Economy

Akerlof and Stiglitz: Let A Hundred Theories Bloom

-
0

George Akerlof, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Joseph E. Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University and winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize, served as Chairman of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Let A Hundred Theories Bloom is from Project Syndicate’s Unconventional Economic Wisdom series.

Let A Hundred Theories Bloom

By George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz

BUDAPEST – The economic and financial crisis has been a telling moment for the economics profession, for it has put many long-standing ideas to the test. If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern.

But there is, in fact, a much greater diversity of ideas within the economics profession than is often realized. This year’s Nobel laureates in economics are two scholars whose life work explored alternative approaches. Economics has generated a wealth of ideas, many of which argue that markets are not necessarily either efficient or stable, or that the economy, and our society, is not well described by the standard models of competitive equilibrium used by a majority of economists.

Beer here!

-
0
Beer here!

molly@sfbg.com

It all started with Stella.

I’d made my weekly (OK, sometimes twice or thrice-weekly) stop at Amnesia and ordered a pint of the Belgian lager not-so-affectionately known among beer snobs as "British Budweiser." Why Stella? It’s light, easy to drink a lot of, and feels classier than PBR. So when I’m not on a $2-a-beer budget, Stella Artois is often what I order.

This time, however, the mustachioed bartender Matthew Harman didn’t simply poor me a glass. It was earlier than usual. He had some time. And he knew me well enough to guess I might be open to the speech he was about to give.

"Do you really want a Stella?" he asked. "Because there are better beers that aren’t shipped halfway across the world and owned by InBev." I consented to let him give me tastes of alternatives and eventually settled on a slightly more hoppy but equally drinkable lager from Sudwerk brewery in Davis.

I enjoyed the beer. But better yet, I enjoyed the wake-up call. Though I’ve become accustomed to buying groceries, clothing, gifts, coffee, and even liquor from local, independent manufacturers and retailers, when it comes to beer, I’ve been lazy. I don’t think before I drink.

What’s worse? I live in the land of craft brews. Though there are now 1,500 craft breweries nationwide, the movement started in Northern California, Oregon, and Washington — with flagship brands like Anchor, Pyramid, and Anderson Valley within driving distance (or, in the case of Anchor, a stone’s throw) from my office. And as the industry has grown and changed, there are ever more options for a range of palates — and purses. In short: there’s little excuse for thoughtless imbibing.

So why drink local? First, there’s the environmental reason: it requires a lot of energy to ship all those heavy bottles and kegs full of liquid across the country and around the world. Then there’s wanting to support the local economy: money spent on Bay Area businesses stays in the Bay Area. There’s the more intangible concept of local pride. "We support our lousy local sports teams," says Lars Larson, master brewer at Berkeley’s Trumer Brauerei. "Why not support our local brewing excellence?" And perhaps most important is taste: beer, like produce and dairy products, is best when fresh.

But the world of beer-making is complex. When it comes to assessing a brewery’s greenness, for example, the question often becomes: how green? If you grow your own hops but send them to Wisconsin for brewing, is that still environmentally sound? Or if a brewery is based in Seattle but makes beer in Berkeley, does it still support the local economy? The answers vary and can be subjective. But the good news is that whatever the reason for wanting to choose brews more thoughtfully, there’s a nearby option — or 12 — to satisfy it.

If you still just love the taste of Stella, or want an import that has no local substitute (like Guinness), or appreciate that the Budweiser you’re sipping was probably made in a brewery 60 miles away, well, more power to you. Even Harman won’t argue (though he’ll happily give tastings of alternatives to anyone who stops by the Valencia Street bar Sundays at 6 p.m.). The real point is to use the same criteria for choosing beer — values, politics, and palate — you do for food and wine. Here’s hoping our guide to some of the Bay Area’s famed and favorite breweries will help you make that decision.

ANCHOR BREWING COMPANY


This landmark brewery has existed in one form or another since 1896, making it the granddaddy of Bay Area brewing. Its current identity comes to us with thanks to Fritz Maytag, who bought 51 percent of the operation in 1965 and is still the driving force behind the company best known for its unique Anchor Steam beer. We love Anchor’s handcrafted brews, commitment to the community, and willingness to experiment with new ideas, including distilling gin and whiskey.

