of deft, powerful, lovingly crafted characterizations. These complex portraits, alternately hysterical and startling, offer their own moving ruminations on a violent but also vibrant stratum of American society, deeply fractured by pervasive poverty and injustice and yet full of restive young personalities too easily dismissed, ignored, or crudely caricatured elsewhere. An effervescent, big-hearted, and very talented performer, Martinez’s own bounding personality and contagious passion for her former students (as complicated as that relationship was), makes this deeply felt tribute all the more memorable. (Avila)

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through August 24. Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a “self” unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his “Better Than You” weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed “seminar” and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Extended through July 27. Thrillpeddlers and director Russell Blackwood continue their Theatre of the Ridiculous series with this 1971 musical from San Francisco’s famed glitter-bearded acid queens, the Cockettes, revamped with a slew of new musical material by original member Scrumbly Koldewyn, and a freshly re-minted book co-written by Koldewyn and “Sweet Pam” Tent — both of whom join the large rotating cast of Thrillpeddler favorites alongside a third original Cockette, Rumi Missabu (playing diner waitress Brenda Breakfast like a deliciously unhinged scramble of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis). This is Thrillpeddlers’ third Cockettes revival, a winning streak that started with Pearls Over Shanghai. While not quite as frisky or imaginative as the production of Pearls, it easily charms with its fine songs, nifty routines, exquisite costumes, steady flashes of wit, less consistent flashes of flesh, and de rigueur irreverence. The plot may not be very easy to follow, but then, except perhaps for the bubbly accounting of the notorious New York flop of the same show 42 years ago by Tent (as poisoned-pen gossip columnist Vedda Viper), it hardly matters. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through July 21. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns after a month-long hiatus with his popular, kid-friendly bubble show.

BAY AREA

Dear Elizabeth Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $24-77. Wed/3 and Sun/7, 2 and 7pm; Fri/5-Sat/6, 8pm (also Sat/6, 2pm). Berkeley Rep performs Sarah Ruhl’s play written in the form of letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

George Gershwin Alone Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-77. Wed/3 and Sun/7, 2 and 7pm; Fri/5-Sat/6, 8pm (also Sat/6, 2pm). Hershey Felder stars in his celebration of the music and life of composer George Gershwin.

Sea of Reeds Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35. Previews Wed/3-Thu/4, 8pm. Opens Fri/5, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Aug 18. Josh Kornbluth’s brand new comedy — it involves atheism, oboes, and the Book of Exodus — opens at Shotgun Players “before it goes on Torah.”

Superior Donuts Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-30. Wed/3 and Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show Thu/4); Sun, 2pm. Through July 14. Pear Avenue Theatre performs Tracy Letts’ comedy about the redemptive power of friendship.

This Is How It Goes Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Tue and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm); Wed-Sat, 8pm. Extended through July 28. An awkward love triangle between former high school classmates gets the caustic Neil LaBute treatment in Aurora Theatre Company’s production of This is How it Goes. Not content to merely skewer the familiar battles between the sexes, LaBute further prods his captive audience with the big stick of race relations, and the often unacknowledged prejudices that lurk in the hearts of men. And women. There are no innocents in this play, though each character certainly has moments where they play upon audience sympathies, only to betray them a few inflammatory lines later. As the marriage between the successful yet self-conscious African American alpha male Cody (Aldo Billingslea) and his neurotically placating Caucasian wife Belinda (Carrie Paff) erodes, the mostly affable (and former fat kid) “Man” (Gabriel Marin) insinuates himself in the middle of their troubled relationship, obviously still carrying the torch for Belinda he did 15 years ago — as well as the same wary animosity an unpopular kid carries for the star of the track team, in this case, Cody. All three actors do a very good job of shape-shifting between their middle-class Jekyll and Hyde selves, assisted in part by Marin’s amiable asides, which don’t so much lull the audience as tease them with the idea that things are about to get better, when they can only get worse. (Gluckstern)

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. July 13, 21, and 27, 6:15pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Comedy Returns to El Rio” El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Mon/8, 8pm. $7-20. With Eve Meyer, Johan Miranda, Kate Willett, Sammy Obeid, and Lisa Geduldig.

