Economics

A no-new-cuts budget

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EDITORIAL It’s time for Democrats in Sacramento to show some political courage. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has thrown down the gauntlet, offering a budget plan that isn’t just brutal and wrong — it’s a train wreck, a catastrophe that would devastate public education, parks, and basic services in California for years to come. The Democrats need to publicly declare this dead on arrival and offer an alternative plan that closes most of the $14 billion deficit with new taxes.

The budget deficit is serious business: it represents more than 10 percent of the state budget, and, after a series of tough years that have left California in debt, it’s not going to be easy to eliminate. And we recognize that Schwarzenegger is serious about across-the-board cuts — he’s willing to eliminate 6,000 jobs from the bloated prison system and let 22,000 inmates out early. That’s long overdue, and those savings can be incorporated in any final plan.

But slicing the education budget by $4 billion is insane. We’re not just talking about government employees losing their jobs or reducing bureaucratic overhead — this is about threatening the future of a generation of California kids. Those kinds of cuts — which absolutely will translate into a loss of teachers, school closures, and the end of music, art, and science programs — aren’t just one-year measures that can be repaired later. These are deep reductions in the state’s commitment to educating children who can’t afford private schools — and those kids will suffer for years.

Closing parks, cutting social programs, and eviscerating aid to cities — which will mean another round of cuts at the local level — would do serious damage to California. And none of it is necessary.

The governor’s pledge not to raise taxes demonstrates that, for all his talk of bipartisanship, at heart he’s a George W. Bush Republican. Cutting state spending at this level as the nation heads into a recession is insane; all the governor’s plan would do is drive the economy further into the tank, destroy more jobs, and reduce tax revenue, making next year’s problem even worse.

Think about it for a second: just restoring the vehicle license fee, which is a modest tax on car ownership, would bring in more than $4 billion, enough to save public education.

The richest Californians have done very well under the Bush tax cuts. And the deficits that those tax cuts created are part of California’s budget problem. Even increasing state income taxes slightly on those very-high-wage earners would bring in as much as $3 billion, according to the California Tax Reform Association — and since the rich can deduct state taxes from their federal payments, this would ultimately be a way to transfer money from Washington DC back to California.

That state’s sales tax code is still stuck in another era, and all sorts of things defined as services don’t get taxed at all — even though, according to the CTRA, "many ‘services’ are actually the temporary use of tangible commodities, such as admission to sporting events, ski resorts, golf courses, amusement parks, gyms and concerts, and should be in the tax base." Fixing that problem would bring in another $4 billion.

In other words, a few modest changes in the tax laws that would affect only the rich and those with excess disposable income would solve the budget deficit without cutting any services at all (except prisons, which need to be cut anyway). And that’s without even addressing the regressive mess that is Proposition 13.

A revenue-based solution would also prevent a deep hit to the economy, because shifting money from the very rich (who don’t tend to spend their marginal dollars) to the poor (who tend to put every new dollar right into the economy) is always a source of economic stimulus.

The Democratic leadership knows this. Most of the rank-and-file Democrats in the State Legislature know this. It’s not rocket science. But politicians in California are terrified of raising taxes — but in 2008 they have to get over it. It’s the responsibility of the Democratic leadership to educate the public about the real choices here, the real economics, the real stakes — and the only humane, credible solutions. If they cower in fear and cave in to the governor now, it’s hard to imagine when they will ever be able to take a stand.

A lousy casino deal

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OPINION After spending millions in campaign contributions, four of the state’s wealthiest and most powerful tribes — Pechanga, Morongo, Agua Caliente, and Sycuan — have cut themselves sweetheart deals for one of the largest expansions of casino gambling in United States history.

As a California Indian and vice-chairman of the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization, an organization working to protect the civil rights of Native Americans, I am deeply concerned that the deals on the February ballot — Propositions 94, 95, 96, and 97 — benefit four tribes at the expense of other tribes, the workers at these tribes’ casinos, and California taxpayers.

The big four tribes bring in huge profits from their existing casinos and spend heavily to influence state laws. Yet they are eager to deny California voters their right to decide this issue and have fought to keep these deals off the ballot and prevent the voters from having their say. Could it be that the big four tribes know their sweetheart deals may not hold up to voter scrutiny?

Here are a few reasons to vote no on Props. 94, 95, 96, and 97.

Labor unions oppose the measures because the deals would shower four wealthy tribes with billions in profits but fail to ensure the most basic rights for casino workers, including affordable health insurance. A study conducted by David Farris, a University of California at Riverside professor of economics, found that Agua Caliente’s health coverage is so expensive that 56 percent of the dependent children of casino workers are forced into taxpayer-funded health care programs.

In addition, the expansion of tribal gaming in California has seen an increase in the number of human and civil rights violations, especially within tribes that have gaming operations. These abuses have resulted in thousands of disenfranchised Indians being cut off from or denied health care benefits, elder benefits, education assistance, and other social services provided by their tribal governments.

Other tribes also oppose the deals. Just four of California’s 108 tribes would get control over one-third of the state’s Indian gaming pie. The deals would create dominant casinos that could economically devastate smaller tribes and local businesses. Moreover, the big four deals fail to adhere to the purpose and intent of previous gaming initiatives, which led California voters to believe there would be modest casino expansion and that Indian gaming would benefit all California Indians and taxpayers.

The big four deals would give these tribes an additional 17,000 slot machines. That’s more than all of the slots at a dozen big Las Vegas casinos. As a result, California would become home to some of the largest casinos in the world.

While the big four would make billions of dollars from these new deals, promises to taxpayers would fall short. The claims about the amount of money the state would get under these deals are wildly exaggerated, and the state’s independent, nonpartisan legislative analyst called the tribes’ figures unrealistic. In fact, under these deals the big four tribes themselves would determine how much revenue they would pay to the state.

Join labor unions, educators, public safety officials, tribes, taxpayers, senior groups, and civil rights and environmental organizations and vote no on 94, 95, 96, and 97. *

John Gomez Sr.

John Gomez Sr. is vice-chairman of the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization.

Yellow Swans’ Gabriel Mindel Saloman picks his final five music faves of 2007

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Yellow Swans’ Gabriel Mindel Saloman (left) and Pete Swanson.

By Gabriel Mindel Saloman

Here are five more musical selections for 2007. See www.sfbg.com for the rest.

FIVE MORE TOPPERS FOR 2007

1. Top way to take the money and run: the career of Andrew WK
After a few years of cult celebrity and corporate bucks, Andy has found some excellent ways to throw curveballs to those who think they have his number. In 2007 he did amazing production work for Sightings, joined Current 93, did a dance party-lecture tour, paraded with Karen Black, provided multiple online and print advice columns and features, and is now working with Lee Perry. What a life.

2. Top example of righteousness: Harry Belafonte
No doubt about it, the man threw down during his keynote speech at the Gathering for Justice in Oakland. It’s rare these days to hear an artist speak with such clarity about the past and the present. Hearing him talk – thanks to Davey D’s great online resource – is like eating food after fasting for days. And his amazing records are still $1 at most thrift stores.

3. Top elephant in the room: punk rock economics
The new realities of MP3s, peak oil, and a looming recession … well, you do the math. DIY shows have been $5 a head since the ’80s. That won’t even pay for a meal anymore, much less a tank of gas on a trip to any big town north, south, or east of the city. Something’s going to change, but what?

Polishing SPUR

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Wedged among the commerce, tourism, and white-collar businesses north of Market Street is the slim entry to 312 Sutter, easy to miss unless you happen to be searching for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. SPUR occupies the fourth and fifth floors of the building — and occupies them completely. Cubicles are close and overstuffed. Conversations compete. Space for meetings is a hot commodity. Four bicycles, ridden to work by staff members, are crammed in a side room where languish a half century’s worth of policy papers, photographs, and planning documents generated by the active public interest think tank.

It looks more like a struggling nonprofit than one of the most influential policy organizations in town, one supported by the city’s richest and most powerful interests.

"This is why we’re building the Urban Center," said Gabriel Metcalf, the youthful executive director of the 48-year-old organization, clad in a dark suit and sipping from a Starbucks coffee cup while he roams the fourth floor office space searching for any available real estate to sit and talk.

He settles on an open-faced workroom with empty seats. They circle a table covered with a thick ledger of plans for SPUR’s new Urban Center, a $16.5 million, 12,000-square-foot four-story building at 654 Mission that the group is building with more than $8 million in public money.

Plans for the center include a free exhibition space, a lending library, and an evolution of the group’s current public education program, now consisting of noontime forums, to include evening lectures and accredited classes. Though the center will house meeting rooms for SPUR’s committees and offices for its staff, the suggestion is that the new space will be a more public place.

And SPUR seems to be searching for a new public image.

For years the organization was synonymous with anything-goes development, ruinous urban renewal, and an economy policy that favored big business and growth at all costs. Today SPUR’s staffers and some board members present a different face. The new SPUR features open debate and seeks consensus; phrases like sustainability and public interest are bandied about more than tax cuts and urban renewal.

But San Francisco progressives are a tough crowd, and SPUR’s history — and, frankly, most of its current political stands — makes a lot of activists wonder: Has SPUR really changed its spurs? And can a group whose board is still overwhelmingly dominated by big business and whose biggest funders are some of the most powerful businesses in town ever be a voice of political reason?

As one observer wryly noted, "I’ve yet to see SPUR publicly denounce a development project."

SPUR considers itself a public policy think tank, a term that conjures an impression of lofty independence. But the group has, and has always had, a visible agenda. SPUR members regularly advocate positions at public meetings, and the group takes stands on ballot measures.

And it has a painful legacy. "We have a dark history," Metcalf admits, referring to the days when "UR" stood for "urban renewal," often called "urban removal" by the thousands of low-income, elderly, and disabled people, many African American and Asian, who were displaced by redevelopment in San Francisco.

That history — and the fact that SPUR’s membership is largely a who’s who of corporations, developers, and financiers — has caused some to raise questions about the public money the group has received for the new Urban Center.

"They’re not an academic institution," said Marc Salomon, a member of the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force who’s butted heads with the group. "There’s no academic peer review going on here. The only peer review is coming from the people who fund them."

Yet prominent local progressives like artist and planning activist Debra Walker, veteran development warrior Brad Paul, and architect and small-business owner Paul Okamoto have joined the SPUR board in recent years. "There’s a bunch of us that have come in under the new regime of Gabriel Metcalf because there’s a real aching need for a progressive dialogue about planning," said Walker, who thinks SPUR is making concerted efforts to inform its policies with the points of view of a broader constituency. "I think SPUR is engaged in those conversations more than anyone."

SPUR defines its mission as a commitment to "good planning and good government." Though a wide range of issues can and does fall under that rubric, the 71 board members and 14 staff tend to focus on housing, transportation, economics, sustainability, governmental reform, and local and regional planning, and their agenda has a dogged pro-growth tinge.

SPUR likes to trace its history to the post–1906 earthquake era, when the literal collapse of housing left many people settling in squalid conditions. The San Francisco Housing Association was formed "to educate the public about the need for housing regulations and to lobby Sacramento for anti-tenement legislation." A 1999 SPUR history of itself places its genesis in the Housing Association, though other versions of the group’s history suggest a slightly different taproot.

According to Chester Hartman’s history of redevelopment in San Francisco, City for Sale (University of California Press, 2002), the 1950s were a time when corporate-backed regional planners were envisioning a new, international commercial hub in the Bay Area. They were looking for a place to put the high-rise office buildings, convention centers, and hotels that white-collar commerce would need. Urban renewal money and resources were coming to the city, and San Francisco’s Redevelopment Agency identified the Embarcadero and South of Market areas as two of several appropriate places to raze and rebuild.

The agency, however, was dysfunctional and couldn’t seem to get plans for the Yerba Buena Center — a convention hall clustered with hotels and offices — off the ground. The Blyth-Zellerbach Committee, "a group the Chamber of Commerce bluntly described as ‘San Francisco’s most powerful business leaders, whose purpose is to act in concert on projects deemed good for the city,’<0x2009>" as Hartman writes, commissioned a report in 1959 by Aaron Levine, a Philadelphia planner, which identified the Redevelopment Agency as one of the worst in the nation and recommended more leadership from the business community. The San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association was born, funded by Blyth-Zellerbach, whose leaders included some corporations that still pay dues to SPUR, like Bechtel, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

John Elberling, a leader of the Tenants and Owners Development Corp., a group representing the people who were trying to stay in the area, was one of many activists who litigated against the city’s plan and managed to wedge some affordable housing into the developers’ vision of South of Market. SPUR, he told us, was "explicitly formed to support redevelopment issues in the ’60s and ’70s."

By 1974, when Paul began fending off redevelopment efforts around the Tenderloin and directed the North of Market Planning Coalition, "all through that period SPUR was viewed by the community as a tool for the Chamber of Commerce," he said.

In 1976, "Urban Renewal" became "Urban Research," a move away from the tarnished term. The 1999 commemoration of SPUR’s 40th anniversary is a somewhat sanitized history that never presents the faces of the people who were displaced by the program; nor does the analysis nod significantly toward the neighborhood groups and activists who were able to mitigate the wholesale razing of the area.

That’s still a soft spot for SPUR, some say. "They’re uncomfortable with questions of class. Those questions tend to be glossed over," said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and a SPUR board member from 2000 to 2004.

Metcalf doesn’t duck the issue. "If you’re a city planner, you’ve got to meditate deeply on urban renewal, even though you didn’t do it. It’s the only time in urban history that planners were given power, and that’s what they did with it," he said.

Besides a long friendship with powerful businesses, SPUR has frequently enjoyed an intimate relationship with city hall. "They morphed in the ’80s into a good-government, good-planning group, but in fact they were really tight with the [Dianne] Feinstein administration," Elberling said. "One of the ways you got to be a city commissioner was by being a member of SPUR. Feinstein’s planning and development club was SPUR."

Mayor Feinstein’s reign is often remembered as a boom in downtown development — at least until 1985, when San Franciscans for Reasonable Growth succeeded in passing Proposition M, a measure severely limiting annual high-rise development. SPUR opposed the measure and still supports increased height and density along transit corridors in the city.

"SPUR always goes with more," Radulovich said. "Sometimes there’s a trade-off between sustainability and growth, and I don’t have much confidence they won’t go with growth."

A March SPUR report, "Framing the Future of Downtown San Francisco," is one example of a cognizance of other options, weighing the pros and cons of expanding the central business district or transforming it into a "central social district": "While office uses remain, the goal of a CSD is to create a mixed-use, livable, 24-hour downtown neighborhood." Another line in the report offers a telling look at how SPUR thinks: "Economic growth in the CSD model may be diminished as the remaining sites for office buildings become used for new residential, retail, or other non-office uses."

Retail means, in fact, economic growth. A 1985 Guardian-commissioned study of small businesses in San Francisco, "The End of the High-Rise Jobs Myth," found that most of the new jobs created in the city between 1980 and 1984 were not in the downtown office high-rises but around them. Businesses with fewer than 99 employees had generated twice as many jobs as those with more employees.

While the numbers may be different today, the concept that neighborhood-serving retail keeps a local economy healthy has only grown stronger, as has public sentiment against chain stores. Yet SPUR opposed a proposition calling for conditional-use permits for formula retail, which voters approved in 2006.

Over the years SPUR’s political record has been checkered. Though the group talks the good-government talk, it opposed propositions establishing the city’s Ethics Commission and reforming the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. According to Charley Marsteller, a founder of Common Cause and a longtime good-government advocate in San Francisco, "Common Cause supported initiatives in 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2005. SPUR opposed all of them."

This November, SPUR came out in favor of Proposition C, which calls for public hearings before measures can be placed on the ballot, but opposed Question Time for the mayor. The group gave a yes to the wi-fi policy statement and approved establishing a small-business assistance center — contrary to past stances.

SPUR isn’t afraid to defend its positions. "Those who disagree with a conclusion SPUR reaches object to us presenting our ideas as objectively true rather than as values based," Metcalf notes in the May SPUR report "Civic Planning in America," in which he surveys other similar organizations.

"And in truth, evidence and research seldom point necessarily to one single policy outcome, except when viewed through the lens of values. We want to stop sprawl. We want housing to be more affordable. We want there to be prosperity that is widely shared…. Perhaps it’s time to grow more comfortable with using this language of values," he writes.

Paul, who’s now program director for the Haas Jr. Fund and has served on the SPUR board for seven years, says the group is indeed changing. "Over the last six to eight years I’ve noticed a real shift on the board," he said. "We have really intense and interesting discussions about issues. People feel they can speak their mind."

Okamoto, a partner in the Okamoto Saijo architectural firm, thinks this is the result of a fundamental shift in planning tactics, due to a more recent and deeper comprehension of the coming environmental crises. "Global climate change is moving things. I think SPUR’s going in the same direction," he said. Okamoto joined SPUR "because I’d like to see if I could influence the organization toward sustainability. Now we have a new funded staff position for that topic."

And yet the fact remains that only 5 of the 71 board members — about 7 percent — can be described as prominent progressives. At least half are directly connected to prominent downtown business interests.

And a list of SPUR’s donors is enough to give any progressive pause. Among the 12 biggest givers in 2006 are Lennar Corp., PG&E, Wells Fargo, Westfield/Forest City Development, Bechtel, Catellus, and Webcor.

In the past 10 years SPUR’s staff has doubled, signaling a subtle shift away from relying mainly on the research and work of board members. One of the newest positions is a transportation policy director, and that job has gone to Dave Snyder, who helped revive the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition in 1991, founded Livable City, and spent seven years on SPUR’s board before taking the job.

Having occupied the new post for a year, he said, "If I left, it wouldn’t be because I didn’t like SPUR. The debates we have at the staff level are more open than I expected."

Proposition A, the November transportation reform measure, is one example of the group’s new approach. The group voted a month earlier than usual to endorse a measure that was directly in opposition to the interests of one of its biggest funders, Gap billionaire Don Fisher (the Gap is also a member of SPUR). According to Walker, when the SPUR board vetted the endorsements the number of no votes for Prop. A was in the single digits. "I was so surprised," she said.

SPUR opposed Proposition H, a pro-parking countermeasure largely funded by Fisher, and worked with progressives on the campaign.

Metcalf noted it was the ground troops who made all the difference. "We don’t have [that kind of] power, and there are other groups that do. We wrote it, but we didn’t make it win. The bike coalition and [Service Employees International Union Local 1021] did," he said.

Sup. Aaron Peskin, who brokered much of the Prop. A deal, called it a sign of change for SPUR. "They probably lost a lot of their funders over this."

Radulovich is still dubious. He jumped ship after witnessing some disconnects between the board and its members. Though SPUR asks members to check their special interests at the door, Radulovich couldn’t say that always happened and recalled an example from an endorsement meeting at which a campaign consultant made an impassioned speech for the campaign on which he was working.

As far as his board membership was concerned, Radulovich said, "there were times I definitely felt like a token…. Development interests and wealthy people were much better represented."

Some say that isn’t about to change. "SPUR has been, is, and I guess always will be the rational front for developers," said Calvin Welch, a legendary San Francisco housing activist. "The members of SPUR are real estate lawyers, professional investors, and developers. Its original function was to be the Greek chorus for urban renewal and redevelopment."

Welch and Radulovich agree SPUR doesn’t represent San Franciscans, and Welch suggests the Dec. 4 Board of Supervisors hearing on an affordable-housing charter amendment was a case in point. "The people who got up to speak, I’d argue that’s San Francisco, and it doesn’t look a fucking thing like SPUR."

SPUR recently applied for a tax-exempt bond capped at $7 million from the California Municipal Finance Authority to help pay the cost of SPUR’s new Urban Center. It’s a standard loan for a nonprofit — SPUR is both a 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) — but some neighborhood activists raised questions about whether SPUR’s project is an appropriate expense for taxpayer cash.

"There’s no city money going toward the Urban Center, but by using tax-exempt bond financing they’re depriving the US Treasury of tax revenues," Salomon said. "The people who are funding SPUR can afford to buy them a really nice building, with cash."

The Urban Center also received a $231,000 federal earmark from Rep. Nancy Pelosi, whose nephew Laurence Pelosi is a former SPUR board member. Another $967,500 will come to SPUR from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment, which voters set aside through Proposition 40 to fund projects that "provide a thread of California’s cultural and historical resources."

Metcalf said SPUR isn’t sitting on a pile of cash: "We’re not that wealthy. We just don’t have that level of funding." The group’s endowment is small, and according to its 2006 annual report, revenues were $1.8 million, 90 percent of that from memberships and special events. The annual Silver Spur Awards, at which the group celebrates the work of local individuals, from Feinstein to Walter Shorenstein to Warren Hellman, is one of the biggest cash cows for SPUR, typically netting more than half a million dollars.

So far most of the funds for the Urban Center have come from donations raised from board members, individuals, businesses, and foundations. Metcalf defends the use of public funds. "For a group like SPUR that needs to be out in front on controversial issues, our work depends on having a diverse funding base. The Urban Center is part of that," he said.