1705 Mariposa, SF. (415) 863-8350, www.anchorbrewing.com

ANDERSON VALLEY BREWING COMPANY


This pillar of the Bay Area craft brew scene has been building its reputation on balanced, drinkable options like Boont Amber since 1987. Other favorites include the nearly hopless Summer Solstice, the oh-so-hoppy Hop Ottin’ IPA, and the Brother David line of abbey-style ales (named for Toronado owner David Keene). But we’re particularly excited about the 2009 Estate Fresh Hop beer, produced with hops grown on brewery grounds (where, by the way, all water is taken from wells on the property and all beer is made in a facility that’s 40 percent solar-powered).

17700 Hwy 253, Boonville. (707) 895-2337, www.avbc.com

MOONLIGHT BREWING


Beer drinkers looking for a truly local, truly independent brewery need look no further than this Sonoma County one-man operation. Well-respected brewer Brian Hunt established the tiny business in 1992 and still delivers his keg-only offerings like Death and Taxes black beer, Reality Czeck pils, and Homegrown Fresh Hop Ale himself. Hunt also has been growing a share of his hops onsite since 2003.

Santa Rosa. (707) 528-2537, www.moonlightbrewing.com

PYRAMID BREWING COMPANY


One of the first craft breweries to appear on the public’s radar, this Seattle-based company also has been operating out of its Berkeley brewery and alehouse since 1997. Until recently, Pyramid operated as a publicly-owned company; now it is part of the Independent Brewers Union. Under this arrangement, the brewery is owned by East Coast brewers Mad Hat but conducts its business as an autonomous unit. The company also has revamped its image, renaming classics like Pyramid Hefeweizen (now Haywire Hefeweizen) and Pyramid Apricot Ale (now Audacious Apricot Ale) and introducing a host of new offerings — some only available at Pyramid brewpubs. But with locations in Sacramento, Walnut Creek, and Berkeley, that means plenty of access to exclusives like the nitrogenated Draught Pale Ale or the session beer Crystal Wheat Ale.

901 Gilman, Berk. (510) 527-9090, www.pyramidbrew.com

RUSSIAN RIVER


Now based in Santa Rosa, the brewery most famous for its Pliny the Elder Double IPA used to be owned by Korbel Champagne Cellars. Vinnie Cilurzo and his partner bought the business in 2003, but have continued to combine aspects of both industries, including a line of beers that are aged in used wine barrels from local wineries. Look for tasting nights of this special line, nicknamed the "’Tion" beers, at pubs like Toronado.

725 Fourth St., Santa Rosa; (707) 545-BEER, www.russianriverbrewing.com

SIERRA NEVADA


The big news surrounding the Chico-based brewery that introduced much of America to Pale Ale is its upcoming Estate Harvest Ale, inspired by the winemaking of its Napa and Sonoma neighbors and made with hops and barley grown onsite. Also exciting? Two collaborations with Maryland-based brewery Dogfish Head — Limb and Life, released on draft this month, and Life and Limb, due out in 24-oz bottles and limited draft in November.

1075 E. 20th St., Chico. (530) 893-3520, www.sierranevada.com

SPEAKEASY ALES & LAGERS


Many beer drinkers gravitate to Speakeasy because of the distinctive, noir-feeling of its packaging and stay for the big, satisfying taste of classics like Big Daddy I.P.A. and Prohibition Ale. Though the Bayview-based brewery’s offerings are available on tap and in the bottle all over the Bay Area, we suggest visiting a Firkin’ Friday happy hour open house at the brewery from 4 to 9 p.m. every week.

1195 Evans Ave, SF. (415) 64-BEER-1, www.goodbeer.com

TRUMER BRAUEREI


This Berkeley brewery encompasses what’s advantageous about imported and local beers. The only non-Austrian outlet for this 400-year-old recipe gets many of its ingredients from its sister company in Salzburg. But bottles, packaging, and, of course, the beer, all are made in the East Bay. What makes Trumer special is a process called "endosperm mashing," which means brewers separate the barley husks from the starchy endosperm during milling, then reintroduce them at the end of the process to highlight the warm, toasty flavor of the malt. Trumer also uses a process called krausening, a slow, secondary fermentation that helps build natural carbonation. (One reason for its signature glassware is to show off the tiny Champagne-like bubbles.)

1404 Fourth St., Berk. (510) 526-1160

21ST AMENDMENT


This Prohibition-themed South Park brewery has been getting lots of attention lately for its canned craft beers — Hell or High Watermelon Wheat Beer and Brew Free! Or Die IPA — and for good reason. Though cans are the best way to keep beer fresh (since sunlight can’t penetrate metal), convenient for carrying, allowed at locales where glass isn’t, and (let’s face it) good for shotgunning, the delivery method has long been associated with cheap, watery beer. But this stigma seems to be slowly eroding, thanks in no small part to forward-thinking breweries like 21st Amendment.