“Mission Position Live” Cinecave, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.missionpositionlive.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Stand-up comedy with rotating performers.

“Performance Making Showcase” Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. Sat/6, 7:30pm. Free. Work created by participants in the University of Chichester (UK)’s Performance Making Institute.

“Queer Rebels of the Harlem Renaissance” Performances: African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.queerrebels.com. Fri/5-Sat/6, 8pm. $15-20. Films: New Parkway, 474 24th St, Oakl; www.queerrebels.com. Sun/7, noon. $7-10. The National Queer Arts Festival presents this showcase of queer black performers, plus films by and about the same.

“Randy Roberts: Live!” Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; www.thealcovetheater.com. July 9, 16, and 23, 9pm. $30. The famed female impersonator takes on Cher, Better Midler, and other stars.

Red Hots Burlesque El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.redhotsburlesque.com. Wed, 7:30-9pm. Ongoing. $5-10. Come for the burlesque show, stay for OMG! Karaoke starting at 8pm (no cover for karaoke).

“San Francisco Magic Parlor” Chancellor Hotel Union Square, 433 Powell, SF; www.sfmagicparlor.com. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $40. Magic vignettes with conjurer and storyteller Walt Anthony.

“Union Square Live” Union Square, between Post, Geary, Powell, and Stockton, SF; www.unionsquarelive.org. Through Oct 9. Free. Music, dance, circus arts, film, and more; dates and times vary, so check website for the latest.

“Yerba Buena Gardens Festival” Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission between 3rd and 4th Sts, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. Through Oct 15. Free. This week: “Accordion Daze,” Sat, noon-3. *

 

Our Weekly Picks

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WEDNESDAY 3

PANTyRAiD

Seven years after meeting in Costa Rica, Martin Folb and Josh Mayer are still doing their thing as seductive bass collaboration PANTyRAiD, even while each has achieved solo success as the Glitch Mob’s Ooah and MartyParty respectively. New album PillowTalk has the right touch of move and groove while keeping an arm’s length from booming, bro-centric dubstep or ear-shattering electro. PANTyRAids like to jump from genre to genre, dropping some trap here and some glitch there, keeping listeners on their toes. Standout track “Just For You” showcases the duo’s slick handling of hip-hop drums, brooding basslines, and melodic synths. Call it mood music for the bass-minded. (Kevin Lee)

10pm, $20-25

1015 Folsom

(415) 431-1200

www.1015.com

Fruition

Upright bass, acoustic guitars, and mandolin (quickly strummed and finger-picked) fill out Fruition’s sound, but don’t clutter its performance. And this show will feature Bridget Law of Elephant Revival, an addition that only upgrades the night. Bluegrass itself requires a lot of emotion and passion to sound right, but Fruition harbors a certain old-back-road, last drop of sunlight through the trees kind of passion. “Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery,” sings the group in gorgeous country harmonies, in its cover of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” (Hillary Smith)

7pm, free

Brick and Mortar Music Hall

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 371-1631

www.brickandmortarmusic.com

 

THURSDAY 4

Oil and Water

It just wouldn’t be summer in the Bay Area without the San Francisco Mime Troupe — so thank goodness the veteran company was able to raise enough funds (in part through crowdsourcing, a testament to its loyal supporters) for its 54th season. Though the 2013 musical will still be performed mostly for free, and comes complete with a political theme (corporations vs. environmental activists), the format is different this year. The show is broken into two musical one-acts: Crude Intentions and Deal With the Devil, both written by Pat Moran And Adolfo Mejia. Per tradition, the show opens July 4 in Dolores Park before spreading its jolly satire ’round NorCal parks through Labor Day; check website for additional shows this week in Golden Gate Park and beyond. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through Sept. 2

Thu/4, 2pm, free

Dolores Park

18th St. and Dolores, SF

www.sfmt.org

 