The new headquarters is modeled on similar urban centers in Paris and New York, places that invite the public to view exhibits and get involved in answering some of the bigger planning questions cities are facing as populations increase and sprawl reigns. According to SPUR, this will be the first urban center west of Chicago, and the doors should open in 2009.

Walker, who’s been a board member for about a year, isn’t ready to say SPUR has been transformed. "It’s in my bones to be skeptical of SPUR," she said. "I have a different perspective than most of the people who are on SPUR, but the membership is different from the people who are funding it. I still think we need to have a more progressive policy think tank as well."

Walker recruits for SPUR’s membership development committee and said some of her suggestions have been well received. "The reality is, the progressive community is really powerful here when we come together and work on stuff. You can’t ignore us. Rather than fight about it, SPUR is offering some middle ground."

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I’ve been talking to the folks at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association about housing. It’s been an interesting conversation — SPUR has been known largely as an advocate for downtown development and rarely as a beacon of progressive wisdom.

But these days there are people on staff who really care about urban issues, and they aren’t always wrong. So when Dave Snyder, SPUR’s transportation person, who was formerly the director of the SF Bicycle Coalition, phoned and asked me to come by and discuss the Guardian‘s call for a new housing policy, I was happy to pay a visit.

And after talking to SPUR’s executive director, Gabriel Metcalf, and policy director, Sarah Karlinsky, I realized that we agree on a basic frame of reference.

San Francisco is in a state of crisis that threatens the future of the city. Housing isn’t just another policy issue to debate; it’s the central factor shaping the future of the city. If we do nothing — in fact, if we go along as we have been doing, building a few thousand units of market-rate housing and some affordable units on the side — we’re heading for disaster. This will become a city where only rich people can live, where a few working-class and poor folks are tolerated but the majority sentiment favors the very wealthy. It will be a city unlike the one so many of us love. The politics will be much more financially conservative. Social liberals like Gavin Newsom will be fine, but anyone who dares talk about business paying for health care or taxes supporting social programs will be irrelevant to electoral politics. As Calvin Welch likes to say, who lives here votes here.

The SPUR board has a lot of downtown types and developers, and some of them probably think it would be a fine thing if San Francisco became a city of wealthier homeowners. I don’t think the staff are of the same view. Snyder, Metcalf, Karlinsky, and I all agree: what’s happening now is simply unacceptable.

We part, sharply, when we talk about solutions. Metcalf argues that building lots and lots of housing, of all kinds — tens of thousands of units a year, bringing San Francisco to the density of Paris — will eventually bring down costs and make the city affordable again. And failing to build enough market-rate housing will just put more pressure on the existing housing stock, driving up prices even more.

That position requires a certain faith in marketbased solutions, and I’ve always argued that the economics of San Francisco housing are too unusual for traditional thinking. Luxury condos in this city are like jails and freeways: you build them, they fill up, and the problem you set out to solve is still there. The new housing downtown isn’t keeping down prices (or demand) in the neighborhoods; it’s creating its own new demand.

When I suggested that we stop building new housing for the rich until we have, say, 40,000 new units for low-income and middle-class San Franciscans, Snyder jotted down some figures and told me the price tag for that much affordable housing would be $8 billion. Actually, if some of the housing is put into land trusts and is available for purchase by middle-income people, that number drops a bit, and if you leverage state and federal money, the amount San Francisco has to raise drops again, maybe to $2 billion or so. Still, it’s a very big number.

And it’s a very big problem. And in one sense, if we don’t solve it, nothing else really matters.

Transit or traffic

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Click here for the Clean Slate: Our printout guide to the Nov. 6 election

› steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco is at a crossroads. The streets are congested, Muni has slowed to a crawl, greenhouse gas emissions are at all-time highs, and the towers of new housing now being built threaten to make all of these transportation-related problems worse.

The problems are complicated and defy simply sloganeering — but they aren’t unsolvable. In fact, there’s remarkable consensus in San Francisco about what needs to be done. The people with advanced degrees in transportation and city planning, the mayor and almost all of the supervisors, the labor and environmental movements, the urban planning organizations, the radical left and the mainstream Democrats — everyone without an ideological aversion to government is on the same page here.

The city planners and transportation experts, who have the full support of the grass roots on this issue, are pushing a wide range of solutions: administrative and technical changes to make Muni more efficient, innovative congestion management programs, high-tech meters that use market principles to free up needed parking spaces, creative incentives to discourage solo car trips, capital projects from new bike and rapid-transit lanes to the Central Subway and high-speed rail, and many more ideas.

In fact, the coming year promises a plethora of fresh transportation initiatives. The long-awaited Transit Effectiveness Project recommendations come out in early 2008, followed by those from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority’s Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (an unprecedented, federally funded effort to reduce congestion here and in four other big cities), an end to the court injunction against new bicycle projects, and a November bond measure that would fund high-speed rail service between downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles.

But first, San Franciscans have to get past a few downtown developers and power brokers who have a simplistic, populist-sounding campaign that could totally undermine smart transportation planning.

On Nov. 6, San Franciscans will vote on propositions A and H, two competing transportation measures that could greatly help or hinder the quest for smart solutions to the current problems. Prop. A would give more money and authority to the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency while demanding it improve Muni and meet climate change goals.

Prop. H, which was placed on the ballot by a few powerful Republicans, most notably Gap founder Don Fisher (who has contributed $180,000 to the Yes on H campaign), would invalidate current city policies to allow essentially unrestricted construction of new parking lots.

New parking turns into more cars, more cars create congestion, congestion slows down bus service, slow buses frustrate riders, who get back into their cars — and the cycle continues. It’s transit against traffic, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

"If we are serious about doing something about global warming, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: people are going to have to drive less and take transit more" was how the issue was framed in a recent editorial cowritten by Sup. Sean Elsbernd, arguably the board’s most conservative member, and Sup. Aaron Peskin, who wrote Prop. A.

Peskin says Prop. H, which Prop. A would invalidate, is the most damaging and regressive initiative he’s seen in his political life. But the battle for hearts and minds won’t be easy, because the downtown forces are taking a viscerally popular approach and running against city hall.

The San Francisco Examiner endorsed Prop. H on Oct. 22, framing the conflict as between the common sense of "your friends and neighbors" and "a social-engineering philosophy driven by an anti-car and anti-business Board of Supervisors." If the Examiner editorialists were being honest, they probably also should have mentioned Mayor Gavin Newsom, who joins the board majority (and every local environmental and urban-planning group) in supporting Prop. A and opposing Prop. H.

The editorial excoriates "most city politicians and planners" for believing the numerous studies that conclude that people who have their own parking spots are more likely to drive and that more parking generally creates more traffic. The Planning Department, for example, estimates Prop. H "could lead to an increase over the next 20 years of up to approximately 8,200–19,000 additional commute cars (mostly at peak hours) over the baseline existing controls."

"Many, many actual residents disagree, believing that — no matter what the social engineers at City Hall tell you — adding more parking spaces would make The City a far more livable place," the Examiner wrote.

That’s why environmentalists and smart-growth advocates say Prop. H is so insidious. It was written to appeal, in a very simplistic way, to people’s real and understandable frustration over finding a parking spot. But the solution it proffers would make all forms of transportation — driving, walking, transit, and bicycling — remarkably less efficient, as even the Examiner has recognized.

You see, the Examiner was opposed to Prop. H just a couple of months ago, a position the paper recently reversed without really explaining why, except to justify it with reactionary rhetoric such as "Let the politicians know you’re tired of being told you’re a second-class citizen if you drive a car in San Francisco."

Examiner executive editor Jim Pimentel denies the flip-flop was a favor that the Republican billionaire who owns the Examiner, Phil Anschutz, paid to the Republican billionaire who is funding Prop. H, Fisher. "We reserve the right to change on positions," Pimentel told me.

Yet it’s worth considering what the Examiner originally wrote in an Aug. 2 editorial, where it acknowledged people’s desire for more parking but took into account what the measure would do to downtown San Francisco.

The paper wrote, "Closer examination reveals this well-intentioned parking measure as a veritable minefield of unintended consequences. It could actually take away parking, harm business, reduce new housing and drive out neighborhood retail. By now, Californians should be wary of unexpected mischief unleashed from propositions that legislate by direct referendum. Like all propositions, Parking For Neighborhoods was entirely written by its backers. As such, it was never vetted by public feedback or legislative debate. If the initiative organizers had faced harder questioning, they might have recognized that merely adding parking to a fast-growing downtown is likely to make already-bad traffic congestion dramatically worse."

The San Francisco Transportation Authority’s Oct. 17 public workshop, which launched the San Francisco Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study, had nothing to do with Props. A and H — at least not directly. But the sobering situation the workshop laid out certainly supports the assessment that drawing more cars downtown "is likely to make already-bad traffic congestion dramatically worse."

City planners and consultants from PBS&J offered some statistics from their initial studies:

San Francisco has the second-most congested downtown in the country, according to traffic analysts and surveys of locals and tourists, about 90 percent of whom say the congestion is unacceptably bad compared to that of other cities.

Traffic congestion cost the San Francisco economy $2.3 billion in 2005 through slowed commerce, commuter delays, wasted fuel, and environmental impacts.

The length of car trips is roughly doubled by traffic congestion — and getting longer every year — exacerbating the fact that 47 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions come from private cars. Census data also show that more San Franciscans get to work by driving alone in their cars than by any other mode.

Traffic has also steadily slowed Muni, which often shares space with cars, to an average of 8 mph, making it the slowest transit service in the country. Buses now take about twice as long as cars to make the same trip, which discourages their use.

"We want to figure out ways to get people in a more efficient mode of transportation," Zabe Bent, a senior planner with the TA, told the crowd. She added, "We want to make sure congestion is not hindering our growth."

The group is now studying the problem and plans to reveal its preliminary results next spring and recommendations by summer 2008. Among the many tools being contemplated are fees for driving downtown or into other congested parts of the city (similar to programs in London, Rome, and Stockholm, Sweden) and high-tech tools for managing parking (such as the determination of variable rates based on real-time demand, more efficient direction to available spots, and easy ways to feed the meter remotely).

"As a way to manage the scarce resource of parking, we would use pricing as a tool," said Tilly Chang, also a senior planner with the TA, noting that high prices can encourage more turnover at times when demand is high.

Yet there was a visceral backlash at the workshop to such scientifically based plans, which conservatives deride as social engineering. "I don’t understand why we need to spend so much money creating a bureaucracy," one scowling attendee around retirement age said. There were some murmurs of support in the crowd.

Rob Black, the government affairs director for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which is the most significant entity to oppose Prop. A and support Prop. H, was quietly watching the proceedings. I asked what he and the chamber thought of the study and its goals.

"We have mixed feelings, and we don’t know what’s going to happen," Black, who ran unsuccessfully against Sup. Chris Daly last year, told me. "The devil is in the details."

But others don’t even want to wait for the details. Alex Belenson, an advertising consultant and Richmond District resident who primarily uses his car to get around town, chastised the planners for overcomplicating what he sees as a "simple" problem.

Vocally and in a four-page memo he handed out, Belenson blamed congestion on the lack of parking spaces, the city’s transit-first policy, and the failure to build more freeways in the city. Strangely, he supports his point with facts that include "Total commuters into, out of, and within San Francisco have only increased by 206,000 since 1960 — more than 145,000 on public transit."

Some might see those figures, derived from census data, as supporting the need for creative congestion management solutions and the expansion of transit and other alternative transportation options. But Belenson simply sees the need for 60,000 new parking spaces.

As he told the gathering, "If someone wants to build a parking lot and the market will support it, they should be able to."

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) is generally allied with the downtown business community on most issues, but not Props. A and H, which SPUR says could be unmitigated disasters for San Francisco.

"SPUR is a pro-growth organization, and we want a healthy economy. And we think the only way to be pro-business and pro-growth in San Francisco is to be transit reliant instead of car reliant," SPUR executive director Gabriel Metcalf told me in an interview in his downtown office.

He agreed with Belenson that the free market will provide lots of new parking if it’s allowed to do so, particularly because the regulatory restrictions on parking have artificially inflated its value. "But the negative externalities are very large," Metcalf said, employing the language of market economics.

In other words, the costs of all of that new parking won’t be borne just by the developers and the drivers but by all of the people affected by climate change, air pollution, congested commerce, oil wars, slow public transit, and the myriad other hidden by-products of the car culture that we are just now starting to understand fully.

Yet Metcalf doesn’t focus on that broad critique as much as on the simple reality that SPUR knows all too well: downtown San Francisco was designed for transit, not cars, to be the primary mode of transportation.

"Downtown San Francisco is one of the great planning success stories in America," Metcalf said. "But trips to downtown San Francisco can’t use mostly single-occupant vehicles. We could never have had this level of employment or real estate values if we had relied on car-oriented modes for downtown."

Metcalf and other local urban planners tell stories of how San Francisco long ago broke with the country’s dominant post–World War II development patterns, starting with citizen revolts against freeway plans in the 1950s and picking up stream with the environmental and social justice movements of the 1960s, the arrival of BART downtown in 1973, the official declaration of a transit-first policy in the ’80s, and the votes to dismantle the Central and Embarcadero freeways.

"We really led the way for how a modern dynamic city can grow in a way that is sustainable. And that decision has served us well for 30 years," Metcalf said.

Tom Radulovich, a longtime BART board member who serves as director of the nonprofit group Livable City, said San Franciscans now must choose whether they want to plan for growth like Copenhagen, Denmark, Paris, and Portland, Ore., or go with auto-dependent models, like Houston, Atlanta, and San Jose.

"Do we want transit or traffic? That’s really the choice. We have made progress as a city over the last 30 years, particularly with regard to how downtown develops," Radulovich said. "Can downtown and the neighborhoods coexist? Yes, but we need to grow jobs in ways that don’t increase traffic."

City officials acknowledge that some new parking may be needed.

"There may be places where it’s OK to add parking in San Francisco, but we have to be smart about it. We have to make sure it’s in places where it doesn’t create a breakdown in the system. We have to make sure it’s priced correctly, and we have to make sure it doesn’t destroy Muni’s ability to operate," Metcalf said. "The problem with Prop. H is it essentially decontrols parking everywhere. It prevents a smart approach to parking."

Yet the difficulty right now is in conveying such complexities against the "bureaucracy bad" argument against Prop. A and the "parking good" argument for Prop. H.

"We are trying to make complex arguments, and our opponents are making simple arguments, which makes it hard for us to win in a sound-bite culture," Radulovich said.

"Prop. H preys on people’s experience of trying to find a parking space," Metcalf said. "The problem is cities are complex, and this measure completely misunderstands what it takes to be a successful city."

When MTA director Nathaniel Ford arrived in San Francisco from Atlanta two years ago, he said, "it was clear as soon as I walked in the door that there was an underinvestment in the public transit system."

Prop. A would help that by directing more city funds to the MTA, starting with about $26 million per year. "I don’t want to say the situation is dire, but it’s certainly not going to get better without some infusion of cash to get us over the hump," Ford told the Guardian recently from his office above the intersection of Market and Van Ness.

The proposed extra money would barely get this long-underfunded agency up to modern standards, such as the use of a computer routing system. "We actually have circuit boards with a guy in a room with a soldering iron keeping it all together," Ford said with an incredulous smile.

The other thing that struck Ford when he arrived was the cumbersomeness of the MTA’s bureaucracy, from stifling union work rules to Byzantine processes for seemingly simple actions like accepting a grant, which requires action by the Board of Supervisors.

"Coming from an independent authority, I realized there were a lot more steps and procedures to getting anything done [at the MTA]," he said. "Some of the things in Prop. A relax those steps and procedures."

If it passes, Ford would be able to set work rules to maximize the efficiency of his employees, update the outdated transit infrastructure, set fees and fines to encourage the right mix of transportation modes, and issue bonds for new capital projects when the system reaches its limits. These are all things the urban planners say have to happen. "It should be easy to provide great urban transit," Metcalf said. "We’re not Tracy. We’re not Fremont. We’re San Francisco, and we should be able to do this."

Unfortunately, there are political barriers to such a reasonable approach to improving public transit. And the biggest hurdles for those who want better transit are getting Prop. A approved and defeating Prop. H.

"It’s clear to people who have worked on environmental issues that this is a monumental election," said Leah Shahum, director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and an MTA board member. "San Francisco will choose one road or the other in terms of how our transportation system affects the environment. It will really be transit or traffic."

Shahum said the combination of denying the MTA the ability to improve transit and giving out huge new parking entitlements "will start a downward spiral for our transit system that nobody benefits from."

"We are already the slowest-operating system in the country," Ford said, later adding, "More cars on the streets of San Francisco will definitely have a negative impact on Muni."

But even those who believe in putting transit first know cars will still be a big part of the transportation mix.

"All of it needs to be properly managed. There are people who need to drive cars for legitimate reasons," Ford said. "If you do need to drive, you need to know there are costs to that driving. There is congestion. There are quality impacts, climate change, and it hurts transit."

"There are parking needs out there, and the city is starting to think of it in a more responsive way. We don’t need this to create more parking," Shahum said. "If folks can hold out and beat down this initiative, I do think we’re headed in the right direction."

Yet the Yes on A–No on H campaign is worried. Early polling showed a close race on Prop. A and a solid lead for Prop. H.

Fisher and the groups that are pushing Prop. H — the Council of District Merchants, the SF Chamber of Commerce, and the San Francisco Republican Party — chose what they knew would be a low-turnout election and are hoping that drivers’ desires for more parking will beat out more complicated arguments.

"The vast majority of San Franciscans call themselves environmentalists, and they want a better transit system," Shahum said, noting that such positions should cause them to support Prop. A and reject Prop. H. "But they’re at risk of being tricked by a Republican billionaire’s initiative with an attractive name…. Even folks that are well educated and paying attention could be tricked by this."

For Metcalf and the folks at SPUR, who helped write Prop. A, this election wasn’t supposed to be an epic battle between smart growth and car culture.

"For us, in a way, Prop. A is the more important measure," Metcalf said. "We want to focus on making Muni better instead of fighting about parking. We didn’t plan it this way, but the way it worked out, San Francisco is at a fork in the road. We can reinforce our transit-oriented urbanity or we can create a mainly car-dependent city that will look more like the rest of America."

Airlines demand corporate welfare

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The major airlines that serve the Bay Area, with the help of the Hotel Council of San Francisco, are trying to get out of paying millions of dollars in taxes to the city by claiming the right to use a law that was designed to help San Francisco’s poorest residents. And they’re threatening to prevent their employees from staying in the city if the Board of Supervisors doesn’t acquiesce to the corporate welfare demand.

At issue is the city’s 14 percent Transient Occupancy Tax, which is paid by hotel guests. It is the third-largest source of local tax revenue, after property taxes and payroll taxes, bringing in $177 million in the last fiscal year. The only major exemption from the tax is for permanent hotel residents, generally those on the brink of homelessness who live in the run-down single-room-occupancy hotels for months or even years on end.

Major airlines house hundreds of their employees in San Francisco’s hotels each night. They are arguing that because of past court rulings on corporate personhood — in which judges have deemed that corporations have the same rights as individuals — the airlines should be exempt from paying the tax when they rent blocks of rooms for their employees.

The airlines, in collusion with some hotels in the city, have long used the exemption to avoid paying taxes on many of the rooms they rent (about two-thirds, according to the Hotel Council, which translates into millions in lost city revenue every year). A few years ago city officials told the corporations that the exemption didn’t apply to them and that they should be paying the tax.

Enacted in 1960, the Permanent Resident Exclusion exempts from the tax individuals who occupy or have the right to occupy the same hotel room for at least 30 consecutive days. “We looked at the legislative history, and it was clearly put there to help formerly homeless people,” Treasurer José Cisneros told the Guardian. “The city has always said that 30 consecutive one-night stays are not the same as a 30-night stay by an individual.”

The hotels and airlines challenged that interpretation and had their case thrown out of court. So now they’ve turned to the Board of Supervisors in the hope that they can win this chunk of corporate welfare by using threats of an economic exodus.

 

CORPORATE SHAKEDOWN

In October 2004, American Airlines and the San Francisco Hilton filed a lawsuit against the city arguing that airline crew members staying in San Francisco hotels qualified for an exemption from the hotel tax. The lawsuit was dismissed in May 2006 without going to trial, with Superior Court Judge James Warren ruling that the plaintiffs “did not assert and did not present any evidence that any particular room at the Hilton was continuously registered to American Airlines for more than 30 days.”

To clarify any ambiguity in the law, Cisneros in May issued an interpretation stating, “Although an agreement between a person and a hotel may require that the person pay the hotel for a minimum number of ‘guaranteed’ daily reservations for the person’s employees over a period of time longer than 30 days, such an agreement does not create any permanent resident exemption for any guest rooms unless the above criteria are satisfied,” referring to criteria that include “a person is a registered hotel guest” and “that person or any of that person’s employees continuously occupy or have the right to occupy the same room for 30 days or more.”