563 Second St., SF. (415) 369-0900, www.21st-amendment.com

We realize that this list is only a tiny glimpse at the myriad breweries, alehouses, brewpubs, and better beer bars in and around the Bay Area. Indeed, Northwest Brewing News lists more than 100 such places between Bakersfield and Blue Lake — and we’re willing to bet there are many more. Check our Web site for information and extended interviews about breweries like Bear Republic, Shmaltz, Thirsty Bear, Triple Rock, and Magnolia, plus recommendations from beer experts at Toronado, City Beer, and Healthy Spirits.

Still think we’re missing someone? Let us know.

———

Light beer’s plight

I like to drink beers. Plural. I’m the guy the ad men were thinking of in that classic jingle, the one that goes "Shaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one." One summer a few years back, my friends and I polished off 1,000 cans of beer over a four-day weekend on Lake Shasta; there were only about 10 of us drinking. Do the math on that one, and you get a sense of my taste for the blessed amber fluid.

But that was then, and this is now. And today I have two kids who wake up at 6 a.m. and keep me on the go day and night; I’m not as young as I used to be; and I can’t handle the intoxication the way I once did.

But I still drink beers, plural, every day, and I’m not about to give it up. What I’ve done is switched to light beer. Correction: "Light" is a bad word. Among serious drinkers, it’s called "session beer."

It’s a choice more and more people are making in this country — beer with lower alcohol content is one of the fastest growing parts of the industry. But it presents a problem: how do you drink local (and high quality beer) when most of the craft breweries and brewpubs focus almost entirely on the heavy and the strong?

Quick definition here: light beer is generally promoted and advertised as having fewer calories than regular brew. But I could care less about beer making me fat (I can always give up food). What I’m talking about is what’s known in the business as ABV; that’s alcohol by volume. Typical American beer — say, Budweiser — runs about 5 percent. Typical craft brew — say, Anchor Liberty Ale — is about 6 percent. The more serious stuff is even stronger — Lagunitas Maximum India Pale Ale, for example, clocks in at 7 percent.

Typical light beer — say, Bud Light, at 4.2 percent ABV — has almost 20 percent less alcohol than Bud, 30 percent less than Liberty Ale, and only about half as much as some of the more extreme brews.

And for those of us who would rather have four light beers than two Imperial Red Ales (and really — in America, is that even a choice?), the craft brew pickings are fairly slim. Especially in Northern California.

"You are living in the land of the IPA," Bill Manley, communications coordinator for Sierra Nevada brewery, which makes no lighter beers, told me.

It’s not as if we’re without choices. Anchor makes a Small Beer (with the leftovers from it’s brutally strong Barleywine Ale) that comes in at about 3.5 percent ABV, but you almost never see it in stores. The 21st Amendment brewpub makes an excellent Great American Bitter that meets the session-beer standard of less than 4.5 percent. Magnolia makes an English Mild, and there’s Stone Levitation Ale (4.4 percent). But again: check out most liquor stores and none of those are on the shelf.

Across the country, that’s starting to change. Lew Bryson, a beer writer and blogger in Pennsylvania, has started the Session Beer Project (sessionbeerproject.blogspot.com) to share information about full-flavored, high-quality brews that don’t knock you silly after a bottle or two. "There are more people like us than most craft brewers would credit," Bryson told me.

The term "session beer" comes from England. By some accounts, it dates back to World War II when pubs were only open for short "sessions" so the workers could get back to the munitions plants in a relatively functional state. By Bryson’s definition, a session beer has an ABV below 4.5 percent and doesn’t overwhelm the party.

There are distinct advantages to lower-alcohol beers. "I was at a session brew festival two years ago and went through six pints in about two hours," he said. "I keep a Breathalyzer in my car, and when it was time to go home, I blew .02" — well within the legal limit in every state in America.

A brewpub near Bryson’s house on the outskirts of Philly sells a Belgian ale called Mirage with an ABV of just 2.9 percent. "I can have a couple of pints with lunch and it doesn’t blow my entire afternoon," he said.

Yet the reluctance remains. "A lot of brewers, they hear low-alcohol and they think light beer — and that’s the enemy," Bryson said.

Mike Riley, marketing director at Anderson Valley Brewing that makes no beer with less than 5 percent ABV, added: "It’s one of those stigmas that’s gone on for a long time."