Giraffage

San Francisco-based futuristic dream R&B producer Charlie Yin has made some big leaps in 2013, with a performance at SXSW along with upcoming gigs at Southern California’s Lightning in a Bottle festival and SF’s Treasure Island Music Festival. His new album Needs on Los Angeles label Alpha Pup Records is a thesis in music manipulation, a comprehensive counterargument to straightforward 4/4. Vocal samples are up-shifted in tempo to lend a playful mood. Tracks are sometimes dipped in sonic mud halfway through, decelerating to a crawl before jumping back to normal time. But Needs never feels jerky, which owes to Yin’s tight transitions and harmonious melodies throughout. The sensual, infectious, shifty third track “Money” sounds like it will be played in lounges in 2050. (Lee)

With Mister Lies, Bobby Browser

9:30pm, $13–$15

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

FRIDAY 5

“Fiestas Fridas”

There’s a reason this three-day event is subtitled “celebrating the 103rd and 106th birthday of Frida Kahlo:” the iconic Mexican painter was actually born in 1907, but she liked to say she was born in 1910 — the year the Mexican revolution began. The fest kicks off with a gala dinner featuring Kahlo’s own recipes (cooked by Puerto Alegre, Gracias Madre, Mijita, and other restaurants), with proceeds going to Cine + Mas; Saturday brings film screenings and Kahlo-inspired performances. The fest wraps up Sunday with an afternoon and evening of live art, dance, DJs, and more family-friendly fun, like a costume contest with a variety of categories: Best Frida and Diego, Best “Little Frida,” and Best “FriDRAG.” (Eddy)

Opening dinner tonight, 6-11pm, $50

Mission Cultural Center

2868 Mission, SF

Film screening and performance, Sat/6, 5-11pm, $35

Victoria Theater

2961 16th St, SF

Community event, Sun/7, 2-9pm, $10 suggested donation

Women’s Building

3543 18th St, SF

www.fiestasfridassf.com

 

 

Johnny Mathis with San Francisco Symphony

Legendary crooner Johnny Mathis’ family moved to San Francisco when he was very young, and it was here in the city that he developed his love for music; while studying at San Francisco State University, he began performing at the Black Hawk nightclub and eventually garnered the attention of some high-profile promoters. In early 1956, Mathis recorded his first album, and he continues to this day. Singing hit songs such as “Chances Are,” “Wonderful! Wonderful!,” “A Certain Smile,” and many more, Mathis has been going strong for nearly 70 years now — don’t miss you chance to see a true icon this weekend, performing with the San Francisco Symphony (Sean McCourt)

Also Sat/6, 8pm, $20–$125

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness, SF

(415) 864-6000

www.sfsymphony.org

 

Accidental Bear Queer Summer Tour

What, you thought just because DOMA got overturned and same-sex couples might be getting married again this summer that our work was over? And also that we’re too hungover from Pride to start partying again? Queer mental health issues and suicide risk are still a huge concern in the community, and hyperenergetic SF gay blogger Mike Enders, a.k.a Accidental Bear, is trying to break the stigma and bring awareness — by throwing a big, fun, charitable concert and party, of course. Colorful gay novelty rappers Rica Shay and Big Dipper (let the double entendre zingers fly!), dazzlingly alien outfit Conquistador, local electro heartthrobs Darling Gunsel, and soulful tunesmith Logan Lynn fill the bill, with proceeds going to the Stonewall Project, the Ali Forney Center, and more. (Marke B.)