Yet now, at the request of Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, the Board of Supervisors’ Government Oversight and Auditing Committee has scheduled a Nov. 19 hearing for the purpose of “explor[ing] the unintended consequences of this decision, including the loss of revenue to the City when the airlines inevitably move their crews to another location in the Bay Area where room rates are more competitive.”

That implied threat comes from Hotel Council executive director Patricia Breslin, who paints a doomsday scenario if the airlines have to pay the hotel tax on every room they rent. Breslin warns that if the Board of Supervisors does not offer concessions to the airline industry, it could bring about an “economic tsunami” that would hit hotels, restaurants, and city government.

Airline employees occupy an average of 1,050 hotel rooms per night in San Francisco, according to Smith Travel Research, an information and data provider for the lodging industry. Given that the tax is collected by the hotels, Cisneros doesn’t have data on how much the airlines should be paying the city. But assuming the airlines negotiate rates of about $100 per night, that would translate into more than $5 million per year.

“We pushed so hard to get them to pay it that they sued us,” Cisneros told us.

Breslin said the airlines have been paying about $1.7 million per year in hotel taxes and that sales taxes generated by airline employees bring another $1.4 million into the city, all money that would be lost if the airlines go elsewhere. She said the airlines have threatened to begin putting their employees in hotels in Peninsula cities near the airport, like Burlingame, San Mateo, and even San Jose, to cut costs. Already Mexicana Airlines has stopped using San Francisco’s hotels for its employees. Other airlines, such as Virgin Atlantic, United, Cathay Pacific, and Lufthansa, have threatened to follow suit.

Breslin said hotels would be forced to lay off cleaners, servers, and other low-income workers due to the loss of business that would accompany the exodus of airline employees. San Francisco, she argues, would “lose a significant revenue stream” if the airlines lose their appeal.

“It will change the economics of San Francisco,” she told us. “This is not a frivolous issue.”

 

CALLING THEIR BLUFF

Granting the exemption would cost the city millions of dollars, but that isn’t the only reason being offered for opposing the gambit. Some city officials simply don’t believe the airlines — or their employees, most of whom are union members, many of whom have contracts specifying their accommodations be in urban centers — will abandon San Francisco.

Sup. Chris Daly, who is on the Oversight and Auditing Committee, is against granting the exemption to the airlines. “They blow smoke all the time,” he told us, referring to major industries such as the hotel and airline industries. “That’s how they get away with not paying taxes.”

Cisneros argues the airlines’ threat to move their employees into suburban hotels isn’t logical, noting that San Francisco hotel rooms are already far more expensive than their suburban counterparts — with or without the hotel tax — and the airlines have always chosen to keep their employees here anyway.

“I just don’t think the threat is realistic at all,” Cisneros said. “If they were basing their decision on which hotels are cheapest, they would have never been staying in San Francisco.”

Recently compiled data and trends in tourism and hotel occupancy rates also suggest that Breslin’s warning of a crippling economic backlash are unfounded. According to an August article in the San Francisco Business Times by Ryan Tate, “Next year promises to be by far the most robust for leisure and business travel in San Francisco since the dot-com boom.”

He continues, “Convention business will reach more than 900,000 hotel rooms in 2008, well above the 740,000 room nights booked by conventions in 2007.” The San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau forecasts that overall tourism will top 16 million visitors next year and that visitor spending will exceed last year’s record $7.8 billion.

The taxes the city collects from hotels go toward funding a wide range of public services. Some of the money is earmarked for the Convention and Visitors Bureau and for maintaining convention facilities. Some funds are allocated for low-income housing and rent supplements. The War Memorial Department, the Asian Art Museum, and the Arts Commission all receive funding through the hotel tax as well, with excess dollars poured into the city’s General Fund.

San Francisco’s tourism industry is the city’s largest industry and its second-largest employer, after the city and county government. “You want to make sure your number one industry is protected,” Breslin told us.

Yet the policy that she’s asking the city to enact runs counter to the policies in other major cities, including those thought to be less politically progressive than San Francisco. In Los Angeles, for example, only individuals can be granted exemptions from paying the hotel tax. In Chicago the exemption is even stricter and only applies to people who use hotel rooms as their domicile.

Private perils: Elliott Sclar

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Elliott Sclar, economics professor at Columbia University and the author of You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization is one of the nation’s leading experts on the consequences of turning public-sector programs over to private businesses and nonprofits. In an extensive interview with Amanda Witherell, he discusses the central theme of our our anniversary issue.


41st Anniversary Special: The perils of privatization

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Click here for Amanda Witherell’s exclusive interview with Columbia professor Elliott Sclar

› amanda@sfbg.com

Over the past few weeks almost every major news outlet in the country has reported on Blackwater, a private company the US government hired to do work in Iraq that was once the exclusive province of soldiers.

The deal hasn’t gone so well: on Sept. 16, Blackwater guards opened fire and, according to the Iraqi government, shot 25 civilians. The incident set off an international furor and has brought into focus the breadth of the company’s work for the US government. It’s prompted an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which showed that since 2001, Blackwater’s federal contracts have increased 80,000 percent. It’s revealed the massive pay inequalities between private security guards and US soldiers — the cost of one private guard could pay the salaries of six soldiers.

And it’s raised a question that’s critical to understanding how government increasingly works in the United States: should a private company be doing the work of the military?

Privatization of public services is all the rage in this country now, at all levels of government, from Washington DC to San Francisco. Supporters say the private sector can often work better and more efficiently than the old, bureaucratic, much-maligned government.

But Blackwater is a great example of the perils of privatization. And there are many more.

STARVE THE BEAST


Over the past few decades governments at all levels in this country have been in a near-perpetual state of deficit. Taxes are way down from their historic post–World War II levels, and except for a brief period during the tech boom, there is rarely enough money for even basic social services.

"It’s been a strategy since the ’70s to, as Grover Norquist calls it, ‘starve the beast,’<0x2009>" Robert Haaland, an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 1021, told us.

And because politicians, even Democrats, are terrified of tax hikes, they’ve been looking for more efficient ways to use the money they have. The magic bullet goes by many names — privatization, public-private partnerships, competitive outsourcing, creative financing solutions — but the basic idea is to allow the power of competition, set free in an unregulated market, to provide the public with the best services at the lowest cost.

"To do or to buy is the question that all governments face," says Ken Jacobs, director of UC Berkeley’s Labor Center.

We’ve been buying. Since 2000, outsourcing of federal dollars has increased 100 percent, to $422 billion in taxpayer funds in 2006, according to a September study by the Washington DC US Public Interest Research Group. The US government is now the private sector’s largest customer.

San Francisco may be known as one of the most progressive cities in the country, but this town has also been wooed by public-private partnerships with promises of improvements to the golf courses, construction of a new power plant, and funding for the many civic needs we have.

PRIVATIZE MUNI?


Cheerleaders for privatization look at someone like Nathaniel Ford, executive director of San Francisco’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, and see everything that’s wrong with the public sector. Ford’s salary is nearly $300,000, plenty high enough to attract a talented leader. But the Muni system he runs keeps the average San Franciscan waiting on the corner in the morning, delivers that person to work at an unpredictable hour, and lurches them homeward every night aboard a standing-room-only bus. Nobody thinks Muni is performing well.

That makes the case for privatization seem almost appealing.

"The public has been schooled to think that government is the problem, not the solution," Elliott Sclar, professor of economics at Columbia University, told us. In his 2000 book on privatization, You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization (Cornell University), he writes, "American folk wisdom holds that, by and large, public service is uncaring, unbending, bureaucratic, and expensive, whereas competitively supplied private services such as FedEx are efficient and responsive."

Competition, the privatizers say, drives innovation. Less red tape means more efficiency. A lack of unions and collective bargaining agreements translates to lower labor costs. Large-scale multinational operations can reduce redundancy and streamline their processes — all of which adds up to a lean-running machine.

But this country has a lot of experience with privatization, and the record isn’t good.

One hundred years ago private companies did a lot of what we now call government work. "Contracting out was the way American cities carried out their governmental business ever since they grew beyond their small village beginnings," writes Moshe Adler, a Columbia professor of economics, in his 1999 paper The Origins of Governmental Production: Cleaning the Streets of New York by Contract During the 19th Century. At one time private companies provided firefighting, trash collection, and water supplies, to name just a few essential services.

But according to Adler, "By the end of the 19th century contracting out was a mature system that was already as good as it could possibly be. And it was precisely then that governmental production came to America. The realization that every possible improvement to contracting out had been tried led city after city to declare its failure."

For example, the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires in San Francisco were what prodded the city to municipalize water service after the company charged with the task, Spring Valley Water, failed to deliver while the fires raged.

In Philadelphia as well as San Francisco, the business of firefighting was once very lucrative — for both the firefighting companies and the arsonists who were paid to set fires for the former to fight. And corruption was rampant. "Large amounts of public contracting out historically created lots of opportunities for fraud and nepotism," Jacobs said.

So public agencies stepped in to provide basic services as cheaply and uniformly as possible. Towns and cities took on the tasks of security with police and firefighting, education with schools and libraries, and sanitation with trash collection and wastewater treatment. Nationally, the federal government improved roads and transit, enacted Social Security benefits, and established a National Park System, among many other things.

And then, about 30 years ago, the pendulum started to swing the other way. Driven by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, enacted in a massive policy shift by Ronald Reagan, proliferated by Grover Norquist and the neocon agenda, and fully appreciated by corporations and private companies, privatization came back.

In Reagan’s first term, he cut taxes 25 percent overall; the rich got a 40 percent cut. Domestic spending fell by half a trillion dollars in the 1980s, although any savings were countered by a rise in the defense budget.

Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, quoted in Looking Back on the Reagan Presidency (Johns Hopkins University), put it this way: "The Reagan budgets will influence the government for the rest of this century. Just as the Great Society left an imprint of Federal commitment to help the indigent and equality of opportunity, the Reagan budget deficits will leave an imprint of non-involvement."

Such a massive realignment of money coupled with tax breaks too politically painful to reinstate led to a boom in the outsourcing of public services. Private companies began doing more municipal work, while nonprofit organizations tried to fill the gaps in funding for social services, welfare, housing, health care, and the environment.

The George W. Bush era has seen even more overt outsourcing. These days no-bid contracts are preferred, and at times government services are completely turned over to the private sector in "direct conversions," and the public agency that once did the job is not allowed to compete to keep it. The Washington Post recently reported that no-bid government contracts have tripled in the past six years.

This doesn’t really sound like the competitive free market espoused by the theory of privatization.

FLUNKING THE TEST


To field-test the primacy of privatization, the Reagan administration sponsored a transportation experiment in the early ’80s: Miami’s Metro-Dade Transit Agency got to compete against Greyhound. The two providers were each given five comparable transit routes to manage over three years, and 80 new buses were bought with a $7.5 million grant from the federal government.

After 18 months 30 of the Greyhound buses were so badly damaged that they had to be permanently pulled from service. Passenger complaints on the Greyhound line were up 100 percent, and ridership was down 31 percent over the course of a year.

Why? There was no incentive in Greyhound’s contract to maintain the equipment or retain riders. The company’s only goal was to deliver the cheapest service possible.

The Miami transit contract could have contained clauses calling for regular inspections or guaranteed ridership, but that would have significantly increased the cost of the work — perhaps to the point where it would have been competitive with what the city provided.

That’s an important lesson in privatization politics: when you add the cost of adequately protecting the public’s interest and monitoring contract compliance, the private sector doesn’t look so efficient.

Which is why many say privatization only succeeds as a theory — and why, for all the problems with Muni, no private company is likely to be able to do a better job.

"Market fundamentalists present an idealized, simpleminded notion of competitive markets in which buyers and sellers have equal knowledge," Sclar told us. "Anyone can be a buyer, anyone can be a seller, everyone can evaluate the quality of the good. In this never-never land, that’s often the way the case is made for privatization by this particular group of economists."

In the real world a number of issues arise when a service goes private. "Accountability gets to be a really big problem," Ellen Dannin, professor of law at Penn State University, said in an interview. "There are predictions about how much money will get saved through privatization, but no one ever goes back to check."

The September study by the US Public Interest Research Group profiled several companies that do government work, including Bank of America, LexisNexis, ChoicePoint, KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown, and Root), General Electric, and Raytheon, and found instances of illegal behavior in all cases. There were often massive errors in the companies’ work.

Bank of America and LexisNexis had security breaches compromising the data of at least 1.5 million customers they were handling for the government. ChoicePoint allowed identity-theft scams amounting to more than $1 million in fraud. KBR overcharged the government millions of dollars for work in Iraq and Kuwait. GE made defective helicopter blades for the US military. Raytheon failed to fully test the systems of new aircraft. These companies are all still employed by the government.

When companies take over services that aren’t typically part of a competitive market, all sorts of unexpected problems occur. Jacobs points to the rash of contracting for busing services in cash-strapped school districts. Not only did costs eventually rise in many places, but when schools tried to go back to providing their own service, the skilled drivers who knew the routes, knew the kids, and were able to do much more than drive a bus were gone.

Sclar and Dannin agree that any service that lacks competition should be public. Sclar presented the example of electricity. "It’s a natural monopoly," he said. "Essentially it’s either going to be a well-regulated industry or it’s got to be done publicly."

Corporations exist to make money. And although graft, mismanagement, and scandal have always been present in City Halls around the country, in the end the legislative, judicial, and executive branches were not designed to generate profits. That alone means contracting out is financially dubious.

Hiring mercenaries is a classic example. "It costs the US government a lot more to hire contract employees as security guards in Iraq than to use American troops," Walter Pincus wrote in an Oct. 1 article in the Washington Post. "It comes down to the simple business equation of every transaction requiring a profit."

As Pincus details one of the many contracts between the security firm and the US, "Blackwater was a subcontractor to Regency, which was a subcontractor to another company, ESS, which was a subcontractor to Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary, the prime contractor for the Pentagon — and each company along the way was in the business to make a profit."

Blackwater charged Regency between $815 and $1,075 per day per security operative. Regency turned around and charged ESS a slightly higher average of $1,100. After that, the costs dissolve into the enormous bill that KBR regularly hands the federal government.

When the US Army is paying the bill the costs are far lower. An unmarried sergeant earns less than $100 a day. If you’re married, it’s less than $200. If you’re Gen. David H. Petraeus, it’s about $500 — less than Blackwater’s lowest-paid workers.

Very little about the Blackwater contracts would be known by anyone outside the company if it weren’t for the federal investigation, since private businesses are not subject to the same public-records laws as the federal government. They don’t have to open their books or publicize the details of their bids and contracts, and they often fiercely lobby against any regulations requiring this, which leaves the door wide open for corruption — which is what brought sunshine laws to government in the first place.

Sclar said that when it’s a good call to contract out, corporations, private companies, and nonprofits should be required to abide by public-records laws in addition to adhering to a five-year wait for employees departing the public sector for the private. "I think transparency should always be the goal," he said. "As much information as possible." If a company doesn’t want to make its records public, he told us, "[it shouldn’t] go after public work."

THE AIDS LESSON


Privatization comes in many forms and emerges for what often seem like good reasons.

In the early 1980s gay men in San Francisco were starting to get sick and die in large numbers — and the federal government didn’t care. There was no government agency addressing the AIDS crisis and almost no government funding. So the community came together and created a network of nonprofits that funded services, education, and research.

"The AIDS Foundation was founded in response to the epidemic at a time when there wasn’t a response from the federal government," Jeff Sheehy of the AIDS Research Center at UC San Francisco told us.

At first, activists all over the country praised the San Francisco model of AIDS services. Over time the nonprofits began to get government grants and contracts. But by the 1990s some realized that the nonprofit network was utterly lacking in public accountability. The same activists who had helped create the network had to struggle to get the organizations to hold public meetings, make records public, and answer community concerns.

That, Sheehy said, shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

"There isn’t that same degree of accountability that you would have" with the public sector, he told us. "SF General is not going to turn you away at the emergency room, but nonprofit hospitals are less and less interested in running ERs."

Sheehy said he’s seen cases where difficult clients have been banned from accessing help from nonprofits. Unlike at public institutions, "the burden is not on the agency to provide the service. It is with the client to get along with the agency," he said.

Sheehy outlines other issues: nonprofits run lean and are more apt to make cuts and resist unionization, which means workers are often paid less, there can be higher turnover, and upper management is often tasked with fundraising and grant writing and distanced from the fundamental work of the group. There’s no access to records or board meetings. "If service takes a sudden downward shift, what can you do?" Sheehy asks. "You can’t go to board meetings. You can’t access records. What’s your redress?"

And that perpetuates the problem of government not stepping up to the plate. More than half of the social services in San Francisco are run by nonprofits, a trend that isn’t abating.

"When the services are shifted from the public sector to the nonprofit sector," Sheehy said, "that capacity is lost forever from government."

THE LOTTERY TICKET


When Dannin teaches her students about privatization, she uses the analogy of personal finance. "If I find my income does not meet my expenses, I can cut my expenses, but there are certain things I have to have," she said. To meet those needs a person can get a second job. In the case of the government, it can raise taxes.

But "that is not an option governments see anymore," she told us. "So the third option is to buy a lottery ticket — and that’s what privatization is."

When a publicly owned road is leased for 99 years to a private company, the politician who cut the deal gets a huge chunk of cash up front to balance the local budget or meet another need. When the new owner of the road puts in a tollbooth to recoup costs, that’s the tax the politician, who may be long gone, refused to impose. What option does the voting driver have now?

Public goods, from which everyone presumably benefits, are frequently and easily falling out of the hands of government and into the hands of profit-driven companies. In New Orleans, charter schools have replaced all but four public schools. In about 15 municipalities public libraries are now managed by the privately owned Library Systems and Services. (In Jackson County, Ore., it’s being done for half the cost, but with half the staff and open half the hours.) At least 21 states are considering public-private partnerships to finance massive improvements to aging roads and bridges. User fees have increased in the national parks as rangers have been laid off and some of the work of park interpretation is picked up by private companies, as is the case with Alcatraz Island.

Dannin also asks her students to consider who really owns a job. The easy answer is the employer. "But there is another claimant of ownership of that job," she says. "That is the public. Employers depend on roads for their employees to drive to work, a public education system to train their workers. They depend on housing, police, the court system, the system of laws. That is a huge amount of infrastructure we tend not to think about.

"We live within an ecosystem. We’re having a hard time seeing that ecosystem, that infrastructure that we’re all in. That’s what your taxes pay for."

Robert Reich speaks up: “Supercapitalism”

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reich.jpg

Tim Redmond recently reviewed former labor secretary Robert Reich’s new book Supercapitalism — below, he talks to Reich about economics, industry, and the pervasive creep of new capitalism’s moral degradations.


SFist thinks we’re commies

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So the folks at SFist have decided that we’re all commies over here because we think it’s okay to tax the rich and provide services for the homeless.

I thought we were all too intelligent in these circles to resort to stupid quips about the “proletariat,” and I’ve posted a response on SFist. But since I’ve had to have this fight since I was an economics major at Wesleyan way back in the dark ages, I have to make a point here:

The Soviet Union as we knew it in the post-War era was not built by Karl Marx. There were some guys named Lenin and Stalin who built a political system in the name of his economic theories. Neither of them had much use for democracy or freedom. One of them was a savage butcher.

That said, you have to admit that Marx was, and remains, one of the most important economists of the modern era. You can’t understand capitalism just by reading Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. The critique of capital that Marx put forward was brilliant; I never fully understood the role of labor in productivity and the way labor-price theory actually works until I studied Marx. So yeah, he should be on the reading list of anyone who wants to talk intelligently about economics.

I would add Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism to Steve’s reading list, too; I did an interview with him last week which will be posted on sfbg.com shortly.

The theory of money — how it’s created, what it is, how it effects the economy — is that stuff of dozens of textbooks and a thousand doctoral theses. But the bottom line is, money today is not a direct measure of labor productivity; it’s a far more artifical construct, as Steve points out. Money is created by the federal reserve and by private banks. At times, the government in effect prints more money at the mint to inject it into the economy. In practice, money — the dollar — is an internationally traded commodity, and the money supply in the United States is desperately hard to even track,much less manage or control.

Yes, taxes come from labor. But these days, a sane system would tax investment income and speculative income much higher than what we typically think of as labor. And a lot of the economy today is built on investment income and speculation that has nothing to do with productive labor.

Yeah, it’s all more complicated than that, but folks: If you can’t understand that money doesn’t directly equal labor, and that you can use Marx’s economic analysis without being a commie .. geez. I thought people in San Francisco were smarter than that.

How wifi might work in SF

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Slate has a great piece by Tim Wu, author of “Who Owns the Internet,” that points out why Mayor Newsom’s public-private partnership idea for municipal wifi will never work.