In fact, I could only find one craft brewer in the country that actually makes a "light" beer: Minhas Brewery in Monroe, Wis., which makes Huber Light and Minhas Light. "People were asking for it," Gary Olsen, the brewery manager told me. "Our first reaction was, why make something that doesn’t taste like anything? But we found out you can make a very good lighter beer."

Yes, indeed. And when Anchor starts making (and marketing) Liberty Ale Light, I promise — I’ll give up Bud Light forever. (Tim Redmond)

Fall Feast 2009

-
0
Fall Feast 2009

Man (and woman) cannot live on PBR and pasta alone. I should know. I spent the whole summer trying. But now that my leftover Burning Man groceries are gone and the weather’s getting colder, I can’t help but crave real food again. And what better time and place is there to be really, really hungry for a substantial meal made with fresh ingredients than right now in San Francisco? Despite the struggling economy, innovative restaurants keep popping up — and the old classics are offering better deals. Plus, the changing culinary landscape has led to all kinds of fun, cheap, gourmet alternatives like pop-ups, lunch carts, and temporary restaurants-within-a-restaurant. This edition of FEAST, our drinking and dining magazine, focuses on what we love about the Bay Area’s food scene, from innovative locales to cross-cultural alternatives, from wintery suppers to summery desserts (after all, how cold does it ever really get here?), and from new restaurants to a niche bookstore that only a foodie-city like San Francisco could support. Whether you’re ready to start your Thanksgiving feasting early or are simply transitioning out of your warm-weather diet (or budget), we’re sure you’ll find something in the coming pages to satisfy your cravings. Unless, that is, you’re looking for PBR and pasta. You’ll have to take care of that one on your own — or wait ’til next summer. (Molly Freedenberg)


>>10 latest, greatest openings


>>6 supper-worthy soups


>>4 fine wine bars


>>6 innovative ice creams


>>4 phenomenal falafels


>>A readable feast: Q&A with Omnivore’s Celia Sacks

Killing the dream

-
0
Killing the dream

tredmond@sfbg.com

When the first issue of the Bay Guardian hit the stands in 1966, it was still really possible to talk about the California dream. The state had seemingly limitless potential and was in many way a model for the nation — a free public university system that was the envy of the world, an economy that provided jobs to hundreds of thousands of new arrivals, the beginnings of what would be the nation’s premier environmental movement pushing to save San Francisco Bay, save the coast, save Lake Tahoe … and the Free Speech Movement, the Summer of Love, the United Farm Workers Union, and so much more that was transforming politics and culture in the United States from the West Coast.

Twelve years later, it was all falling apart. Eight years of Gov. Ronald Reagan and then the passage of Proposition 13 launched a very different kind of movement out of the West, a movement that sought to dismantle the public sector and the social safety net, to treat government as the enemy, and to use culture wars to convince working-class Americans to vote against their own economic interests.

And now California is being described as the nation’s first failed state. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — the second Republican actor to hold that role — has driven the state to the brink of bankruptcy. The University of California is drowning in red ink, raising fees and turning away students. The state’s water system is a mess; cities and counties are in fiscal collapse; the economy’s in the tank; and nobody seriously talks about a California dream anymore.

The story of how that happened — and how the diseases of tax-revolts, privatization, government corruption, and public disempowerment spread east from California — is the focus of this 43rd anniversary issue. It’s both enlightening and a bit scary to read through old issues, because in hundreds of stories over the past four decades, the Guardian has warned of exactly what was to come.

The very first issue of the Bay Guardian talked about the "historic election" pitting the incumbent, Democrat Pat Brown, against Reagan. A lot of people in the emerging "new left" were arguing that there wasn’t a bit of difference between the two, and that you might as well sit out the election. But the Guardian had a different take. The election was really about the direction California wanted to go, the paper said, a choice between a state that cares about the public sector and social welfare and a state where those things don’t matter.

"Reagan’s stands typify the temper of the cause," the Nov. 7, 1966 editorial stated. "He is on record, at various times, in opposition to the progressive income tax, Social Security, Medicare, the anti-poverty program, farm subsidies, the TVA, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, public housing, federal aid to education, and veterans hospitalization for anything other than service-connected disabilities. How can a man or a movement govern the state of California with such a political philosophy?"

Reagan’s election may have seemed like a fluke, but it was nothing of the sort. By the mid 1960s, with the counterculture — and equally important, the economic left — looking to make major inroads in American policy, the broad outlines of a right-wing attack plan were in place.

That’s something the Guardian always recognized — that powerful people who moved the levers of government typically did so with a long-term plan.