8pm, $15

Beatbox

314 11th St., SF.

www.accidentalbear.com

 

 

SATURDAY 6

Beast Crawl

Now in its second year, Beast Crawl is a free literary festival featuring more than 140 writers in one night. It’s probably pretty hard to go wrong with that many options. Spread out over 26 local galleries, restaurants, bars, and cafes, the annual event offers a place and performance for everyone. Beast Crawl has four legs — the first one beginning at 5pm, and the last one (the after-party) starts at 9pm. Visit the Uptown, have a drink at Telegraph Beer Garden, open your eyes at Awaken Café, all while taking in some of the best Bay Area authors, poets, and even stand-ups. You know how you always hear people say “I went to this rad little poetry reading the other night,” and then wonder where the hell they always are? Well, here’s your chance to finally check out one, or 20. (Smith)

5pm, free

Uptown, Oakland

(415) 706-9128

beastcrawl.weebly.com

 

Audiobus Mission Creek

Properly executed, music should take you on a mental voyage, a mini musical vacation, if you will. It’s not to remove all thought, but to direct your attention elsewhere momentarily, in the direction the sound dictates. The AudioBus, a mobile venue, will delete the figurative from that jaunt, and take you on a literal trip down a specific San Francisco route. For AudioBus Mission Creek — a Soundwave SonicLAB event — sound artists Jeffy Ray and Jorge Bachmann will sonically guide passengers through the old and new Mission District, narrated by Adobe Books’ Andrew Mckinley. Together, they’ll explore “profound themes of the past, from nostalgia to displacement, and the future ideas of technology and possibility.” The sound-tour will leave the temporary station twice tonight, once for a sunset tour and then again on a starry night ride. A reminder: the bus waits for no one, so don’t miss your stop. (Emily Savage)

8 and 9pm, $16

Bus station: Adobe Books

3130 24th St., SF

www.projectsoundwave.com

 

Fillmore Jazz Festival

Live jazz music, crafts, and gourmet food, all in one place (and most of it is free to check out). The Fillmore Jazz Festival is the largest of its kind on the West Coast, reportedly luring in a mind-blowing 100,000 visitors over the two-day event. Considering the history and popularity of the neighborhood — and the sheer amount of bands and musicians playing the fest — that number starts to make sense. Sultry local vocalist Kim Nalley will bring her jazzy blues blend to the stage, as will instrumentalist-composer Peter Apfelbaum, Mara Hruby, John Santos Sextet, Beth Custer Ensemble, Crystal Money Hall, Bayonics, and Afrolicious, among many others. Stroll through the 12 blocks, and you’re bound to find some acts that give you a reason to pause. (Smith)

Also Sun/7, 10am-6pm, free

Fillmore Street between Jackson and Eddy, SF (800) 310-6563

www.fillmorejazzfestival.com

 

Woolfy

I miss Kevin Meenan’s show listings at epicsauce.com. At one time it was a go-to for highlights of small shows going on in the city, filler free, and super reliable for finding a new act to see live. Meenan has since dropped the showlist (perhaps made redundant with the availability of social apps), but is still active with his regular event Push The Feeling. This edition features a DJ set by English born, LA musician, Simon “Woolfy” James, whose eclectic and spacey post-punk dance sensibility first got my attention with the caressingly Balearic “Looking Glass” and the recent James Murphy-esque snappy cut on Permanent Release, “Junior’s Throwin’ Craze.” (Ryan Prendiville)

With Bruse (Live), YR SKULL, and epicsauce DJs

9pm-2am, $6, free before 10 w/ RSVP

Underground SF

424 Haight, SF

www.undergroundsf.com

 

SUNDAY 7

Cleopatra

The backstory that looms over 1963’s Cleopatra is very nearly as glorious as the film itself, which ain’t no small feat; Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s epic take on the legendary Queen of Egypt ran famously over-budget, but damn if all those dollars aren’t one hundred percent visible, with lavish sets, costumes, and blingy whatnots filling every frame. But really, who cares about overapplied eye make-up and historical inaccuracies when you have the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton romance playing out before your very eyes? There’s no better way to relive the drama — oh, the drama — than in this 50th anniversary restored DCP screening, a one-day-only affair at the Castro. (Eddy)

2 and 7pm, $8.50–$11

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com

 