Wu’s point (also bloggednicely in leftinsf)

“The basic idea of offering Internet access as a public service is sound. The problem is that cities haven’t thought of the Internet as a form of public infrastructure that—like subway lines, sewers, or roads—must be paid for. Instead, cities have labored under the illusion that, somehow, everything could be built easily and for free by private parties. That illusion has run straight into the ancient economics of infrastructure and natural monopoly. The bottom line: City dwellers won’t be able to get high-quality wireless Internet access for free. If they want it, collectively, they’ll have to pay for it.”

And yet, Newsom’s crew are out raising money for a ballot measure, Prop. J, that would lock the city in to a “public-private” free-lunch partnership. I’ve just looked at the Ethics Commission filings on it, and in many ways it’s the usual Newsom bunch: Eric Jaye of Storefront Media, Newsom’s chief consultant, is running the campaign. Jim Sutton is doing the legal work. The money’s come from downtown types (the Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe law firm gave $500), Newsom’s father (who gave $1,000) Newsom’s political allies (Assessor Phil TIng gave $250) and labor groups that want to stay on the mayor’s good side or owe him favors (Sign painters, transport workers, and firefighters). What a waste of time and money — unless this whole thing is about providing a back-channel way to give cash to the mayor.

Gayest. Music. Ever.

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› marke@sfbg.com

Something horrible happened.

The promo package, marked Special, arrived on my desk in May from Ultra Records in New York City. Hastily, I tore the envelope open and yanked out the CD within, letting squiggles of packing confetti fall where they may. A bronze and glistening, near-naked, possibly underage Brazilian boy stared fiercely from the cover. His bulging genitalia were not quite stuffed into a Gummi-red Speedo. His hair dripped with viscous product. Posed stiffly against a seaside shack the color of processed cheddar, he looked like he was about to either blow me or feast on my liver. The text across his sculpted, slightly veiny torso read DJ Ricardo! Presents Out Anthems 2.

Oh, good lord. If there’s anything that turns me off more than DJs with exclamation points appended to their monikers — OMG! The ’90s! Low carb! Wow! — it’s some gay fool from Ultra Records in New York City trying to tell me what my "out anthems" are. Sorry, but tin-eared "Don’t Want No Short Dick Man" remixes, spacey-diva "Deeper Love" covers, mindless melodramatic thumpers, and obnoxious washes of sizzle and screech don’t quite sum up my raggedy, faggoty lifestyle or speak to my proud, if occasionally morally compromised, experience.

I adore dance music — it’s my life. Any packed dance floor is a good thing in my book. But I also have some taste, and this was the apogee of cheesiness. The presumption that these bland corporate farts are the tunes of my loony-queer times crosses a clear homo-to-homo line in the shimmering sands. (For the record, Ultra Records, my current personal out anthems are the Cinematics’ "Keep Forgetting," Shazzy’s "Giggahoe," and Gladys Knight and the Pips’ "Love Is Always on Your Mind." Go mix that.)

Listen, I can ride with the tsunami of cheap and sleazy DJ dance compilations that has flooded various music stores, in-boxes, and jittery Wal-Marts for the past decade or so, featuring tightly clenched glutes, toxic tans, and spandex-stretching silicone explosions. (And that’s just the music. Someone should really publish a picture book of all of the blindingly awful, grinding-Barbie-in-headphones cover designs. Title suggestion: Writhe the Ibiza Abysmal. Or how about just Champagne and Crap?) There’s definitely a market out there for pulsating pabulum, and I dug my own grave with two coke spoons and a mirror ball when I became a nightlife critic. I was even OK with the knowledge that because I had Out Anthems 2 grasped shakily in my hot little palm, it meant that somewhere out there an Out Anthems 1 must exist. You go, DJ Ricardo!! Work it however you can. No, that wasn’t the horrible part.

SPLICING THE MONOLITH

The horrible part was this: I actually kind of liked it.

Bursting with a weird glee that’s unique to our media-saturated moment — "Holy shit, you’ve got to hear-see-watch this, it’s the most horrifying thing ever!" — I had rushed the CD over to my boyfriend Hunky Beau’s house before listening to it, eager for us to put it on and tear it a new one together. That’s our modern gay love.

Yet once I’d slipped the disc into Hunky’s Mac and readied myself a hot shot of schadenfreude, I realized I don’t hear this sort of heinous stuff when I’m out and about as much as I used to. The once-omnipresent, thousand-nostriled behemoth of overbearing, poorly produced circuit and "progressive house" music has been somewhat tamed. Sure, much of the CD was atrocious, but now that this cookie-cutter hokum is no longer forced on me at every gay turn I take, pouring forth from restaurant patios and flashy video bars, after-hours megaclubs and fisting pornos, open gym windows and passing Miata convertibles, I could listen to it not as some soulless dominant paradigm that was threatening to rob gay culture of every last ounce of scruff and sparkle, but as mere tacky noodling: harmless fun in an ironic way, if you’re into irony anymore. (Not poor Hunky Beau, though. A die-hard devotee of skinhead mosh and East Bay punk, he dived beneath the covers as soon as the first few high-hat sprays had rung in the air, moaning like he had aural hepatitis.)

What happened that night — a night that found me wriggling around in my Underoos and torturing my man with shouts of "Look at me! I’m a tweaked-out fan dancer!" — sparked the more masochistic aspects of my curiosity.

Ever since the supastar DJ scene of the late ’90s and early ’00s became economically impossible to sustain — the Sisyphean task of convincing thousands of people to spend $40 to hear a scrawny dude from Manchester, UK, or Miami spin yet again burned many promoters out — the dance floor playing field has blown wide open. Megaclubs, with their monolithic sounds, gave way to smaller venues where independent promoters could experiment with fresh ideas and vent their wacky stylistic impulses, minus hefty cover charges and pat-down security. Clubs became more like house parties: the kid with the most friends or the biggest iTunes collection could plug into the DJ booth and let ‘er rip.

Gay clubs, especially, had followed the newfound freedom from big-time pressure and flight-booking budgets in myriad zany directions. Today’s gay club scene is more diverse than it’s ever been. Almost every night of the week there are options.

So maybe it was time for me to reappraise a style that I’d grown to hate, now that it was fading from mainstream gay scene ubiquity in favor of sleek hip-pop and ’80s hair bands. Maybe I could stare into the numb, drooling jaws of circuit and progressive terror and dance, dance, dance. Could it really be as bad as I remembered? Was I ready to let go of my bitterness toward a music so insidious that even my grandmother thought my life was one big party scene from — gag — Queer as Folk?

Was it possible for me to tune into KNGY, 92.7 FM (Energy), the aggressively gay-friendly "pure dance" local radio station that had become synonymous with such music — and had recent hosted a party spotlighting, yes, DJ Ricardo! — without retching uncontrollably at the first few modulated wails?

Perhaps. I dug out the hand-crank radio from my earthquake emergency kit because, like, transmission radio — who still listens to that? I reacquainted myself with how to adjust a dial. Then I turned the volume up.

DOWNSIZE QUEENS

Mention Energy 92.7 to most gay men, and curious things happen to their bodies. The shoulders pop, the eyes roll, the hands begin to gesticulate wildly. Those are the gay men who love the station. The others absolutely loathe it. Their bodies convulse in a spasm of disgust. Their faces twist into ghoulish grimaces. Spittle flies from their lips. The hatred is palpable. There’s no middle ground when it comes to Energy. I’ve been in cars where people have fought over it until blood spurted.

Such reactions may be the legacy of the circuit party scene. Fifteen years ago, if you asked the average straight person to close their eyes and think about "gay music," the image that would first leap to his or her mind would be a turtlenecked show-tune queen clipping pink rosebuds in her garden while whistling something from Les Miz. Or, if the hetero were more contemporary, the archetype called up would be a sweat-dripping, mustachioed disco nymph collapsing into a pile of Studio 54 fairy dust or a bleached and tragic Madonna fan in an oversize cable-knit sweater with a regrettable yen for cheap eyeliner. Many gay club kids today would gladly take those images over what replaced them in the mid-’90s: buffed-out ‘roid heads in sailor caps and tighty whiteys frantically tooting whistles while some faceless diva yelped them into an aerobic frenzy.

The colossal circuit scene had its strengths: with its world-conquering voraciousness, it served as an accessible entry point for the vast numbers of gay men who came out at the time. Clattering circuit beats and ecstatic progressive swells and breaks — the natural evolution of corporate rave music in a mainstream gay environment — pushed many HIV-positive men through despair in the time before effective AIDS meds became available, and served as an all-purpose celebration template afterward. But circuit parties also marginalized queers with no taste for militaristic conformity, gratingly regurgitated tunes, or the alphabet soup of designer drugs then in vogue. The fact that the circuit had once been a credible, if snobbish and expensive, underground movement held no sway when it hatched into a gargantuan space tarantula from Planet GHB that swallowed all semblance of queer individuality. It was the Will and Grace of clubland, and most of us got jacked.

But that was then, this is neu. Dissing the circuit scene for gay club music’s discouraging popular image is like nail-gunning a dead, glitter-freckled horse. "The scene has really downsized, along with the whole megaclub thing in general," a popular San Francisco circuit DJ confided to me recently. "The energy we’re riding on is nostalgia."

Michael Williams, co-owner of Medium Rare Records in the Castro, the go-to store for dance mix compilations, told me, "We still sell a lot of that music, but people aren’t asking for it as they once did. I think the market got oversaturated and quality became a real factor. People began asking, ‘Where’s the talent?’ Our biggest sellers now are more complex artists like Shirley Bassey, Thelma Houston, and Pink Martini, or DJs who really work to have an interesting sound, like Dimitri from Paris." Even the odiously corporate Out magazine declared the circuit party over in its current issue, so you know it must be true.

Still, the sour taste of the circuit era in many alternaqueers’ mouths has proved hard to wash out. And the stereotype of awful gay club music still reigns supreme in the straight world. Even though Energy 92.7’s been around for less than three years and is in truth, as I found out after tuning in, more prone to playing Billboard Hot 100 pop remixes than actual circuit music, it’s had to bear the backlash brunt. As the most visible mainstream gay dance music giant of the moment, it’s become guilty by association.

CREEPIN’ LIKE BOUGAINVILLEA

Greg: "Oh my god, he is such a freakin’ moron."

Fernando: "Thirty-six percent approval ratings is far too high for this president."

Greg: "The only way my gay ass would be impressed by [George W.] Bush is if he put a VJ in the Oval Office. Bitch, please — how many more troops have to die?!"

Fernando: "You’re listening to Energy, 92.7 FM. Here’s Rihanna with ‘Don’t Stop the Music.’"

Fernando and Greg in the Morning

This is how gay Energy 92.7 is: when I first visited the station recently, the station’s party promoter, Juan Garcia, recognized my hair product from 50 paces. "Little orange can, girl?" he called out to greet me.

This is how gay Energy 92.7 is: when I sat in on the morning show with hosts Fernando Ventura and Greg Sherrell, they agonized during songs over the fact that something called the "smart-fat diet" forbade them to eat nuts for a week. "You can write anything you want," Sherrell, a high-voiced, blond spitfire who frequently informs listeners that he’s wearing his most expensive jeans, told me. "But if you don’t say I’m thin, I finna kill you."

Fernando and Greg in the Morning, on air weekdays from 6 to 10 a.m., is one of the most popular shows on Energy, which has a potential reach of 3.2 million listeners. The show could be accused of a lot of things — gay minstrelsy, pandering to stereotypes, making me get up at 4 a.m. to sit in — but it could never be accused of being unexciting. It’s the only openly gay morning show on commercial radio, and some of the live quips traded by DJ Fernando, Greg "the Gay Sportscaster," and their "straight man" producer Jason are dizzy scandal. Vaginal pubic hair "creeps up like bougainvillea," poppers are bad on first dates "because they’ll make your throat sore," and Kylie Minogue gets the verbal knockdown but "Oh, we love her: she had breast cancer!" Interspersed with segments like "Homo vs. Hetero," during which one caller of each orientation is quizzed about the other’s lifestyle, are Kelly Clarkson and the Killers remixes, "Vintage Beats" by Blondie and Michael Jackson, and current dance-chart toppers by Bananarama, David Guetta, and the Sunlovers.

It’s a thing of wonder in a society still riddled with homophobia — I dare you to find a YouTube video with more than 5,000 views that doesn’t have the word fag in the comments — to have such an unequivocally queeny experience, with a strong straight following, sail through the airwaves each morning. The tunes take a backseat to the dish. "At 9:30 in the morning you can only get so adventurous with your music selections," Ventura, an easygoing, bearish guy, told me. "I mostly stick with the hits."

The station, located in a murky green downtown office building, is a buzzing hive of fluid sexuality and good-natured candidness. The hyperdrive strains of DJ Tiesto and Deepface fill the air. As the only independently owned and operated commercial radio station in San Francisco, Energy’s done well. As a suitor of the gay audience, it’s done spectacularly. Even though its press materials emphasize its appeal to a broad variety of dance music fans, Energy’s known as "the gay dance station" to most San Franciscans. (That’s not so much the case across the bay, where Energy has gained a lot of traction in the Latino and Asian communities.)

Balancing a constant need for revenue with gay political intricacies can get tricky. A chill shot through me when I saw "Energy 92.7 owns the gay community" printed in bold and underlined in the station’s media kit — apparently we’re all slaves to remixed Cher. And even though the station is a major sponsor of most large gay charity events, there have been a few controversies. The gay media has fussed that Energy is co-owned and run by a straight man, Joe Bayliss, and the station has been blamed for dumbing down gay culture to grasp the pink dollar (although that’s like saying Britney Spears’s performance sucked because her heel broke). And last year Energy released a branded compilation mix CD — with an Army recruitment ad slipped into the packaging.

"We made a mistake. It was just stupid and insensitive on our part," Bayliss, a frank, handsome man with a ready smile, said when I asked him about the Army debacle. "This institution offered us a lot of money, and hey, we’re a struggling, independent business. We answered every complaint personally to apologize. We learned our lesson." (A new, military-free compilation comes out next month, to be carried by Best Buy, with proceeds going to local AIDS charities.)

PROGRAMMED RAINBOWS

That’s the politics, but what about the music? "I’m starting to build up a dance music collection," said Bayliss, who’s been working in radio since he was a kid. "This particular format tested through the roof in this market when we were looking to buy the station. I had no idea who Paul Oakenfold or Kaskade was when we started. I used to run a country station, and I didn’t know Merle Haggard from a hole in the ground either. But we’re 100 percent committed to this music and its audience. We have to be — our listeners are very dedicated."

Rabid may be a better word. The phone lines were jammed while I was there, and according to programming manager John Peake, the in-boxes are full every morning with e-mails from gaga enthusiasts. Good portions of Energy listeners stream the station online, and employees interact continuously with members of Energy’s E-Club virtual community. Even the afternoon DJs were leaping up and down in the booth while I was there, pumping their fists heavenward.

"Often we’ll get these enormously long e-mails from people listing every song we played that night, going into intense detail about each one and exactly why it was so important to them," Peake told me. "We get a lot of e-mails at six in the morning."

Looking compact in a lavender oxford, faded jeans, and a kicky Italian snakeskin belt, Peake took me through the music selection process. Each week he and music programmer Trevor Simpson go through new releases, recently submitted remixes, and requests from the station’s fans. They form a playlist based on what they think will most appeal to listeners and then program their picks into a hilariously retro MS-DOS program called Selector with, I shit you not, a rainbow-colored interface. "It’s tacky, but it’s bulletproof," Peake said, laughing. DJs either punch up the tracks automatically or refer to the playlist to make their own mixes using Serato software. Zero vinyl’s involved.

Peake and I talked about the criteria for choosing songs. "It’s a moving target. There’s definitely a ton of music out there that falls within our brand, and our nighttime and weekend DJs get to play a huge variety of mix music from around the world, so there’s a lot of latitude. I think our biggest challenge right now is figuring out the role of hip-hop. Our younger listeners demand it, but a lot of our demographic is still afraid of it. If we play something with rapping in it, we get flooded with angry callers screaming, ‘How dare you play this! Don’t you know it’s homophobic?’"

Later I spoke with Energy’s promotions director, Tim Kwong, about the backlash against the station. "We get it from both sides," Kwong, a young Bay Area native with impressively gelled hair, said. "Trance and progressive fans say, ‘Why don’t you play more harder, locally produced records?’ Rock and hip-hop fans want us to play fewer remixes of their favorite songs. We try to strike a balance, but the truth is what we do works for our audience."

"I can totally understand the frustration people feel when a certain image is projected that doesn’t fit them," he continued, addressing the gay question. "As an Asian American with a punk and indie background, I have a lot of experience with stereotypes, believe me. But we try to be as broad as possible in our appeal and acknowledge differences. And we’re not bribing people to listen to us."

(OTHER)

To their credit, the folks at Energy also acknowledge that their programming may not be in sync with what’s going on in the gay club scene now. "It’s apparent when you listen to the morning show that I don’t go out to clubs very much," DJ Fernando told me. "But when I do, I notice there is so much more choice these days. In the past there were a bunch of huge nights or clubs, and everybody went. Now there’s a night or a bar for everybody."

"Ick! I think it’s total crap. It’s like the dance music equivalent of Weird Al," said Bill Picture, who, along with his partner, DJ Dirty Knees, is the city’s biggest gay rock club promoter, when I asked him his opinion of Energy. "We’re much more into visceral rock energy and seeing live, local queer punk. But a lot of gay people do like that kind of music. And I’m glad that there’s a radio station that they can tune in to. How boring would it be if all gay people liked the same things? We’re happy to be an alternative."

The alternatives have arrived aplenty. In addition to Picture’s metal events, there’s DJ Bus Station John’s bathhouse disco revival scene, which fetishizes pre-AIDS vinyl like the smell of polished leather. There’s DJ David Harness’s Super Soul Sundayz, which focuses on atmospheric Chicago house sounds. There’s Charlie Horse, drag queen Anna Conda’s carnivalesque trash-rock drag club that often — gasp! — includes live singing. Queer-oriented parties with old-school show tunes, square dancing, tango, hula, Asian Hi-NRG, hyphy, mashups, Mexican banda, country line dancing, and a bonanza of other styles have found popularity in the past few years. The night’s a sissy smorgasbord of sound.

There’s even a bit of a backlash to all of this wacky fracturation and, especially, the iTunes DJ mentality. A segment of gay club music makers is starting to look back to the early techno and house days for inspiration, yearning for a time when seamless mixing and meticulously produced four-on-the-floor tunes — not sheer musical novelty — propelled masses onto dance floors.

Honey Soundsystem, a gay DJ collective formed by DJs Ken Vulsion and Pee Play and including a rotating membership of local vinyl enthusiasts, attempts to distill Italo disco, Euro dance, acid house, neominimal techno, and other cosmic sounds of the past three decades into smooth, ahistorical sets spanning the musical spectrum from DAF’s 1983 robo-homo hit "Brothers" to Kevin Aviance’s 1998 vogue-nostalgic "Din Da Da" to the Mahala Rai Banda’s 2006 technoklezmer conflagration "Mahalageasca (Felix B Jaxxhouz Dub)."

"Girl, that shit must be pumped out by a computer with a beard somewhere," the 21-year-old Pee Play opined of Energy 92.7’s music. I didn’t tell him how close to the truth he was as he continued, "But I’m over most of the goofy alternashit too. I never lived though circuit, but the music is fucked-up. I’m just really into quality. I want to play records that every time you hear them, they just get better."

PLAY LIKE BROTHERS DO

I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as gay music. If there were, its representative incarnation would probably be closer to experimental duo Matmos’s homophilic soundscapes, like those on their 2006 album The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast (Matador) — each track named for a gay community hero and composed of poetically related sampled objects ("Sequins and Steam for Larry Levan," "Rag for William S. Burroughs") — than anything that ever soared from Donna Summers’s throat. As far as gay dance goes, the epochal choreography of the uncompromisingly out Mark Morris, currently the hottest dance maker in the country, may prove more historically resilient than the image of semiclothed bears raving on a cruise ship.

Yet despite the Internet drain, clubs are still where homos meet to get sweaty, and the music they get sweaty to has a big impact on the culture at large. Dance music is ephemeral in the best sense: how good it sounds has everything to do with how and where you experience it and what and who you experience it with. Energy’s playlist was perfectly amusing in a broadcast booth full of campy, happy people or while twirling half naked in my BF’s bedroom. But in a club setting, maybe not so much — it all depends on who my been-there, done-that ass is dancing next to, no?

I recently spoke with Steve Fabus, one of the original DJs at San Francisco’s legendary Trocadero Transfer gay disco, launched in 1977. He’s been spinning continuously for 30 years and has pretty much seen it all. "Dance music is magic — it’s what gay people are," he explained. "It brought us together and kept us going through some incredibly hard times. Disco gathered everyone under one roof, and then house came along and did the same. Circuit was fun in the beginning, but it got too aggressive, and people of color or people into other things didn’t feel welcome. It took over everything, and, of course, it burned out."

"I love that kids are expressing themselves in smaller clubs, with different kinds of playing. It’s encouraging," he continued. "But it’s a shame that circuit took the big clubs down with it, where everyone could share in this experience together. Of course, there are other factors involved — crystal meth, the Internet, economics. You have to be very clever to be gay and live here now. It’s just so damned expensive."

"But oh well," he said with a laugh. "Everything comes in cycles."

Extra! Click here for the Gayest. Videos. Ever.

Click here for a list of upcoming alternaqueer dance events

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Allow me to postulate a few axioms that will help define the way we think about housing in San Francisco and put our cover story this week in context. Some of these laws are easily provable with existing data; the others, I admit, are loaded with political values. So be it.

Axiom number one: There are already too many rich people in San Francisco.

Socioeconomic diversity is essential to a healthy urban environment. Cities of the very rich (and typically, the very poor) are not good places to live; they become tourist destinations where a fake veneer of urbanism is pasted over a place with no real soul.

San Francisco is rapidly heading down that path — and the first and by far most important reason is the cost of housing.

Axiom number two: Private for-profit developers can never build us out of this housing crisis.

The housing market in San Francisco does not behave according to any of the rational rules you learn in Economics 101. This is an international city, a place with a global housing constituency. Demand for high-end condos in San Francisco is, for all practical purposes, unlimited and insatiable. You could build 50,000, 100,000 high-rise apartments, and the prices still wouldn’t come down to a level that would be affordable for most working-class San Franciscans.

Axiom number three: Any sane housing policy has to start with the acceptance of axiom number two.

Building more market-rate housing does nothing, nothing, nothing for the current crisis. There is no lack of housing options for the very rich in this town. The problem is housing for everyone else.

Axiom number four: When you have an irrational market for a basic necessity, the only way to make that market function is with strict regulation and aggressive government intervention.

Axiom number five: Increased density is not a positive environmental policy unless axiom number four is operative.

Building high-rises in which the housing is priced out of range of the people who actually work in San Francisco — and doesn’t offer the size and affordability the local workforce needs — does nothing to fight sprawl or build community. It just creates tall rich ghettos. (See axiom number one.)

Axiom number six: This city is running out of time.

There are virtually zero affordable apartments in this city for the people who make up the heart of San Francisco. We’re doing ecological damage by driving them out of town (and forcing them to drive back, in cars). We’re doing social damage by shattering communities (through evictions and displacement). And all we’re offering is modest tidbits of real planning (a few slightly more affordable units here and there for every 100 we give to the rich).

My conclusion, as we lay out in this week’s cover story, is that San Francisco has to turn its planning and housing policy upside down, to start treating housing as a necessity (as we’re doing with health care) and not something to be played with by speculators on the financial markets (look how well that worked with subprime mortgages) or an amenity for Silicon Valley commuters who would rather have a playground here than live closer to work.

Instead of zoning for developers, the city needs to do something really bold and say: This is the housing we want, the only housing we want — and then find a way to build it, with or without the private sector. As the axiom slingers say, quod erat demonstrandum.*

Record labels, quit playin’ games with my heart – hurry up and release these CDs over here already

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candiepayne.jpg
Sweet on unreleased-in-the-US Candie Payne.

By Todd Lavoie

Look, I know America is supposed to be the land of infinite choice and all – y’know, 287 types of toothpaste to choose from in the supermarket aisle, right next to the avalanche of deodorants eagerly waiting to cripple you with consumer-paralysis – but sometimes we really seem to let a lot of the good stuff slip clean out of our nets, don’t we? Take chocolate. Sure, we’ve got all sorts of lovely nibbles on offer in this country, but why, oh, why must it take a small miracle to track down a Crunchie Bar in Cheneyland? It shouldn’t be so hard for this young buck to snuff out a sticky-sweet choco-honeycomb yummable when he’s got the hankerin’ somewhere over yonder in the Heartland, should it? Say what you will about British cuisine, but they make some f-f-fine candybars – too bad you can’t find the damn things in Peoria. What did Mick and Keith say? “You can’t always get what you want.” Oh, yeah. So shut up and eat your Hershey Bar.

Now, if that’s not enough to wet my eyes, how about this sad state of affairs: here we are, with hundreds of record labels between our coasts, and yet some of the finest albums of the year come from artists who don’t even have American record deals! Or, in some cases, if they do have an American label, they still have to wait an eternity for its release. Case in point: my beloved Super Furry Animals, who I will get to later.

I could go on about the priorities of record companies, et cetera, but honestly, who cares? Economics bores me. Macro, micro – can I stifle this yawn? Me, I’ll take art, thanks. Too bad the music labels don’t always seem to feel the same way.

So, what I’ve done here is cobble up a humble list of noteworthy 2007 CDs that have yet to see the light of day here in the U. S. of A. It’s a low-down dirty shame that these little gems are import-only when the cut-out bins of every blue-polo-shirted, name-tag-requiring “music retailer” across the country are groaning with the latest round of Fall-Out Boy/Good Charlotte knockoffs that exited Hindenburg-style upon release. (Goading behavior, you say? Never!) And while I recognize that the Guardian may not move and shake in the same earth-shattering directions as the mighty-mighty Pitchfork.com in molding public taste – yet – here’s my bidding for making things right. Record execs, if you’re out there: take note. Folks need to hear this stuff. Record geeks, write these suckers down. They’re worth the extra cash.

1. Candie Payne, I Wish I Could Have Loved You More (Deltasonic) Do you swoon for Dusty Springfield and her bewitching white-girl soul confessions? Do Portishead’s spy-movie tearjerkers still give you the post-cocktail blues? Liverpool’s Candie Payne slinks and sashays somewhere in between the two, shimmying her simple – but elegant – see, pop can still be elegant! – blue party dress under a canopy of flute trills, soundtrack-worthy-string and brass arrangements, and some deliciously moody-ass organ. While she may not carry the same emotional devastation as Portishead’s Beth Gibbons – but who can, honestly? – Payne can be quite disarming with her sweetness, cooing away gently while sending an unequivocal kiss-off on the slow-shuffle of “Why Should I Settle For You?’ Another highlight, the Sandie Shaw/Petula Clark-informed “One More Chance,” is perhaps one of the most sweetly sincere baby-come-back songs I’ve ever heard. Or how about this video for the title track, in which you get every possible camera angle of Payne’s head? Oh, and she’s so tough on the eyes, too, poor thing:

Green City: Gray-water guerillas

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› sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The task sounded simple: help our friend Kristal set up a bathtub in her backyard over the Labor Day weekend so she could soak under the stars and her plants could drink the gray water.

Gray water is water from the sink, shower, bathtub, and washing machine, but not the toilet. And I’ve been inspired by its use since reading gray-water guerrillas Laura Allen, July Oskar Cole, and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine’s book Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull, 2007).

Allen, Cole, and Woelfle-Erskine describe how to install fairly radical gray-water systems, including dry and composting toilets and rainwater capture zones, as well as ways to recharge groundwater with rain gardens and treat gray water using homemade wetlands.

Installing gray-water systems usually requires government permits, and public health officials caution that flawed systems can spread disease and contamination. But our system was a simple one meant to dispose of clean hot water that cascades from the tub into a lava rock–filled drainage ditch that will hopefully, in time, support a small wetland.

Like many Californians, Kristal can only afford a tiny place, but she has hit the rental jackpot with her latest abode. It’s a barn red, vine-covered cottage behind a bigger house, but it comes with a private yard, thanks to artfully placed trellises and interwoven tree branches.

The only downside of her cottage is the absence of an indoor bathtub, so Kristal decided to set up a cast-iron bath outdoors and fill it with water piped by a hose from her sink. We tried it out July 4, and it was magical looking at the fireworks while sitting in steaming water that wasn’t steeped with hot-tub chemicals.

But when Kristal let out the plug, the gray water splattered out noisily and created an unsightly, muddy hole in the yard. This growing mess got Kristal worried that she would attract mosquitoes, kill her plants, and rot her cottage foundations. So I decided to help, relying on the gray-water guerrillas’ manual and my husband’s years of experience in restoring wetlands. Together, the three of us talked through the science, economics, and aesthetics of the proposed project to come up with a viable plan.

The science was simple but critically important, given that we were contemputf8g creating a homemade wetland near other dwellings and gardens. Water flows downhill and follows the path of least resistance, while wetlands, which are nature’s water purification system, create breeding grounds for native plants, insects, and animals. As such, they are fragile ecosystems that are easily harmed by bleach, bath salts, and any boron-containing products. So it’s critical to use all-natural, biodegradable soaps in a tub whose gray water will flow into homemade wetlands.

We reconciled these principles with Kristal’s need for inexpensive materials, her love of simple designs, and her desire to camouflage unsightly plumbing. In the end, we settled on a cascading system that uses cinder blocks to elevate Kristal’s tub and a wine barrel to hold the gray water, which flows by gravity into the barrel and then into the wetlands.

To control and direct water flow, we linked the barrel by way of a garden hose to a piece of slotted, corrugated drainage pipe. We buried the pipe in a lava rock–filled trench that was dug in a serpentine shape so that the gray water flows away from homes and into the lowest part of the garden, which is filled with sandy, drainage-friendly soil.

After a hard weekend of work, Labor Day found us basking in a freshly painted and elevated aquamarine bathtub, imagining how great Kristal’s wetlands will look once she adds water-loving plants like native cattails, which will attract a host of dragonflies, frogs, and beetles. Then we pulled the plug and waited anxiously for the tub to drain. To our delight, the water swirled smoothly into the barrel, then gurgled quietly underground.

Eureka! We were now bona fide gray-water guerrillas and had experienced, in microcosm, the challenges people grapple with, yard by yard, block by block, as they try to green the concrete jungle, one low-impact development at a time. It was exhilarating, empowering, and addictive. But before we had a chance to fully recover, Kristal was on her feet, talking about installing a solar-powered water heater this Thanksgiving. *

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

NASA hippies

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION As annoying as hippies can be, it’s strangely comforting to think that the one bit of junk we shot into deep space is emblazoned with a hippie symbol. I’m talking about the golden records screwed onto the shells of Voyagers I and II, two space probes that completely changed our understanding of the solar system and then shot out into deep space bearing record albums intended for alien consumption.

Last week marked the 30th anniversary of the Voyager II launch. While most people recall the Voyager probes for creating close-up photographs and atmospheric readings from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, these probes were always intended to do more than send messages back home for human consumption. In the mid-1970s, when the Voyager spacecraft were being completed, pop cosmologist Carl Sagan convinced NASA to include a message from Earth on the probes. They were to bring news of us to alien beings in the unknowable reaches of the galaxy and beyond.

In consultation with a bunch of other geeks (including Timothy Ferris, who produced the album), Sagan decided that the delivery mechanism for this message should be a golden record, packaged with a cartridge and needle, as well as abstract mathematical instructions for how fast to spin the disc and at what frequencies it would emit sound. You can listen to the entire recording at goldenrecord.org, and the experience is bittersweet, an auditory glimpse of a very different time in human history.

The tracks include greetings in dozens of languages, including ancient Sumerian, which of course nobody knows how to pronounce anymore. And Gaia help us, there is also a "whale greeting." There is a track devoted to "Earth sounds," all which sound totally cool while remaining unrecognizable as particularly Earthly. There are over a dozen music recordings from around the world, all of which are written (and mostly performed) by men. Most are from the West, with a few Russian numbers thrown in — probably for "diversity." Bach is presented alongside Chuck Berry, Navaho chants beside Beethoven. It’s a Sesame Street notion of pluralism, with an emphasis on music and greetings rather than political speeches or academic treatises on economics.

Also included on these records are directions to Earth, using nearby stars as navigation points.

The golden records imply that music, math and images are universal symbolic systems, the best kind for communicating with beings radically different from ourselves. This is an idea that was popular in the 1970s — Steven Spielberg immortalized it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which humans meeting aliens establish communication via electronic sounds. But as American historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman has pointed out, the idea that music (and the math underlying it) is a universal form of communication also comes from centuries-old encounters between Europeans and natives in the Americas. Early European explorers recount communicating with natives via music upon first meeting and reaching an understanding on that basis.

Music may be a near-universal form of communication among humans, and there is something glorious and touching about trying to share that with other creatures in space. Of course, the notion that aliens might share the idea of "hearing" with us profoundly silly. What if these are creatures who communicate via molecular manipulation, or chemical signatures? What if they live in vacuum, and therefore cannot "hear" at all?

So yeah, the golden record is species-centric. It’s also naively specific to one culture, for who can think of a golden record full of Western music as anything but the work of hippie liberal white dudes? Still, I’d rather be represented by its naive utopianism than by most of the signals shooting off this planet.

No doubt the golden record will bemuse any alien life that actually bothers to examine the goo on a piece of space junk. But a bemused alien may in fact be the one who comes closest to guessing the true meaning of the golden record, and perhaps the true meaning of human life itself. And so it seems fitting that our one letter to the universe reads something like this: Wish you were here. We have no idea what we’re doing, but we sound good!

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who thinks that perhaps the golden record is really a message to ourselves.

Written on the skin

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune — legendary screen team-ups betwixt a vision-questing director and his or her alter ego star filter are the stuff of cinematic legend. Wet dreams for reviewers intent on imbuing criticism with the sticky glaze of biography, they’re also seemingly part of a mythical auteur-driven cinematic past that was untouched by the hard-line realities of big-budget, gun-for-hire studio economics.

So it’s remarkable to find a filmmaker like David Cronenberg reteaming with his A History of Violence (2005) star Viggo Mortensen for Eastern Promises — it’s only the second time that Cronenberg has repeated such a collaboration since his work with Jeremy Irons in M. Butterfly (1993) and the director’s masterwork, Dead Ringers (1988). Sure, the feature also revolves around the mob (this time the Russian Vory v Zakone rather than the Irish mafia) and family, of both the biological and the bloodily nonbiological sorts. But there must be something deeper going on here. Talking to an energetic, black-clad Cronenberg, temporarily sprawled on a damask couch at the Ritz-Carlton a few weeks back and preparing to head back to his hometown film festival in Toronto, I wondered what exactly was the nature of his and Mortensen’s obviously tight relationship.

"Oh, we’re in love," the 64-year-old director quipped dryly. Shall we alert the tabloids about forthcoming nuptials, in the scandalous style of Ingrid Bergman running off with Roberto Rossellini?

"Yeah, it’s kind of a brotherly love as well. I feel like he’s the brother I never had. We’re very close. No, we’re very close."

Cronenberg kids you — not a stance expected from the man once associated with a grotesque yet cerebral breed of filmic Grand Guignol. But perhaps it isn’t entirely unprecedented: he famously splattered the prepubescent screens of pop-cult consciousness with his literally mind-blowing Scanners (1981). Punctuating his points with sharp hand gestures and following every flicker of your glance, the man thinks and jests both on and off his feet — and spars and parries just as effortlessly.

For Cronenberg, Eastern Promises‘ attraction lay not in its focus on mafia or family but in the well-crafted, textural script by Dirty Pretty Things‘ Steven Knight. "I was particularly interested in the multicultural aspect, because London, like Toronto, prides itself on being multicultural, which is to say immigrants can come and maintain their national identity and still live within the English context," the filmmaker mused. "That’s a nice concept. Does it really work? There are a lot of frictions, hostilities, and enmities that are brought from the old country."

The multilingual, half-Danish Mortensen has proved the ideal specimen, or Cronenbergian vessel, through which to play out these ideas. In contrast to A History of Violence‘s Tom Stall, whose assimilative veneer of wholesome middle-American respectability is torn away by a sudden, almost sensually shocking outburst of violence to reveal a noirish mafia past, Mortensen’s mysterious Eastern Promises character, Nikolai Luzhin, is all cold and mechanistic as he moves carefully through the alienating turf of a Russian immigrant neighborhood in London. Behind his slick, sexually contained, rockabillyesque shades, suit, and pompadour, Nikolai keeps his past firmly hidden, showing only bodily badges of allegiance, a vividly baroque comic book constellation of Siberian prison tattoos. The mafia narrative has become a way of venturing into the shadow zones of biological and chosen families. In Eastern Promises, Cronenberg juxtaposes the quest of Anna (Naomi Watts) to find the relatives of a dead Russian girl’s infant with Nikolai’s search for acceptance within the family of crime boss Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl).

On its slick gray and black noirish surface, Eastern Promises doesn’t resemble offerings like 1979’s The Brood, 1983’s Videodrome, 1986’s The Fly, or 1996’s Crash, films that bound Cronenberg’s name to that of the phrase body horror. But one can’t help but glimpse the filmmaker’s themes in the starry ciphers on Mortensen’s form.

So what does Cronenberg think of so-called body horror today? "I think nothing!" he exclaims with a comic snort. "It does seem kind of ridiculous. When you think of it, horror is about mortality, and it’s about mortality seen as a very physical event. That’s what, to me, horror films are about. To me, the genre is about the body, really."

EASTERN PROMISES

Opens Fri/14 in Bay Area theaters

www.focusfeatures.com/easternpromises

Censored!

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

>>Big local stories that never made mainstream headlines

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

amanda@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. GOOD-BYE, HABEAS CORPUS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. MARTIAL LAW: COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU


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

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

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

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

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

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

3. AFRICOM


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

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

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

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

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

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

4. SECRET TRADE AGREEMENTS


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

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

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

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

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

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

5. SHANGHAIED SLAVES CONSTRUCT US EMBASSY IN IRAQ


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

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

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

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

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

6. FALCON’S TALONS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. BLACKWATER


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

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

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

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

8. KIA: THE NEOLIBERAL INVASION OF INDIA


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. THE PRIVATIZATION OF AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. VULTURE FUNDS: DEVOURING THE DESPERATE


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

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

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

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

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

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

Switching sides

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The whole time that Earl Butter was with us, from New Hampshire to New York to Michigan, there was something I wanted to ask him but couldn’t quite put into words. That is, until he and Phenomenon hugged me good-bye and drove away, leaving me, at 44 years old, for my first time ever at camp.

Then, as soon as it was too late, the fog lifted from my sentence and the wording was clear and succinct: "How do I learn hopelessness?" Huh? Help me. Bankrupts, scofflaws, dock rats, bottle dwellers, how do you give up and get on with it? Stop writing poetry and start living poetically. Be the poem, or the ball, or the song.

I crunched back into the woods and set up my tent. As usual, I pitched it as far away from everyone else as possible. And every day I kept moving it farther and farther away, until I wasn’t even sure I was in Michigan any more.

What do you do at camp? Besides feeling lonely and displaced, I mean, and plotting your way back to town, to a phone, so you can call your mommy or daddy and say, "Uncle! Come get me! Please!"

Well, the purpose of Camp Trans is to protest the official policy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival re trans women inclusion. However, nobody exactly knows exactly what that policy is! It’s the most beautifully twisted blur of swirliness since the US military’s famous "Don’t ask, don’t tell" masterpiece. To the best of my chicken farmerly understanding, trans women are, in theory, not welcome. They are asked but not forced to respect the festival’s womyn-born-womyn, cluck cluck. In practice, however, no one’s going to check your jeans or genes. You buy a ticket, you’re in. Some people might be mean to you, and their meanness might be backed by policy, but hey, welcome to the world. Right?

Right. So, Camp Trans aims to change all that. Peopled mostly, I think (but didn’t count), by trans men showing support for their homemade sisters, and open to anyone anywhere on or off the gender spectrum, Camp Trans is young, and strong, and beautiful, and diverse, and brilliant, and radical, beautiful, and very well educated, and young, and the main strategy, to the best of my chicken farmerly understanding, is to have 10 times as much fun as the festies do, and for 300 times cheaper, until people start switching sides and the Michfest bigwigs get real.

Off the top of my head, it’s my favorite political strategy ever. I say this without a trace of facetiousness, I swear, and as the least politically active person in the world, give or take Lars Fiffick.

By the end of the week I had a new favorite singer-songwriter (Lost), a new favorite spoken wordster (Katz), a new favorite lightbulb eater (Emily), and a new favorite lap dancer (Alex). All around me people were making out with other people, laughing hysterically, talking intensely, hugging, playing, partying, holding hands, and womyn-born-womyn from the festival kept crossing the road and saying, "Wow, it’s funner over here."

Personally, I can speak for the food. I did have lunch on Michfest one day. First I tried to sneak in through the woods but got busted. Then I tried to talk my way in at the entrance, where the problem wasn’t gender but economics. Somehow $310 seemed like a lot to pay for a vegetarian lunch. I told them I had a friend in the kitchen (which was true) and that I just wanted to see her (which was true) and eat lunch (which was true). I swore I didn’t want to see any shows (which was true) and wouldn’t stay on the land for one second longer than necessary to masticate my food in a manner conducive to healthy digestion and tranquility.