TUESDAY 9

Chef Hubert Keller

Hubert Keller is a culinary celebrity as a multiple James Beard Award winner and the owner and executive chef of trendy restaurants across the country, including the highly-praised San Francisco-based Fleur de Lys. But the classically trained French chef is not all expensive, showy cuisine — during the first season of Top Chef Masters, he earned the respect of broke college kids and amateur foodies everywhere when he resourcefully used a dorm room shower to cool a pot of pasta. Last year, he collaborated with co-author Penolope Wisner to publish Hubert Keller’s Souvenirs: Stories and Recipes from My Life, a memoir-cookbook featuring instructions on 120 dishes. (Lee)

In conversation with Narsai David

6pm, $25 (students, $7)

Commonwealth Club

595 Market, SF

(415) 597-6700 www.commonwealthclub.org

Small Business Commissioners support Pet Food Express over local stores

Sasha Cuttler
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34

San Francisco’s Small Business Commission has recently come under fire for its promotion of corporate interests and, most recently, advocating for an allegedly predatory pet store chain known as Pet Food Express.

In 2009, the Small Business Commission voted in favor of denying Pet Food Express’ application for a location on Lombard Street in the Marina District. Subsequently, the Planning Commission also denied the request, seemingly blocking Pet Food Express’ efforts to set up shop in the Marina. 

San Francisco’s formula retail legislation requires chain stores like Pet Food Express to apply for a conditional use permit in order to receive approval for opening new locations.

But now, Pet Food Express is back after recently filing another identical application with the SBC for the exact same spot on Lombard Street, and this time some members of the SBC are oddly supporting the chain.

As Pam Habel, owner of local Marina pet store Catnip & Bones, pointed out at the commission meeting on June 10, Pet Food Express already has a location on California Street just one mile away. At the same meeting, Susan Landry, owner of another Marina pet store, Animal Connection, added that nothing has changed in the past four years that would point toward the Marina community needing or wanting this Pet Food Express, since four pet-related stores exist within a mile of the proposed Lombard Street location.

“We were really surprised and disappointed that the commission no longer seemed to be an advocate of small business and even made comments indicating sympathy for the big chain pet store,” Habel and Landry, told the Bay Guardian jointly via email. “Commissioner Adams even said it seemed unfair to him to penalize a business that had started out small and now are being victimized for their success since they are one of the largest pet store chains in the U.S.”

So what has changed since 2009 that is now making the SBC consider supporting the proposed Pet Food Express? For one, Mayor Ed Lee’s corporate-friendly appointees to the SBC, including developer Luke O’Brien and President Stephen Adams, a manager for Sterling Bank & Trust.

Additionally, San Francisco Animal Care and Control Director Rebecca Katz lobbied for approval of the Pet Food Express while holding a blind Chihuahua adorned with a sweater at the June 10 meeting. Katz cited Pet Food Express’ many financial contributions to her agency as reasoning behind supporting the chain’s new location and expansion. According to Animal Care and Control spokeswoman Deb Campbell, Pet Food Express donates an estimated $50,000 to $70,000 in supplies annually to the city department.

“The more business Pet Food Express does, the more they grow and the more they give back to the community,” Katz told the Bay Guardian. “We take in about 10,000 animals a year on a budget of about $40 million.”

Kathleen Dooley, one of the SBC’s few existing members still in favor of promoting local business over big business, met Katz’s lobbying with criticism.

“She went up and lobbied for Pet Food Express and implied if it wasn’t for them no pets would be adopted and the animal world would be in chaos,” Dooley told the Bay Guardian. “They already have a number of stores in San Francisco, but they act as if this one on Lombard would change the tide.”

But Katz says that her public promotion of Pet Food Express is not lobbying. “I spoke to the Ethics Commission and they told me it is okay for me to talk about what Pet Food Express does for us,” said Katz.

Few of the arguments in favor of the Pet Food Express’s intrusion into the Marina actually acknowledge the store’s potential detrimental impact on the existing local businesses. Katz even publically said she thought it was ironic to protest another corporation coming into the Marina, where so many chain businesses already exist.

“The size of the Lombard location would allow for an adoption center which would have a huge impact,” said Katz. “Whereas residents have to drive to the California Street location, now they could walk.”