Then, when the truth didn’t work, I tried lying. "OK, you got me. I’m a journalist," I said. "I’m a food writer. I’m doing a piece on the food here and at Camp Trans."

They were so fuckin’ friendly! They said, "Oh, we have the food right here. It’s what’s for lunch." And they started dishing me out an awesome bean salad and a pasta salad with black olives in it, and a cream cheese sandwich, and a nectarine.

I sat on a hay bale, under an umbrella, and everything was great, but with apologies to my actual friend in the actual kitchen, the food was better, spicier, and healthier at camp. And I’m talking not just vegetarian, but vegan! How can it be?

One word: beets. Beets, and I did have a huge bag of beef jerky in my tent, without which I would have died.<\!s>*

Where are all the payphones?

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› news@sfbg.com

Click here to read more about payphone deregulation

When the big earthquake, terrorist attack, or other civic disaster finally hits San Francisco, a lot of people are going to be in for a major shock: their high-tech cell phones and computer-based office telephone systems might not work.

But after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City, residents found there was still a way to reach their loved ones and let the world know they were OK; they used an old-fashioned communications tool that’s low tech, securely grounded, publicly accessible, and reliable.

It’s called a pay phone.

Next time there’s a disaster, we may not be so lucky: pay phones, fixtures of the public landscape for more than a century, have been quietly disappearing. And many of those that remain don’t work. These essential communication tools — good for emergencies, privacy, and the poor — are falling victim to deregulation laws, the greed of telecommunications companies, and the public’s obsession with high technology.

In San Francisco they’ve departed in droves from sidewalk carrels; corner stores; bus shelters; subway platforms; office, museum, and movie theater lobbies; supermarkets; shopping malls; city swimming pools and YMCAs; diners; parks; and gas stations. They’ve been disappearing at a rate of about 10 percent annually for the past four years, down from roughly 400,000 at the height of the dot-com boom to 150,000 today, trade group attorney Martin Mattes told state regulators last year. The decline in San Francisco mirrors those in California and the nation.

And while pay phones may seem like quaint relics of another era, they remain an important part of the nation’s communications system, serving millions of people who for one reason or another don’t have or can’t use cell phones. And consumer advocates say the loss of the pay phone system is a serious problem.

Although cell phones are pretty ubiquitous, not everyone can afford one — and not everyone can use one. For socially marginalized people, pay phones are still a lifeline. For people who can’t use wireless technology — and can’t afford a home phone line — they’re essential.

Why are pay phones vanishing? The ready answer — cell phones — identifies the technology that’s replacing them and cutting into their profits. But it doesn’t completely explain why a society that once valued pay phones — and may ultimately remember that it still does — has let them disappear. That story has more to do with the politics of deregulation and the profits of telecom companies.

THE POWER OF OLD TECH


In the 2004 climate-change disaster film The Day after Tomorrow, Dennis Quaid plays a climatologist who anticipates dire consequences from a sudden oceanic temperature drop, which is triggered by global warming and leaves New York City frozen solid. From the beaux arts NYC Public Library where he’s taken shelter, the Quaid character’s son (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) needs to call Dad in Washington, D.C., but the cells don’t work. So he finds a half-submerged mezzanine pay phone with a dial tone ("It’s connected to the telephone lines," he notes brightly), drops in a couple of coins, and bingo — he gets Dad’s insider travel advisory.

Such a scenario — at least the pay phone part — isn’t science fiction. In fact, it has played out like that in NYC a few times and also did so in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. When the Twin Towers went down Sept. 11, cell phone masts went down with them. Lines were endless as outgoing calls from lower Manhattan funneled through two nearby landline pay phones, as reported on NBC’s Today. Ditto in the summer heat wave of 1999, when New York air conditioners on overdrive toppled wireless transmitters like dominoes, silencing cell phones from NYC to the Great Lakes. Landline telephones — including pay phones — continued to ring. And when the waters rose in New Orleans, residents flocked to pay phones made available for free use to contact loved ones and let the world know they were stranded.

Landline pay phones — like wired home and office phones — are simply more durable and reliable. "I love my cell phone," said Natalie Billingsley, who heads the California Public Utilities Commission’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates. "But I wouldn’t give up my landline. There’s not enough [wireless] network redundancy."

When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area in 1989, electricity and cell phone service were out for hours, but, Billingsley said, "landline phones were back up in 10 minutes."

Regina Costa of San Francisco’s the Utility Reform Network recalled that when the quake trashed Pacific Street in Santa Cruz, the public switch connecting local phones to the larger network worked despite a local power outage.

The reason, Costa says, is that the traditional wired phone network has a robust, independent electrical backup. Not so wireless transmitters and cable fiber-optic systems, both powered by the public grid.

"Wire lines are a really big public safety feature," Billingsley told us. Backup generators at switching points, where regional and long-distance lines converge, create "all kinds of redundancies" for rerouting calls if parts of the network go down.

That’s not just a technological issue. The new tech networks lack robustness and redundancy, Billingsley said, in part because such standards are no longer mandated. Before telecommunications were deregulated, companies were required to pay for reliability. Now reliability is no longer a public service. Under deregulation, reliability is more spotty. Last year state legislators addressed the need for adequate backup power-pack standards for Internet phones — but in the end, consumers will need to buy the backup systems.

In Japan, where the old but vital wired pay phone network has been reduced by more than half (from 910,000 to 390,000) since the public phone company was privatized in 1985, a public safety official recently warned against such shortsightedness. "To remove public telephones amounts to decreasing the means of communication during emergencies," disaster prevention program director Hitoshi Omachi of Yokohama’s Chiiki Bosai Laboratory observed in a May 8 Asahi Weekly article about cell phones overtaking pay phones. "People should think about measures to maintain public phones, including financial assistance from the central or local governments."

Then there are the social issues. Beth Abrams, director of Grupo de la Comida, which feeds 2,000 immigrants and refugees in the Mission each week, said many are dependent on pay phones. "The thing to remember," Abrams told us, "is that a pay phone could mean somebody’s life in an emergency, when time is of the essence." A child suffering an asthma attack or an adult with heart disease or diabetes (the occurrence of which is high in the immigrant community) "often needs immediate response and has difficulty walking far," Abrams said. Many people whom her group serves don’t have cell phones and rely on pay phones when caring for children outside the home or answering job ads.

Howard Levy, attorney and executive director of Legal Assistance to the Elderly, which serves about 1,000 clients a month, told us many seniors in the Tenderloin and in SoMa hotels don’t have home phones or cell phones. Besides the disincentive of cell phone cost, "folks beyond a certain age don’t feel comfortable with the technology," which is not designed for people "whose vision isn’t so great," Levy said.

Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness told us that "a lot of folks do have cell phones nowadays, on a prepaid card," but have only intermittent access, and none when the card runs out. "Poor people in general — people who have extremely low incomes — even if they have a phone at home, [it] can be shut off at times," she said. "Pay phones are really important for emergency situations for folks living outside," or when homeless people are first on the scene, to report an emergency.

In an impromptu survey of eight clients at the Independent Living Resource Center, a San Francisco disability-rights advocacy and support group, services coordinator Diane Rovai found three who had been seriously inconvenienced by lack of pay phone access. One needed a ride home from the airport and was stranded after an entire bank of pay phones was removed; another "missed a really important meeting" after getting wrong directions (the phone she finally found "was dirty and not in good repair"); and the third, who has no cell phone, has problems when she goes out to meet people.

"There are still people who depend on pay phones," particularly in rural communities, Anna Montes said. She belongs to San Francisco’s Latino Issues Forum and is a member of the PUC advisory committee on Universal Lifeline Telephone Service, which subsidizes phone service for low-income households.

Four percent of state households don’t have basic phone service, she said, and many of those are poor and Latino and rely on pay phones.

"Pay phones should be supported because there are individuals who can’t afford [cell phones] and places where wireless doesn’t work," said Bill Nussbaum, a telecommunications lawyer at TURN. "Public policy is a reason to wrap [pay phones] into the goal of universal service, the concept of maximum penetration with reliable and affordable phone service for all."

THE END OF PUBLIC SERVICE


One reason the government has allowed pay phones to disappear is that most people don’t think about them. Cell phones often seem like all one needs to stay in touch, at least to those who own them.

"There’s an unfortunate assumption that everyone has a cell phone. It’s not true," said Harold Feld, senior vice president of the Media Access Project, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit public interest media and telecommunications law firm.

Regulators used to feel it was important for people to have access to public phones, but "they don’t think it’s important anymore," he told us.

Feld pointed out that pay phones used to be owned by AT&T, which created and maintained the pay phone network as part of a widely accessible phone system. Government-guaranteed profit on the company’s investment essentially subsidized even those pay phones that weren’t profitable, an arrangement institutionalized by the 1934 Telecommunications Act. Moreover, as a regulated public utility, the phone company needed permission to get out of the pay phone business.

With the monopoly’s breakup in 1984, competitors could enter the pay phone market, and by 1996 AT&T could get out of it.

"The old Bell monopoly came with a historical sense of public service that did not survive the [company’s] breakup and the new cost-benefit accountants and the MBA bottom-line artists," technology historian Iain Boal, coauthor of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso, 2005) told us. "Under neoliberal economic doctrine, all public goods are suspect."

Boal noted, "The new telecom companies had little or zero interest in the public phones they inherited. In fact, quite the reverse. It was in their interest to close or leave trashed any boxes that weren’t profitable and in general to force laggards to mobile phones."

It didn’t happen immediately, attorney Mattes, who has represented the California Payphone Association, a trade group, told us.

"Because the pay phone business was still pretty good in the late 1990s, the telephone utilities stayed in the business during those years, competing with the independents," Mattes said. Pay phone rates also rose.

But the economics of the pay phone business started to change around 2000, Mattes said, mostly due to wireless competition, and companies had difficulty collecting for toll-free calls and calls made through other long-distance providers. So telephone utilities started giving up their less-profitable pay phone locations.

"Bell South abandoned the pay phone market entirely about five or six years ago," Mattes said. "AT&T and Verizon have been gradually leaving the market, giving up their less-profitable pay phones at a steady pace."

From January 2005 to June 2007, AT&T reduced its pay phone lines in California by more than half — from 77,467 to 36,870 — according to PUC counts. And in the same period, Verizon went from 28,743 to 16,421 pay phones.

While the pay phone business was "modestly profitable," according to Mattes, it was mainly important to the utilities "as a platform for customers to make highly profitable long-distance calls." But, he said, with competition in long-distance and wireless services, the profits have been squeezed out of long-distance calls. Pay phone use also dropped dramatically, he said, due to wireless competition.

TURN’s Costa suggested that the old AT&T overpaid in its postdivestiture bid to acquire cable and bypass local exchange carriers for direct connections with its former customer base. Later, it abandoned the poor voice-quality network and may have needed to recoup losses.

"The Bells have a separate incentive to pull out copper," the older coaxial wire that connects almost all landline phones, Feld said. "The FCC says they don’t have to share [fiber-optic cable wire with competitors] as they do copper, and copper needs to be maintained. It was laid because regulators made them. It’s more costly to maintain than they can charge."

"Without regulation," Feld noted, "big companies can leave the [pay phone] market, but they can also increase line charges" — monthly fees for phone connection to the local exchange — "and interconnection fees" for long-distance connection, paid by callers and local exchanges to the nonlocal carrier for allowing calls to go through.

The loss of pay phone service is one more result of faith-based deregulation, the belief that the market will provide for everyone’s needs. "The demise of pay phones was utterly predictable," Boal told us. "It’s a disgrace."

And the impact of the disappearance of pay phones ripples beyond service needs.

OUTSOURCED


A sprawling ’70s low-rise cement building at West Portal and Sloat, once hidden by shrubs from view of the adjacent Muni tracks, is now vacant and slated to become the new Waldorf High School. It used to be the Pac Bell operators’ building, housing 35 workers, mostly women with more than 30 years of service, "the forefront of the [union] movement," said Kingsley Chew, president of Communications Workers of America Local 9410 in San Francisco.

Those operators answered 411 information queries and routed 911 emergency calls. Two years after winning a strike by shutting down the phone company, the operators saw their jobs outsourced in 2006 to Dublin and Pleasanton.

The majority of the local’s members are women, Chew said. Their male counterparts, mostly collectors in the coin department, are now gone, accounting for the loss of 25 to 30 union jobs in the past five years. Besides gathering coins from pay phones, the collectors maintained the phones and removed graffiti (which is more prevalent these days).

Pay phones once meant union jobs, and as their numbers have declined, so has the union. Local 9410 membership is down from 3,000 when Chew took office in 2003 to 750 today, with those still around mainly technicians who install and repair phones.

Chew calculated that one job here is financially equivalent to six jobs in India or the Philippines, where 1-800 calls are processed and workers are paid $400 a month. The city and the state lose local business tax revenues when jobs go overseas, he said, and the costs of vanishing pensions as workers are laid off are eventually externalized and borne by local residents when demand for public services rises.

There may be greater demand for pay phones soon: the major phone companies are expected to raise home-phone rates. Basic service rates have generally been averaged geographically, within a major company’s service "footprint," Lehman said, but deaveraging can soon occur, which will drive up the price of basic rural and high-cost urban services.

Meanwhile, two state programs supporting pay phones are being axed.

REGULATIONS DIE


Two pay phone regulatory programs remain on the books, one frozen and one barely operating. The PUC created both programs in 1990 as part of a legal ruling, when new pay phone providers were struggling to gain a foothold in former Pac Bell (now AT&T) and GTE (now Verizon) monopoly territory and consumers were encountering new system abuses.

One program, the Public Policy Payphone Program (PPPP, or Quad-P), was designed to subsidize phones located "in unprofitable locations to serve the health and safety needs of the public," while the other, the Payphone Enforcement Program (now known as Payphone Service Providers Enforcement), was established "to ensure that pay phone consumer safeguards are being followed." Both programs, which were expanded statewide, were funded by a monthly per-line surcharge on the industry, unlike other telecom public policy programs, which are supported by a percentage surcharge on consumers’ monthly phone bills.

But the list of potential state locations for subsidized pay phones was reduced from 67,000 in 1988 to 22,000 in 1989, just before the state programs were initiated, and to 1,975 in 1993. By 1998, when deregulation was complete and pricing went to market rates, Pac Bell had only 300 subsidized business phones out of 140,000, attributing the change to the increased number of independent providers and to multiphone contracts, which enabled revenues and costs to be averaged out.

Applications to designate or install Quad-P phones have to pass through the PSPE advisory committee, which hasn’t aggressively solicited them or approved more than two or three (with just one installed) of the 33 received since 2001, according to the Division of Ratepayer Advocates.

Almost nobody knows that Quad-P exists — or that anyone can file an application if a proposed site meets certain criteria. Currently, there are only 14 Quad-P phones statewide, mainly in parks, down from 40 in March, with 13 supported by AT&T and one by Verizon.

The PSPE was set up "to enforce, through random inspections, consumer safeguards for all public payphones … such as signage requirements, and rate caps for local, long distance and directory assistance calls within California."

Until recently, inspectors made the rounds of for-profit as well as subsidized pay phones, numbering more than 400,000 in the ’90s, on a rotation schedule that took a decade to complete. Between December 2001, when the project came under PSPE administration (it was formerly run by the industry), and June 2007, civil-service inspectors logged 133,893 violations on 39,444 phones, a rate that has slowed with staff downsizing. The DRA estimates its activities reduced the average rate of violations significantly. The inspection staff was cut in half last fall, to three, and other program staffers were transferred to other divisions to cut expenses.

The number of pay phones to monitor has declined, but with reduced inspections, violations have begun to rise. Numbering too few to be proactive, inspectors now respond only to consumer complaints registered on the PUC’s consumer fraud hotline. This number, not posted on pay phones, is 1-800-649-7570; it accepts calls between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. There’s no after-hours message machine, but if you’ve got a computer and are still primed when you get home, you can log on to the PUC Web site, at www.cpuc.ca.gov, to report a complaint. Patterns of systemic abuse — and dead phones — are less likely to be detected from reactive, hotline-triggered complaints.

Last summer the industry’s PSPE advisory committee formally requested that both programs and the committee itself be eliminated and program surcharges ended, citing reduced activity and need. "All that Quad-P has done is subsidize its own costs," said Mattes, the attorney for the California Payphone Association. "It deserves a quiet burial."

The DRA argues that the reduction of these state programs is premature: even if dramatic market changes have made pay phones a distant second choice over wireless for many, the old technology is still important.

For one thing, predictions of the death of pay phones may be exaggerated. "It is likely that some core base of payphones will continue to be used regularly and earn a profit," the division observed in a July 2006 report, responding to gloomy industry forecasts.

For another, the actual basis for the pay phone network’s decline is far from clear. The division noted "a distinct lack of quantitative analysis regarding both the reduction … and demographic information about the location and need for payphones" in its program review comments, part of the PUC’s formal rule-making process (to be concluded in coming months, following administrative law judge Maribeth Bushey’s findings).

Acknowledging that "concerns about migration to wireless phone plans and cost recovery issues (including interconnection costs, phone card fraud, and 911 services)" need to be addressed, the division restated the universal service goals of both the ’96 act and the original 1934 Telecom Act, quoting a commission ruling from a decade ago, now more urgent: "Parties have not substantiated that telephone service will continue to be available at unprofitable locations to satisfy public health, safety, and welfare needs. Nor have they convinced us that the marketplace will replace the existing public policy payphones or fulfill the public policy objective in public health, safety, and welfare."

The DRA recommends a two-pronged strategy for stabilizing the for-profit market and assessing the need for subsidized pay phones — one that could potentially restore proactive inspections.

Instead of eliminating Quad-P oversight, it said, "the task, rather, is to address these problems by reforming and strengthening the program, as well as by assessing [systematically] the continuing public need for payphones" and finding ways to meet it. The division proposed a formal workshop or survey to compile data about profits and costs, locations, and demographics — hard data on where pay phones exist and where they don’t but are needed.

The DRA also suggests that regulatory oversight be overhauled; that the PUC exert closer control over pay phone service providers by imposing fines or through disconnection; that pay phones be registered or certified, as they are in numerous other states; and that new procedures be adopted for installing and removing pay phones.

Oversight is needed, the division says, even if the industry can’t pay for it; it recommends a surcharge on monthly phone bills, as there are for other public policy telecom programs. It also says an overdue audit of both programs is needed and that the hotline-triggered inspection regimen needs to be reassessed within 12 to 18 months of its inauguration last fall.

SAVING PAY PHONES


On the ground floor of San Francisco’s City Hall, a single pay phone remains among six phone bays. Under existing subsidy rules, the city — which contracts for multiple phones — is ineligible for a subsidy.

It seems like high time to figure out how to restore some conventional lines of communication. Instead of shifting the whole cost of backup phones to the public, why not consider allocating it between the industry and ratepayers, placing the industry’s contribution on a sliding scale to be reviewed every year or two along with revenues, and even incorporating a percentage of more competitive telecom video and cable profits?

Admittedly, this goes against the current tide. Avid deregulators — like former PUC commissioner Susan Kennedy, now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, and current commissioner Rochelle Chong — have aggressively promoted advanced technology and less oversight.

But is what’s good for AT&T and Verizon really good for ratepayers or small businesses? Letting the pay phone network — a real, decentralized public space — be dismantled just because many of us now have private cell phones violates fairness and common sense. Corporate-minded advanced-tech boosters may dismiss the older technology, but it serves everyone.

"Just because it’s old," TURN’s Nussbaum said, "so what?"<\!s>*

Why gas costs so much

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By Tim Redmond

Just in case anyone out there is still wondering about the basic economics of the oil industry: When you raise the price of gas, the oil companies make more money. This has been true forever, and it’s true today.

Gee, why would all these refineries be off line at the same time? Why would supplies be so tight? Is it because of those rotten environmentalists — or do high gas prices and limited supplies actually make good business sense for Chevron?

Importing injustice

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› news@sfbg.com

More than 100 tractor trailers were lined up at 6:30 a.m., inching toward the Port of Oakland’s Terminal 7, waiting for their next load. Against the backdrop of the San Francisco skyline, a mammoth freight ship emblazoned with the name Hyundai glided toward the port, pregnant with multicolor shipping containers.

A driver told the Guardian that he expected to be in line for at least two hours waiting to drop off the empty container attached to his big rig. His 1989 truck lacks air-conditioning, so the windows were rolled down, allowing diesel exhaust to pollute the air he was breathing.

It’s the same scene at many of the port’s other terminals: long lines of ancient trucks slowly snaking toward their destinations, their primarily immigrant drivers performing the essential and thankless task of transporting cheap clothes from Asia to the nation’s big-box retailers or helping to export California’s agricultural goods to Hawaii.

The fourth-busiest container port in the nation, the Port of Oakland is the economic engine of the region, providing thousands of jobs and more than $1 billion in revenue. But activists say that the port system has also led to sweatshoplike conditions for truckers and created a health crisis for the surrounding community.

On their poverty-level wages, truckers are usually able to buy only the oldest, most polluting trucks. Their diesel pollution is a major factor driving asthma rates through the roof in the neighboring, primarily African American neighborhood of West Oakland, where, the American Lung Association says, one in every five kids has asthma.

A new national coalition of labor, environmental, and community activists has advanced a proposal that would make all drivers employees with benefits, radically changing the way work is done on the waterfront and possibly heralding the return of the Teamsters to the ports for the first time in more than 20 years. In the process, the proposal would make the port’s biggest customers responsible for its environmental problems.

The coalition places the blame for the current situation squarely on giant retail shippers such as Wal-Mart and Target and is calling for them to be held accountable for the full environmental and labor costs of the cheap goods they sell — a call the corporations are strenuously resisting. The American Trucking Association, whose members contract directly with the corporation, has threatened a lawsuit if the change is adopted. But port officials have voiced a willingness to seriously consider implementing the proposal.

Having long claimed that the trucking industry is outside its control, the Port of Oakland could embrace the proposal as a means of satisfying community, environmental, political, and business concerns. With impending directives to clean the air coming from Sacramento, trade planned to almost double by 2020, two new Port Commission appointees representing labor and environmental concerns, and a federal antiterrorism tracking plan slated for this fall, the port is poised to play a leadership role that could reverberate up and down the West Coast and across the country.

THE TRUCKER’S LIFE


The Port of Oakland’s estimated 1,500 to 2,500 drivers are a far cry from the middle-class, long-haul Teamsters and the Smokey and the Bandit–<\d>style freewheeling rebels who have long been engrained in the American imagination. Instead, they are at the bottom of the port’s food chain and are the most exploited trucking sector in the country, consisting primarily of recent immigrants struggling to make ends meet.

Dawit Fre, 39, immigrated to Oakland from the small nation of Eritrea two years ago. "I wanted to see a better life," he told us. Fre was a driver in Africa and went to work for the Port of Oakland after his cousin told him people start their trucking careers there. He said he works up to 60 hours a week for one company, making the equivalent of about $8 an hour after expenses.

Fre arrives at work every day no later than 6:30 a.m., waits for dispatches from his company, and spends a minimum of two hours in line for each container he picks up or drops off. He is paid $42 for each load by the company. He doesn’t know how much the trucking companies make but has heard that some get $200 per load. He returns home around 6:30 at night.

"The whole time I’m at the port, I’m thinking about my family," he said. "I got children. The only thing I’m thinking inside the terminal is, how many moves am I going to do? Am I going to do four or five or three or two?"

On a good day he can get four, on a bad day as few as one, depending on the length of the lines and the generosity of the dispatcher. Then there are his expenses. As an independent operator, Fre is solely responsible for a tankful of diesel that costs him up to $250 a pop. DMV registration is $178 a month, and 12 percent of his weekly earnings goes to his boss for insurance on his truck, not to mention annual federal income tax.

He receives no benefits, no overtime pay, and no health care coverage at a time when his wife, a diabetic, is suffering from severe stomach complications. "I’m taking her to Highland Hospital," he told us. "If it’s easy for them to fix, they can do it. But if she has a big problem, they can’t do it."

Fre has his own health problems. "Most of the drivers, we have old trucks," he said. "You don’t have AC, your windows are down, and you get sick in the truck" from the diesel. Fre’s remedy for his persistent coughing and the burning in his throat is several glasses of milk after each day of work.

A 1998 study published in the Journal of Independent Medicine found that truck drivers face a risk of cancer 10 times greater than Occupational Safety and Health Administration–acceptable levels, and a 1990 study published in the American Journal of Public Health showed that truckers face nearly double the average lifetime lung cancer risk.

Fre has little money to invest in his truck, a ragged 1987 model that he said needs $5,000 in repairs. He doesn’t trust it on the freeway, so he’s asked his dispatcher to send him only from pier to pier, not outside the port, further dipping into his earnings. "I came here to see a better life," he said. "When I got here, I found it is different. Here we don’t get paid for the overtime. We don’t get benefits. When I get into the terminal, there is no respect."

His experience is typical of those of port truckers across the country. A study by the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a labor-affiliated think tank, found that the average Port of Oakland trucker makes as little as $8 an hour after expenses, works 11 hours a day, and spends two and a half hours in line per load. Almost none of the truckers reported receiving benefits on the job, and 66 percent don’t have health insurance.

This is consistent with data from a 2004 survey of port truckers in Los Angeles and Long Beach, conducted by a professor of economics at California State University Long Beach. That report found they had a median income of $25,000 a year after expenses and an average workday of 11.2 hours, with up to 33 percent of their time spent waiting in line.

Port truckers generally drive only the oldest, most polluting trucks because that’s all they can afford. An industry adage is that ports are "the place trucks go to die," a reality that has dire impacts on the surrounding communities.

POLLUTING THE COMMUNITY


West Oakland has long been a dumping ground for the Bay Area’s toxic waste. The community has one of the five highest asthma hospitalization rates in California, with an estimated 20 percent of its K–<\d>12 students suffering from the disorder, according to the ALA. Researchers at the University of Southern California have found that children living within a few hundred meters of freeways leading out of ports not only are more likely to suffer from asthma but also actually develop smaller lungs.

Margaret Gordon, a 60-year-old community health activist who has lived just blocks from the Port of Oakland for 15 years, told us that she and four of her grandchildren living with her all suffer from asthma. When one grandchild was born with severe asthma and her own asthma worsened after she moved to West Oakland, Gordon, then a housekeeper, started reading about the causes of asthma and made the connection to the port. Like many in the low-income neighborhood, she cannot afford to move elsewhere in the Bay Area.

Gordon has been fighting for clean air for more than a decade, and in April she was inducted into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame for her work. In 2001, Gordon formed the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, which she now cochairs. The project has released more than half a dozen studies related to air quality. A 2003 report showed that trucks traveling through West Oakland in one day produce the same amount of toxic soot as 127,677 cars, leading to indoor air in some neighborhood homes that is five times more toxic than that in other parts of the city.

Still, Gordon told us that port officials are "only starting paying attention." Last year the California Air Resources Board passed a resolution related to air quality at ports and announced that it was developing a regulatory mechanism. A 2006 CARB report found that truck diesel exhaust accounts for the majority of the estimated 2,400 deaths related to freight transport each year and 70 percent of the state’s air pollution–<\d>related cancer risk. Freight transport will cost California residents $200 billion in health costs over the next 15 years. Most of this is borne by low-income communities of color near freight transport hubs.

The combination of state mandates and local community concerns is starting to spark a change. "They would sit down and talk with us before that, but there was not anything concrete done," Gordon told us. The port is now in the early planning stages of an air-quality-improvement program, working with Gordon and other activists.

That movement is getting vigorous new support from the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, a national partnership of labor, environmental, and community activists organizing at the country’s major container ports: Los Angeles, Long Beach, Miami, Oakland, New York–New Jersey, and Seattle.

"Every one of those ports has the same environmental and labor problems we have in Oakland," Doug Bloch, the coordinator for the coalition in Oakland, told us during a tour of the port’s heavy industrial landscape. Virtually all of its 900 maritime acres are covered by concrete and asphalt, monster cranes that inspired Star Wars‘ Imperial Walkers, and 20-foot steel containers stacked up like Legos behind chain-link fences.

The Port of Oakland has no direct relationship with its truckers at the present. Shippers take price bids from among roughly 100 trucking companies at the port, then contract the work to the independent-contractor truckers. The CCSP says bidding wars lead to poverty wages for truckers, older trucks and more pollution, and a chaotic port full of inefficiencies like long pickup waits.

Under the proposed system, ports would call on their ability as landlords to set standards for the trucking and shipping companies. They would require trucking companies to hire drivers as employees, shifting maintenance costs from the drivers to the companies, which would retrofit or replace all port trucks with more environmentally friendly rigs. The ports would allow only new, cleaner trucks to enter. The companies could then, in theory, pass the costs on to shippers and end users.

If drivers were paid as employees by the hour instead of by the trip, the coalition expects the market would reduce inefficient truck wait times and air pollution.

"When you rent an apartment you sign a lease," Bloch told us. "If you trash the place, you get evicted. Corporations are trashing this community, but they’re not being evicted."

A test case could soon be under way at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two largest in the United States, and the situation is being closely watched by ports and industries across the country. Port commissioners there had hoped by the end of this month to approve the coalition’s program, which they expect to reduce diesel truck emissions by as much as 80 percent over the next five years. But growing opposition and the threat of lawsuits by groups like the California Trucking Association, which represents the owners of truck companies, and the Waterfront Coalition, a consortium of major retailers, led the ports to delay their decision. The commissioners now expect to vote in September after completing an economic impact survey.

At the center of the storm is the fact that as employees, truckers would be able to organize and form a union. As independent contractors, they are barred from doing so because of antitrust laws originally created to oppose vast enterprises that dominated industries. (A further irony is that giant retail steamship companies have experienced incredible consolidation and enjoy a limited antitrust immunity.)

If passed by LA port officials, the plan would be implemented there starting Jan. 1, 2008, and could result in a domino effect at the other, smaller ports across the country. "The industry is fighting like hell in LA," Bloch told us. "They know that if they’re going to have to pay, the party’s over."

Meanwhile, Bloch told us that more than 1,000 truckers have signed a petition asking the Port of Oakland to pass a version of the coalition’s proposal, and it will be presented to the Port Commission, the seven-member body that would eventually vote on the proposal. Spokesperson Libby Schaff told us that the port "agrees with the coalition that the port can and should have a more direct relationship with its truckers" and is "very seriously considering the coalition’s proposal."

Because the proposal "constitutes a major overhaul of the way trucking is done today," Schaff said the port is currently holding stakeholder meetings with residents, truckers, terminal operators, elected officials, the business community, and labor to consider it in the context of a more comprehensive port plan. Schaff said a comprehensive plan could be crafted in less than a year.

The port has not taken a position on granting truckers employee status. It is also looking into other funding mechanisms for a clean-truck program, including money from a pending state bill that would impose a $30 fee on every 20-foot-equivalent unit passing through the Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland port complexes, to be used for improvements in road and rail infrastructure and for clean-air programs.

The legislation, Senate Bill 974, by Alan Lowenthal (D–Long Beach), would generate more than $525 million annually. But it faces tough opposition from some very powerful interests.

RESISTING CHANGE


Bill Aboudi, president of Oakland’s AB Trucking and a member of the CTA, told us truckers are "treated like second-class citizens," and he believes long lines and trucker asthma are serious problems. But he strongly opposes the coalition’s proposal. Instead, he told us, state regulations like those forthcoming from CARB and other piecemeal reforms are the answer.

"The coalition’s main goal is to unionize the drivers," Aboudi said. He was wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with two American flags and the words "Oakland Trucker." An immigrant from Israel, he has been at the Port of Oakland since 1992. "If these guys choose to be owner-operators, why are you rocking the boat? You can’t be playing with my livelihood just because you want to get union dues," Aboudi said. "Truckers want to own a piece of the American dream. They want to own their own truck."

It’s an appealing image to many. Kevin Leonard, an owner-operator trucker who contracts with Aboudi and others, told us he doesn’t want to give up his independent status. "I have the freedom to work when I want," he said. "I don’t see how the Teamsters can represent me better than I can."

The trucking industry as a whole says the coalition plan will force away trade and drive out small trucking companies, which will have to maintain the trucks and start paying benefits such as health insurance and workers’ compensation.

Yet Assemblymember Sandré Swanson (D–Oakland) brushed aside those arguments. "I’ve been involved in Bay Area politics for more than 30 years," he told us. "I’ve seen these same claims made against farmworkers as they were organizing for better conditions. I’ve seen these arguments made when we were raising the minimum wage. I think the opposite is true. If you have a workforce with a livable wage, it’s a more productive workforce, and I think everyone benefits. Truckers deserve more, and we’re going to do what we can to help them."

Oakland City Council president Ignacio de la Fuente, who drafted and helped pass a minimum-wage law for port employees, told us he supports the right of truckers to unionize but labor and environmental concerns must be balanced with economic growth. "You can’t ignore the fact that you have the port of Oakland competing with other ports," he said. "I support the fact that the Teamsters are going to bargain collectively on a national level. This port competes with other ports, and you cannot be put at a disadvantage."

Bloch says the coalition’s target is the shipping companies, not the trucking companies. "The shippers are hiding behind the trucking companies," he told us. "On the one side there are the giant shipping companies, like Wal-Mart and Target, huge global companies that demand low prices from trucking companies. On the other side are tiny trucking companies, immigrant truckers, and communities of color. Wal-Mart’s slogan is ‘always low prices,’ but ‘always low prices’ means one out of five children in West Oakland with asthma and drivers making $8 an hour who can’t support their families."

Oakland mayor Ron Dellums may be signaling his support for reform with two new appointees to the Port Commission. Even before he took office, Dellums was working to influence the Port Commission; as mayor-elect, he requested that outgoing mayor Jerry Brown hold off on appointing a new nominee so Dellums could appoint someone working on environmental and community impacts. He lost this battle when a majority of the city council voted to appoint Mark McClure, the director of marketing at a business technology company focused on security.

Dellums’s latest appointees, announced earlier this month, are a marked contrast to the business-oriented appointees of the Brown era: Victor Uno, a financial secretary with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and Gordon, the longtime resident and environmental activist in West Oakland.

"The port’s policy has been all about business and not about the people," Gordon told us. "The mayor really wants someone there to talk about health issues. I have never known a mayor to put someone on the commission and one of their engagements is to talk about health." She would also like to see a public participatory-process policy built into the port. "This is about sharing the power," Gordon said. "I don’t think West Oakland residents know they have power." She has "no problem" with truckers unionizing but also wants to find a way for drivers to remain independent contractors if they prefer.

Uno told the Guardian that he is highly supportive of the proposal. "I think that if the whole commission takes the lead of Mayor Dellums that this proposal will be very seriously considered," he said. "I’m very optimistic." Asked if he thought a proposal could succeed without requiring trucking companies to hire truckers as employees, he said, "I do not see how that is possible, given the lack of regulations in the trucking industry. It’s a dog-eat-dog world among independent truckers."

DEREGULATION HISTORY


The ports were not always structured as they are now. Before the 1980s the Interstate Commerce Commission regulated trucking, and most truckers at California ports were members of the Teamsters. They had health care, pensions, and workers’ compensation insurance and were paid a middle-class wage.

As part of a national push toward deregulation in the late 1970s, Congress, spurred by President Jimmy Carter, deregulated the trucking industry in 1980. In the following few years, a flood of new trucking companies entered the ports, with shippers choosing between a growing number of companies for each job. As small trucking companies undercut one another in bidding wars, the falling rates translated into declining driver pay, the bankruptcy of Teamster-organized companies, and increasing reliance on independent contractors whom companies could hire without spending money on payroll taxes, health care costs, or other benefits that unions might try to extract.

Trucking expert Michael Belzer, an economics professor at Wayne State University, has shown that long-haul truckers now earn less than half of prederegulation wages and work an average of more than 60 hours a week, while retailers like Wal-Mart have thrived. "The low rates paid to truckers in this global-trade game acts as a subsidy for increasing the amount of trade," Belzer told us. "Pollution and safety hazards are the negative externalities." If all ports on the West Coast required employee drivers, he said, "the market result would be that cost and safety would go up, and pollution would go down."

There have been a handful of Teamsters-related or trucker-led rallies and work stoppages at the Port of Oakland since deregulation, including a technically illegal strike in 2004 protesting the soaring price of diesel fuel, which virtually shut down the port for eight days. Many of the same complaints of today’s port truckers were aired at that time — long waits in lines, poor pay, long hours, and no benefits.

"This business is like the Mafia," Lorenzo Fernandez, 36, said, standing in front of two metal taco trucks glinting in the noon sun, along with about a half dozen other truckers on their lunch break. "They’re doing whatever they want with us, between the [truck companies] and the shippers. There is so much competition between the companies, and they know that we need the job. They know that our kids will go hungry."

Muhammad Khan, 33, said he’s sometimes forced to make up for long wait times by driving dangerously fast on the freeways. "We have our families. We have to take care of them. We all risk our lives because we have to. We don’t make enough money if we don’t make a load," Khan told us.

"We’re all immigrants here," Fernandez said. "We make it possible for the economy to grow up, but they’re stepping on our faces…. We have to work together. Otherwise we are going to be slaves for life."

A sign on a chain-link fence near the taco trucks reads, "Got an old truck? The Port of Oakland can help! Replace your old truck today!" Call the number at the bottom of the sign, and a recorded message issues an invitation to an informational barbecue that took place four months ago. The message explains that the port will provide qualifying owners with up to $40,000 to replace trucks dating from 1993 or before with a 1999-model truck. But Schaff told us, "Due to overwhelming demand, new applicants are currently not being accepted."

Money for the program came from a $9 million settlement of a lawsuit West Oakland residents filed against the Port of Oakland in 1998, alleging that their health was being harmed by port operations. The port says it will replace a total of 80 of the estimated 2,500 port trucks with those funds. When asked if the port had a responsibility to truckers, Schaff said it was "consistent with the port’s commitment to social responsibility…. We’ve done a lot, and we’re going to do more."

But the only specific programs the port could point to were the truck replacement program, a trucker access committee and working group started after the 2004 strike, and new GPS cell phone technology that is being touted as a solution for bottlenecks. Chuck Mack, the Teamsters’ Western Region vice president, isn’t impressed. "They’re a joke," he said of the programs. "Very few independent contractors have utilized them."

The recent purchase of the GPS system particularly irritates Mack. "Here is a quasi-governmental agency supplying services to the trucking companies," he told us. "It’s bizarre that we’re using taxpayer money for this. Any other industry would buy the devices themselves."

"We don’t disagree with using this money" for truck replacement, Mack said, "but what you’re doing is blowing $2 million in taxpayer money. Years down the road they’re going to need a new truck and another million in taxpayer money. For Wal-Mart and Target it’s great because they can have the taxpayer pick up the bill. Without changing the model, it’s just a short-term fix at the expense of the taxpayer."

EMPLOYEE BENEFITS


Beyond the environmental and economic benefits of making truckers employees of the companies, the change also might improve port security. The federal Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, expected to be implemented in the fall, will check the identities of the nation’s 750,000 port employees, 110,000 of whom work as truckers. Under the present system, there is no way to track the independent port truckers.

Employees are easier to track, and they are also better for port security in other ways. Among low-paid port truckers, turnover rate is extremely high, according to the ATA. "We all know that having a stable, well-trained, reliable workforce only leads to more security," Bloch said. "If they’re trained, they can be the eyes and ears of the port."

Well-paid truckers also would lead to safer ports. In a 2005 report, Belzer showed that "a substantial fraction" of independent operators actually loses money each year, resulting in "a high risk of unsafe operations among those earning the least money." The low compensation also "presents a national security risk," his report read, "since those who desperately work to break even might be at risk to engage in activities that put the nation at risk, whether intentionally or unintentionally, just trying to find a way from not going under."

Driving past another long line of trucks idling outside a gate after lunch break, Bloch pointed out one truck. A placard on the back of the rig read, "End sweatshops on wheels."

The current port system "just heaps abuse and abuse on these truck drivers and this community," Bloch told us. "The big businesses like Wal-Mart don’t pay the cost of polluting Oakland. It’s the truck drivers and the community that pay the cost. People pay with their lives."

"You can’t fix the environmental problems without fixing the problems of the driver," he said. "And now you have labor and the community coming together, and that’s powerful."*

Nuclear greenwashing

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Patrick Moore’s presentation isn’t as slick as Al Gore’s. The slides he shows lack a certain visual panache and don’t compare to the ones in An Inconvenient Truth. Moore himself seems a little frumpy, particularly as he peers out across the audience recently gathered in the Warnors Theatre in Fresno.

But attendees paid $20 to hear the former Greenpeace leader extol the benefits of nuclear energy as a clean, safe, reliable, economic, and — perhaps most important to the current political and media focus on global warming — emissions-free source of power.

It’s hard to imagine Moore at the helm of an inflatable boat steering into the line of a whaling ship’s fire, but that iconic Greenpeace image is exactly what he wants you to associate with him. The Vancouver, British Columbia, native is quick to tell you he’s a former leader of one of the most effective international activist organizations ever. But he said he’s older now and wants to be for things instead of against them.

What’s Moore for? Warding off the warming of the world. What does he think will do it? More nuclear power plants.

If there’s any great and unifying issue thrumming through the national psyche, defying political party lines and flooding the media filters these days, it’s global warming. While leaders argue left and right about nearly every issue that comes before them, there is at least consensus that something must be done about climate change.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger jumped on that bandwagon last September when he signed into law Assembly Bill 32, mandating a 25 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020.