Unfortunately for local Marina businesses, the SBC, whose professed goal is to “work to support and enhance an environment where small businesses can succeed and flourish,” may be doing just the opposite by supporting a chain business that will undoubtedly endanger the many locally owned pet stores.

“As small businesses in San Francisco, we rely on the SBC as our voice at City Hall, not as a sympathetic voice for chain stores,” said Habel and Landry. “Because of their response last month, we no longer feel that we can look to the SBC to support small business in San Francisco.”

In her presentation before the commission, Landry drew an analogy to the previous opening of a Blockbuster on Lombard Street. Following the corporation’s entrance into the community, all four independent video stores in Cow Hollow closed within a year.

At the same meeting, Commissioner Mark Dwight acknowledged the predatory nature of Pet Food Express, who has sat on the same property for four years in order to continuously rally support in favor of the proposed location.

The pet supply stores in the Marina could face the same fate as the local video rental shops if Pet Food Express succeeds in opening on Lombard Street.

“When chain stores go in, commercial rents go up and the small mom and pop businesses are priced out of the neighborhood and replaced by even more chain stores as they are the only ones who, with their corporate structures, can easily afford high rents,” said Landry and Habel. “This is about more than one Pet Food Express application on Lombard, this is part of our battle to retain the heart and soul of our neighborhood commercial corridors.”

‘Money is a tool’

Andrew Lam
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0
‘Money is a tool’

Jack Abramoff says “legalized bribery” is corrupting our political system, and as a lobbyist who went to prison for taking the practice of buying favors from Congress to obscene new depths, he should know. But if we’re relying on him to help reform that system, a cause he’s now taken up, we could be in real trouble.

Watching Abramoff address “public ethics” at a University of San Francisco class of aspiring political professionals on June 6 was a little surreal. Part charming rogue, part penitent reformer, Abramoff told inside tales of how easily money corrupts even well-intended people who work in Congress.

“I didn’t create a new way of lobbying, I just did more of it,” Abramoff told the students, noting that while some lobbyists had a few good tickets to Washington Redskins or Wizards games to give away to members of Congress, he had 72 of them. And while some lobbyists would take members golfing, “I would put them on a Gulfstream and fly them to Scotland. What’s the difference? It’s still playing golf.”

It was particularly strange for someone of Abramoff’s obviously questionable moral fiber to be addressing political students at this Jesuit-run academic institution, whose local advertising slogans include “How to succeed in business and still go to heaven” and “Wicked smart without the wicked part.”

Yet forgiveness is supposed to be divine, and the instructor who lured Abramoff to speak with his class, local lobbyist and political consultant Alex Clemens, was certainly pleased to attract someone with Abramoff’s inside knowledge, avoiding Abramoff’s usual speaking fees of up to $20,000 by piggybacking on a Southern California speech he gave and paying only his airfare.

I was a bit more skeptical of a guy who equates political donations with bribery while hawking a book and narrow reform proposal — while at the same time soliciting corporate lobbying clients and telling the San Francisco Chronicle that Silicon Valley should be spending far more money to influence politicians.

“It needs a much bigger view of political involvement,” Abramoff told the Chron. “It should be spending much more. They’re not playing as smart as they should, and they could lose big.”

That’s part of the muddle of contradictions that defines Abramoff and his advocacy today, which is consistent with the anti-government, wealth-worshipping conservatism he has pushed with missionary zeal since his college days, along with pals Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, who still play key roles in keeping religious fundamentalists and the rich in the Republican Party fold.

“I’m not against money in the system, I’m against money being used the wrong way in the system,” Abramoff told me after the talk, as I probed the contradictions in his statements and views. My efforts to pin him down caused him to scornfully brand me a “socialist,” the old bully replacing the affable face he showed the students.

“Money is a tool,” Abramoff told me.

Abramoff is also a tool, I decided as I listened to him, although it’s still tough to discern who is wielding him now and where this effort may be headed.

LESSON FOR STUDENTS

Abramoff told the students that even after he got busted in 2005, for a long time he indignantly wondered why he was being prosecuted for the same sorts of actions that were endemic to Washington DC. Eventually, he began to realize he had done something wrong.

“I thought maybe some of this [the charges against him] is right,” he said. “I decided to be honest with myself. Am I the saint I always thought I’d been, or the devil they said I was?”

Yet in the end, Abramoff never did really rethink his own worldview and history — from his early days of shilling for the South African government against efforts to end apartheid to later bribing members of Congress to oppose regulation of sweatshops and sex trafficking in US territories — he just blamed the political system.

“I thought this system is maybe not right,” he told students studying to be a part of that system. “I thought when I got out, I should probably try to help.”

So he wrote a book, Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Corruption From America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist, and he says that he’s been developing political reform legislation that he intends to start pushing next year along with unnamed others.

Abramoff has consulted with Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who founded Rootstrikers to push political reforms, but Abramoff doesn’t support many of the central tenets of that and other reform groups, including public financing of elections and overturning “corporate personhood” court rulings that deem political spending by the rich to be a free speech right.

In fact, Abramoff is still a right-winger who shows little interest in limiting the ability of wealthy corporations and individuals to freely spend their money on political candidates and issues, placing him at odds with pretty much the entire political reform movement.

Phillip Ung, a spokesperson for Common Cause — which has been working on these political reform efforts for decades — was a little skeptical about getting help from someone who once embodied the most corrupt and excessive aspects of the current system.

“As much as we enjoy his newfound support for political reform, we also understand that he has a debt to pay, and not just to society,” Ung said of the $44 million in restitution that Abramoff still owes to his victims.

Ung said that a stark example of political corruption like Abramoff represents does help the cause, but that has little to do with his current advocacy. “The reform flag at the federal level goes almost nowhere if there’s not a political scandal,” Ung said, although even that isn’t saying much because, “Congress and DC only have tolerance for political reform one every 10 years or so.”

With Democrats now overwhelmingly controlling California’s Legislature and executive offices, Ung sees opportunities for important reforms here. The most promising is Senate Bill 27, which would require political groups that raise more than $500,000 to disclose their donors.

By contrast, Abramoff’s proposal seems tepid at best, and his strategy for selling it relies on using political spending to elect sympathetic people to Congress, which would seem to undermine his reform message almost as much as pitches to corporate clients to hire him for lobbying consulting services (see www.abramoff.com).

“He seems to be going back to his old ways,” Ung said of Abramoff.

Abramoff said his legislation would broaden the definition of lobbyist, limit their campaign contributions to $500 per election cycle, and prevent public officials from working as lobbyists for 10 years after they leave government.

Then Abramoff said that he and his unspecified “we” will dump money into six contested Congressional races in 2014, trying to elect three Democrats and three Republicans who pledge to support his legislation, following that up in 2016 by targeting 25 to 50 races.

“Then and only then will Congress take it seriously,” Abramoff concluded, arguing that politicians respond to losing their jobs more than other means of persuasion. He’s going to use aggressive political spending to win the reforms he seeks, which don’t really do anything to limit political spending.

When I asked Abramoff how increased political spending can reform a political system corrupted by money, he replied, “You play with the tools and the battlefield you’re on.”

THE SYSTEM, OR ITS SPONSORS?

Abramoff blames Congress for corruption far more than the lobbyists or wealthy special interests who are doing the corrupting, noting how difficult it is to get political reforms approved by legislators who want to later cash in on their public service.

“The lobbyists are a response to the system set up by Congress,” he told the students, building on his earlier point that “99 percent of everything I did was legal, and that’s a bigger deal than the 1 percent that was illegal. That’s what has to change.”

But he acknowledges that reforming the system will be “impossibly difficult” because those who are invested in the current system will always find loopholes to any new regulation. “They’re extremely brilliant people and their goal is to get around things,” he said.

Omitted from Abramoff’s recitation of what’s wrong in Washington are the people doing the corrupting, that other 1 percent, the very rich. When I asked him about how he can really attack institutionalized political corruption without going after the cash that feeds that corruption, he told me, “I tend to be nervous about a political approach that says, ‘It’s the rich.”