Thirty-one states recently agreed to join a voluntary greenhouse gas emissions registry similar to California’s, 10 northeastern states are creating a cap-and-trade market, and already half the country has laws requiring that a certain percentage of local power portfolios come from renewable energy.

The alternative-energy troops who’ve long been waiting in the trenches have stepped up to fight, armed with the tools they’ve been honing for years: solar panels, wind turbines, tidal power, and biofuels. They say new options and innovations abound for weaning the country off its fossil fuel habit.

But there are already critics who say those approaches aren’t going to be enough — and that we need to go nuclear against this planetary threat. And now they have some unlikely new allies.

Maybe you’ve seen the headlines touting the new nuclear push, running in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and all the daily syndicates. They all claim the same questionable facts: Nuclear power is clean and emissions free. It’s safe, reliable, and cost-effective. It isn’t contributing to global warming — and these days even the environmentalists like it.

James Lovelock, the renowned Gaia theorist, thinks nuclear energy will be essential to power the developing world. On a Sept. 13, 2006, airing of KQED’s Forum, he told host Michael Krasny, "I would welcome high-level nuclear waste in my backyard."

During the hour-long program he said the dangers of radiation were exaggerated; there wasn’t that much waste generated; and in order to mitigate the increasing effects of climate change, we should "look at nuclear as a kind of medicine we have to take."

Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, thinks nothing is more doomsday than global warming and told the Guardian he advised Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to start touting nuclear power as a solution.

"The nuclear industry needs a new green generation," he told us. "My fellow environmentalists ought to be grateful to the nuclear industry for supplying 20 percent of our electricity."

And then there’s Moore, the 15-year Greenpeace veteran who once put his body in the way of a seal hunter’s club and wrote in an April 16, 2006, Washington Post op-ed, "My views have changed and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

"Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely."

The bio for the Post piece identifies Moore as cochair of "a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which supports the use of nuclear energy."

It’s one of the few articles that make such a disclosure, although more probably should. A survey by Diane Farsetta, a senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, came across 302 recent articles mentioning Moore and nuclear power as a possible option for mitigating the effects of global warming.

Only 37 — a mere 12 percent — said he’s being paid to support nuclear power by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a national organization of pro-nuke industries that’s hired Moore to front its nuclear renaissance.

Only the Columbia Journalism Review has drawn the further connection that Hill and Knowlton has been paid $8 million to help the NEI spread the word that the nukies have the silver bullet for solving global warming.

Hill and Knowlton knows a little something about pushing dangerous products. The company created the tobacco industry’s decades-long disinformation campaign about the effects of smoking. Veterans of that campaign then helped ExxonMobil try to bury the truth about global warming.

Before laughing these folks out of the reactor room, consider this: Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, who’ve been against nukes in the past, are now suggesting nuclear energy needs to be considered in light of global warming.

Al Gore and Hillary Clinton have also made similar recent murmurings. Of all the major 2008 presidential candidates, only Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards have offered up energy plans that don’t include more nukes.

Eight states are working on pro-nuclear legislation, and although a bill to lift the moratorium on new plants in California was shot down in the Assembly’s Committee on Natural Resources, its sponsor, Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine), told us he intends to introduce it again and again until it passes.

In the meantime a private group of Fresno investors has signed a letter of intent with a nuclear power company to put a 1,600-megawatt nuclear plant in the San Joaquin Valley. So far the only thing stopping the group is the state’s 30-year-old moratorium, which says no new nuclear power plants may be built in California until a permanent solution to the waste is established. The investors are already working on a November 2008 ballot measure to end the ban and allow new nuclear plants.

A new nuclear plant hasn’t been built in the United States since 1978, when concerns about safety, cost, and the long-term waste management challenge (nuclear rods will still be deadly hundreds of thousands of years from now) overwhelmed the industry.

But if there were ever an opportunity for a nuclear renaissance, the threat of climate change has created one. And the poster child is Moore, a relatively innocuous Greenpeace exile who’s traveling around the country with a B-movie version of Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, speaking to communities and drumming up what he calls a grassroots coalition of mayors, business leaders, and community activists. He’s steadily convincing them we need more nuclear power by trading the classic doomsday scenario of a massive radioactive explosion for the creeping killer global warming.

"I’m aghast," Dr. Helen Caldicott, an Australian who helped found Physicians for Social Responsibility and is one of the most prominent international critics of the dangers of nuclear energy, told us.

Caldicott, who’s authored several books on the subject, most recently Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (2006), said, "I’ve never seen a propaganda exercise which is so fallacious. Both the politicians and the media are buying it."

She and other nuclear watchdogs who’ve been patrolling the industry for more than 30 years say it’s anything but a safe, reliable, economic, and emissions-free silver bullet.

Let’s look at the facts.

SAFETY


When it comes to safety, Moore told us, "US nuclear power plant employees enjoy the so-called healthy worker effect: people employed at the plants have lower mortality rates from cancer, heart disease, or other causes and are likely to live longer than the general population."

To support this claim, he cited a 2004 Radiation Research Society study of 53,000 workers. After reviewing it, Caldicott said, "I’m very suspect. There’s nothing here about people who are living with cancer."

Caldicott admits there’s a void of data about the health of nuclear workers and people who live near plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t mandate baseline studies of cancer rates in areas surrounding the sites of nuclear facilities.

But people living near Three Mile Island, the Pennsylvania plant that came within minutes of a catastrophic meltdown in 1979, demanded studies, which found evidence of increases in thyroid cancer in the region. And Caldicott, in her recent book, pointed out that there are a number of things the government doesn’t want to admit. "To this day there is no available information about which specific isotopes escaped nor the actual quantity of radiation that was released," she wrote, going on to detail how, for lack of sufficient data about the distance the radiation may have spread, scientists studied the rates in the livestock of nearby fields and found supporting evidence that the plume of poison spread as far as 150 miles away.

And of course, there’s Chernobyl, where a 1986 nuclear-plant disaster caused lasting health problems and contaminated a huge swath of what was then the Soviet Union.

The unavoidable fact is that the industry thus far has had two terrible, nightmarish accidents, one of which was catastrophic and the other very nearly so.

And every part of the nuclear-power cycle involves serious health risks.

"You want to get really sad?" asked Molly Johnson, a lifelong environmental justice activist and San Luis Obispo County resident. "Go to New Mexico, go to Arizona, see the families that are dying because of the uranium mining. Their water is irradiated from the uranium tailings that are still there…. Why would we continue that?"

These days intentional attacks are even more of a concern. But Moore isn’t sweating. He said he thinks a plane colliding with a power plant is unlikely, even though the 9/11 Commission Report found that al-Qaeda operatives at one point considered aiming for the Indian Point reactor in New York.

Even if a jet hit a plant, Moore insists, the plant would be strong enough to withstand a collision. "If you drove an airplane into that, it would just be one messed-up airplane you’d have to deal with," he said.

Not exactly, say the critics.

"He is just dead wrong about reactor security. Breathtakingly misinformed," said Dan Hirsch of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a public interest group that’s been studying nuclear power and proliferation issues for nearly four decades. "Virtually no reactor containment in the US was designed to withstand a hit by a jumbo jet. Significant parts of the plant essential to preventing a meltdown are outside containment anyway."

Hirsch is speaking of power lines, which transmit electricity from the plant and also carry electricity to it — power that’s used to keep dangerous components cool and safe. If that power were cut off for any length of time, a meltdown could occur in the pools where explosive spent fuel is kept.

These spent-fuel storage areas — essentially big swimming pools where radioactive waste is kept underwater until a long-term storage facility is built — rely on a steady pumping of water to cool the superheated waste. All you’d have to do is stop that water pump, and there’d be a meltdown. And the storage areas don’t necessarily have the same fortified structures as the reactors.

Hirsch said, "A successful attack on a nuclear plant or, even worse, a spent-fuel pool would be the worst terrorist event to ever occur on earth by far, capable of killing over 100,000 people immediately and hundreds of thousands of latent cancers thereafter, contaminating an area the size of Pennsylvania for generations."

There’s no immediate solution in sight for long-term storage, so these pools of deadly waste will likely remain on reactor sites for many years.

San Luis Obispo County’s Mothers for Peace recently sued the NRC over the newly established laws regarding protection against terrorist attacks, which only require plants to be able to ward off five potential external terrorists on the ground. It took 19 people to pull off the Sept. 11 attacks. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that power plant operators must also consider the possibility of an air attack when designing spent-fuel storage tanks.

Mothers for Peace is fond of noting that existing security measures aren’t what you’d call foolproof. During a recent earthquake, 56 of 131 sirens in the San Luis Obispo area — designed to alert residents of a possible accident at the plant — didn’t go off because the power was out and they aren’t backed up by generators or batteries.

When Mothers for Peace and the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility brought the failure to the attention of the NRC, the agency said that nothing is perfect and that the sirens over the course of 1,000 hours worked 99 percent of the time.

"Except the five hours you’d actually want them to work," David Weisman of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility said.

Nuclear power is either a creeping killer or a sitting bomb. Wind farms and solar-panel arrays are not leaching poisons into the environment. They’re not direct targets for terrorist attacks, and if they were, the result wouldn’t be all that horrible. Imagine cleaning up a bombed wind farm versus a nuclear power plant.

"Wind farms are on nobody’s list of targets," Weisman added. "If a windmill falls and there’s no one there to hear it, do you need an emergency evacuation plan?"

RELIABILITY


A centerpiece of the pro-nuke argument is that nuclear power is a baseload source, meaning it can generate energy all day, every day. Solar and wind, of course, rely on the cruel (and unpredictable) forces of nature to generate power.

But one could argue the same about nuclear power plants. They’re run by people — and the record of those operators isn’t encouraging.

Moore expressed great confidence in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: "They have very, very stringent requirements and regulations. It’s all there for anybody to see. All of these reactors are inspected regularly. There is no reason in my estimation to suspect the NRC of anything other than being a responsible watchdog agency. If you want to take the time to dig into it, you can find out what’s going on."

David Lochbaum does take that time — and he’s found out a lot. After working for 17 years as a consultant to the NRC, he joined the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) as a nuclear-safety engineer. He spends his days combing NRC reports and documents and compiling studies on the safety of the industry. His experience and research have caused him to conclude that the commission can’t stay on top of the 103 plants in the country.

"We get a lot of calls from workers in the plants, and NRC employees that have safety issues they’re afraid to raise," he said. "We had three calls last week. That’s a little more than usual, but we usually get 50 to 60 whistleblower calls a year." He said sometimes the workers have already raised the issue internally but need an ally to force a remedy at the plant. Other times they’re afraid to speak about what they’ve seen without fear of retaliation.

Lochbaum authored a September 2006 study for the UCS titled "Walking the Nuclear Tightrope" on the issues of safety and reliability. It’s a chilling read; it carefully outlines how regulators have been complicit in allowing plants to operate far longer than they should and how these overstressed plants eventually have to be shut down for years to restore safety standards. He found that in the last 40 years plants have ground to a halt for a year or more on 51 occasions. In most cases it wasn’t a spontaneous incident but an overall decaying of conditions that compromised safety.

"Some observers have argued that the fact no US nuclear power reactor has experienced a meltdown since 1979 (during which time 45 year-plus outages have occurred) demonstrates the status quo is working successfully," Lochbaum wrote. "That’s as fallacious as arguing that the levees protecting New Orleans were fully adequate prior to Hurricane Katrina by pointing to the absence of similar disasters between 1980 and 2004."

One of the most recent and chilling examples is the 2002 outage of the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, where a hole the size of a football was discovered in the vessel reactor head. Only a half inch of steel remained to prevent a massive nuclear meltdown. The plant was overdue for a shutdown and an inspection and had been granted the extension by the NRC.

When asked what he thought about that close call, Moore said, "I didn’t think it was a close call. I thought it was a mechanical failure that should have been caught sooner. It was caught long before it became an accident or anything like that."

"When you say close call, that means that nothing actually happened," he concluded.

But when there’s a facility where an accident could lead to mass deaths, even close calls are grounds for concern. That’s why we have to hold nuclear plants to such high standards. And the fact that plants have to close so often to avoid disastrous accidents doesn’t say much for the reliability argument.

EMISSIONS


This may be the issue on which the pro-nukers make the most headway. Moore cites a number of international studies, posted on the NEI’s Web site, that show nuclear plants competing only with hydropower when it comes to emitting the lowest level of carbon dioxide. Even solar panels and wind turbines, when one factors in the entire energy process, emit more greenhouse gases, according to these studies, though all these power sources release significantly less than burning coal or natural gas.

The anti-nuke crowd says a true study has never been completed that quantifies the CO2 emissions from mining uranium and turning it into usable nuclear fuel. Both are heavily energy intensive. Additionally, they argue that transporting waste will incur even more CO2 emissions, whether it’s shipped across the sea for reprocessing in Europe or trucked across the country for burial in Yucca Mountain.

But the waste itself is also a huge issue. Although nuclear power plants don’t have bad breath, they do emit toxins — and it’s an unresolved issue as to where to put them. The current forecast for opening the Yucca Mountain repository is 2021. Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada opposes building the facility, and he’s pushing a bill that would require plants to keep the crud in their backyards.

"They’ve had 50 years to work on the waste issue," Weisman said. "And the best solution they’ve come up with is, who do we not like enough to send it to?"

Either way, Moore thinks waste is not a problem. If anything, it should be reprocessed — he likes to call it "recycling." Under that process, spent fuel is bathed in acid to separate out the usable plutonium. That can be followed by vitrification — a complex, energy-intensive process of suspending the highly radioactive and corrosive acid in glass, which is then sealed in expensive trash cans of steel and concrete and buried underground for at least 300 years, after which point he predicts it should no longer be a problem.

"It makes more fuel," he said.

Actually, Hirsch said, "it makes more weapons-grade plutonium." He argues that the last thing the nation should do is allow nuclear-plant operators to separate the plutonium and put it on the market, where it can be leaked for bomb making.

Additionally, there are a number of waste sites around the country that are slowly emitting what they’ve been designed — or not designed in some cases — to contain.

The worst is probably in Hanford, Wash., where decades’ worth of reprocessed spent radioactive fuel pushed the area beyond Superfund status into a "national nuclear waste sacrifice zone.

"Hanford is the most contaminated site in North America and one of the most significant long-term threats facing the Columbia River," Greg deBruler, of Columbia Riverkeeper, wrote in the Fall 2006 issue of Waterkeeper, the group’s quarterly journal. "It’s difficult to comprehend the reality of Hanford’s 150 square miles of highly contaminated groundwater or its 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste sitting in 45-year-old rotting steel tanks."

Much of that waste includes leftover reprocessed spent uranium fuel, which ate through its casks and poisoned the community’s drinking water.

Moore said, "It’s not as if everyone is dead. The nuclear waste has been contained."

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

ECONOMICS


"The economics of nuclear power are well proven around the world. It is one of the most cost-effective forms of energy," Moore said.

Just check the record. Of the 103 reactors that were built in the United States, 75 ran a total of $100 billion over budget. India more recently went 300 percent over budget on its 10 reactors. Finland is already 18 months behind and $1 billion over on a reactor.

Given this track record, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration "Annual Energy Outlook 2005" reported that "new plants are not expected to be economical." They’re so risky, in fact, that not a single plant could have been built without the 1957 Price-Anderson act, which moves the liability for a nuke plant off its owners and onto US taxpayers. "If they were really economical, they’d be able to get insurance," Weisman said. The bill was recently renewed.

The nuclear industry forges on unperturbed, claiming that new plants have been streamlined for easier construction. Additionally, the siting and licensing laws for plants have been changed to speed up the process by precluding public input. (Given the industry’s safety record so far, that’s not comforting.) Experts predict it will now take 10 years to build a new nuclear plant. Thirty-four licenses are currently pending at the NRC as utility companies race to secure the $8 billion the federal government set aside for subsidies.

"Imagine how many wind turbines that could buy," said Harvey Wasserman, a longtime anti-nuke activist who recently authored the book Solartopia, which outlines a plan for completely renewable energy by 2030. In fact, renewables are far cheaper. Building the facilities to create one gigawatt of wind power costs about $1.5 billion; about two gigawatts could replace the Diablo Canyon Power Plant.

THE BOTTOM LINE


In the end, it comes down to money, and that’s where nuclear power may be the most vulnerable.

Sam Blakeslee, a Republican Assembly member from San Luis Obispo, introduced a bill last year that calls on the California Energy Commission (CEC) to conduct an in-depth study of the true costs of nuclear power to assess its viability as part of California’s future energy plans. The bill passed unanimously, and Schwarzenegger signed it.

"This will be cradle to grave," said Weisman, of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, which has focused its scrutiny on the industry’s costs.

The group has long been suspicious of PG&E’s financial woes, which came to a head this past March when the California Public Utilities Commission allowed the company to use $16.8 million from ratepayers to fund its in-house study of relicensing its two nuclear plants. "The licenses won’t be up until 2023 and 2025, so why are they looking at relicensing now — and why does it cost $16.8 million when the state’s study is projected to cost $800,000?" Weisman asked.

Assemblymember Mark Leno (D–San Francisco) is introducing a bill this year that will undercut PG&E’s study before the CEC’s analysis is completed, which is expected to occur around November 2008.

"Our very simple idea here is that before any relicensing of our aging nuclear power plants can proceed, the CEC study be completed," Leno said. "Clearly, PG&E is very eager to move forward its relicensing process. They have many years to accomplish that task."

Leno said the stakes are too high and the inherent risks of the toxins already accumulated in seismic zones along the coast need to be carefully weighed against the prospects of generating even more waste. "We should proceed with absolute caution, forethought, and consideration."

NOWHERE TO RUN


Those risks, that caution, are something that never leaves the minds of the people who live in the plants’ fallout zones, areas as vast as a steady breeze or trickling flow of water can make them. That’s really the problem with nuclear power plants. After 50 years there are still too many unknowns. In Moore’s lectures and during interviews and debates, the former Greenpeace activist likes to say more people are killed by car accidents and machetes than by nuclear power plants, but that mocks the magnitude of a meltdown.

A car accident kills at most a few people. A machete attack might kill one person. A nuclear accident has the potential to inflict casualties in the tens of thousands, maybe even millions, and to render entire cities uninhabitable. And while most of the time, most of the plants may be perfectly problem free, it only takes one accident to wreak environmental havoc.

These days opposition to nuclear energy isn’t about mass protests in the streets. "When KQED calls and asks for the sounds of a protest, I say that’s not how it happens," Weisman said while showing a DVD of a Jan. 31 San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission meeting that droned on for more than 12 hours. The meeting ultimately resulted in what he’d hoped for: a continuing delay of PG&E’s permit to site new dry-cask storage tanks for thousands of tons of nuclear waste accumuutf8g at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. He and Rochelle Becker, the group’s director, sat through the whole thing. "That’s what protesting is now," he said.

Becker, a pert, soft-spoken woman with the aging visage of the youngest grandmother in the room, said correctness is crucial. "Never, ever exaggerate. When they want to talk about safety issues and isotopes, we refer them to someone else because we don’t have that expertise. All we have is our credibility, and if we lose our credibility, we don’t have anything."

THE PLUTONIUM PAYCHECK


Which makes what Moore is doing look like such a travesty.

"Maybe we should hire Hill and Knowlton," joked James Riccio, Greenpeace’s nuclear-policy analyst in Washington, DC, on thinking about gearing up for a new wave of anti-nuke activism.

To Riccio, Wasserman, Weisman, Hirsch, Caldicott, and many others who spoke with the Guardian, Moore is nothing but a dangerous distraction who’s getting the wrong kind of attention. Wasserman disputed Moore’s credentials as a Greenpeace founder in the Burlington Free Press article "The Sham of Patrick Moore."

When questioned by the Guardian, Moore called Wasserman a jerk. Moore said he’s still an activist — and in addition to parroting for the nuclear industry, he runs a sustainability consulting company, Greenspirit Strategies, which advises industries on controversial subjects like genetically modifying organisms, clear-cutting, and fish farming. His clients include hazardous waste, timber, biotech, aquaculture, and chemical companies, in addition to conventional utilities that process nuclear power and natural gas.

Moore insists he’s not hiding anything. "In every interview I do the reporter already knows that I’m cochair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and that I work for the nuclear industry," he told us.

But Moore did not identify himself as such during a lengthy interview with us until we asked. The disclosure was also missing during the long biographical presentation given to the folks in Fresno on Feb. 22, which did include pictures of his Rainbow Warrior days. Again, on May 24, Moore didn’t mention his plutonium paycheck during a radio debate on KZYX. Neither did the moderator, and it was only when Hirsch, his debating partner, got a moment to speak that it was revealed. "Let’s be clear here, Patrick," Hirsch said. "You’re being paid by the industry." *

Joseph Plaster, Andrew Oliver, and Sam Draisin helped research this story.