Abramoff actually supports the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling, which ended controls on the political spending of wealthy individuals and corporations, telling the students, “We all want certain corporations to have the rights that we individuals have.”

Abramoff also seems to dismiss the possibility of a grassroots political reform effort, saying that any change in the system would need support from both the left and the right, and the latter will kill any effort to actually removes private money from political campaigns.

“You’re not going to have federal financing of elections. The right will die before they let that happen,” Abramoff said.

That might have been the most insightful thing that Abramoff said to the students, although he certainly didn’t intend it the way that I heard it: maybe the right needs to die, in the political sense, before the system that Abramoff both decries and supports will change.

The adulation of the technoriche

Zelda Bronstein
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31
The adulation of the technoriche

It’s hardly news at this point that billionaire tech mogul Sean Parker tore up a public campground to build the sets for his $10 million fantasy wedding in Big Sur. And it’s been widely reported that Parker paid a $2.5 million fine to the Coastal Commission, which he tried to spin as a wonderful environmental gift to improve the state park system.

But I read with interest in the Chron that both Lite Guv Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris were reportedly at the wedding. Both are very smart people; both have the ability to observe the world around them. So I have to wonder:

Didn’t either Newsom or Harris think it was a little bit odd to see all this new development in a protected area? Did it occur to either of them that their richy-rich-rich pal, who has a history of snubbing laws he doesn’t like, might have done the same thing here?

Could the state’s top law-enforcement official and a member of the state Lands Commission really look at artificial ponds and large new structures, which involved bulldozers to create, and not say:

Huh? Aren’t there rules against this sort of thing?

Okay, it was a wedding, and nobody wants to be the one to throw the turd in the punchbowl. The politician guests were there to celebrate with a person who is capable of helping to fund future campaigns (and since both Harris and Newsom are considered possible candidates for governor when Jerry steps down, I bet they had a great time together).

But didn’t either of them feel at least a little weird about it?

I called Newsom’s office and left a message for Dierdre Hussey, his press person. She hasn’t called back. Nick Pacilio in Harris’s office told me someone would get right back to me; hasn’t happened yet. So we don’t know what the two were thinking.
But I do know this: The level of adulation of the technoriche has reached levels we haven’t seen since the Gilded Age.

Technology columnist James Temple puts it this way:

To the outside observer, Parker’s actions look like contempt for the piddling rules that we non-billionaires can’t buy our way around. And they certainly do nothing to alter the increasingly popular local view of the tech class as selfish and aloof, conspicuously relishing their venture capital rounds and IPO winnings, as a growing portion of the Bay Area population struggles to make the skyrocketing rents.

And politicians seem to adore the most selfish and aloof (and clueless) among them.

Take Mayor Ed Lee’s comments about Airbnb. The company is clearly cheating on its taxes. The city treasurer investigated the situation and ruled unequivocally that airbnb needs to collect and remit the Transit Occupancy Tax money that should be charged on its rooms.
When Michael Krasny asked the mayor on Forum about the issue, Lee defended airbnb (which is funded by his buddy Ron Conway), saying that the company is just “making arguments” about whether it owes the tax.

But that’s just false: The arguments are over. The company argued with the tax collector and lost. And it isn’t arguing anywhere anymore — not in court, not in the political sector. It’s just …. not paying. And because it’s a tech company, and Conway is nurturing it, the mayor seems just fine with that.

It appears that big corporations are big corporations. They may claim that they won’t be evil, and they may be headed by people in their 20s who dress like hipsters, and they may make really cool products — but their operating just like the robber barons of old. And the great wealth they’ve created has, to a great extent, also created great arrogance.

Before the trolls accuse me of fomenting class warfare, let me repeat: I didn’t start this war. I didn’t rig the political and tax systems so that the middle class would be wiped out as all of the net new wealth in a generation goes to the top 1 percent. I’d much prefer we all share in the bounty, as the middle class and working class did in the post-War era.

Meanwhile: Does anyone really need a $10 million wedding in a state park?

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