In San Francisco, part of that plan was the transformation of a human-scale city to a West Coast version of Manhattan. The idea: tear up South of Market (then mostly low-income housing) for a shiny new convention center and hotels. Dump dozens of big high-rise office buildings downtown. Construct a fixed-rail system to carry suburban commuters into the dense downtown. Drive up property values — massively — and if that means blue collar jobs and working class people had to go to make way for wealthier office workers, so be it. In the end, of course, the architects of the plan — landowners, developers, bankers, and big business leaders — became immensely wealthy.

On the state and national level, their plans were broader. Even so, they had one major aim: throttle the pubic sector. Cut off the funding for government programs, reduce regulations, undermine any concept of a welfare estate — and cut taxes on the rich.

As we report on page 8, the architects of this plan are happy today to talk about how it worked — how Reagan launched his war on government back in the 1970s, how a group of well-funded think tanks developed plans, and political consultants took advantage of people’s fears (and the Democratic Party’s failures) to put those plans into action.

The movement really got off the ground in 1978 with the passage of Proposition 13.

Prop. 13 emerged from a state in the middle of a massive growth spurt and a heated political cauldron of money, race, and Legislative failure. Howard Jarvis, a Republican landlord lobbyist who hated taxes, hated government, hated public schools, and disdained most Californians — "63 percent of [public school] graduates are illiterate" and would have no need for public libraries, he once quipped — took advantage of a gaping hole in political leadership and set off a movement that would cripple the United States of America.

The measure marked the final, fatal end in California of the era known as the ’60s — a period when the left was ascendant, when taxes on the wealthy funded education, infrastructure and programs for inner cities, and when economic and cultural liberalization seemed to be spreading across the nation.

Rising property values, driven by rapid population growth, were driving up property taxes — and the problem was real. Long-time residents, particularly people on fixed incomes, saw their taxes rise so high they couldn’t afford to stay in their homes. The Legislature could have addressed that (with, say, a split-roll measure that taxed residential and commercial property at different rates) but utterly failed to move on the crisis.

A series of assessor’s office scandals didn’t help, either. And, at the same time, the California Supreme Court ruled that rich school districts had to share revenue with poor districts, infuriating wealthy white property owners.

Jarvis and his partner Paul Gann circulated petitions to roll back property taxes and make it almost impossible to raise taxes in the future. It passed with 65 percent of the vote.

Of course, big businesses (particularly utilities) were the big winners. As the Guardian pointed out on June 1, 1978, the top five utilities in California alone (including Pacific Gas and Electric Co.) would gain billions from the tax cuts.

But beneath it all was a simmering discontent with government — something Jarvis had set afire and would later be used by Ronald Reagan and the right-wing operatives who backed him to undermine the New Deal, the social safety net, and the basic social contract in America. The antitax folks played to white people who didn’t want to see their money going to minorities, to the middle-class folks who thought (thanks to the assessor scandals) their tax money was being wasted by corruption — and to a lot of younger people coming out of the 1960s who had learned from Vietnam, COINTELPRO, and Watergate not to trust government.

The Bay Guardian opposed the measure strongly: "Most analyses indicate that without replacement taxes, hundreds of thousands of California public servants would be thrown out of work (which is exactly what Howard Jarvis intends) … " a May 18, 1978 editorial noted. "Vote for Prop. 13 only if you favor decreased government services (including cutbacks in everything from libraries to schools to street-cleaning crews and possibly police and fire departments) and are fond of half-baked measures that favor the rich."

Prop. 13 set off a national movement to cut taxes — and riding that wave, Reagan was elected president in 1980. He immediately set about attempting to slash taxes on big business and the wealthiest Americans, and eliminate environmental, workplace safety, and employment regulations.

You can see the results in California — and across the nation. The very strategies that emerged in this state and that the right has supported over the years have come very close to destroying the United States economy, leaving millions out of work — while the gap between the rich and the poor has risen to unsustainable levels.

Part of the reason this national attack on government and the public sector worked was the failure of Democrats to recognize that corruption matters. It was no small wonder that Californians were losing faith in government — in the 1970s and 1980s, the state Legislature, under the Democratic control of Speaker Willie Brown, was awash in sleaze, paralyzed by lobbyist influence and campaign money. Yet leading Democrats, fearful of Brown’s power, did little to reign in the appalling corruption.

In fact, when Brown became mayor of San Francisco, the entire Democratic Party, from the president of the United States on down, seemed to treat him as royalty — despite the fact that he was selling the city to every developer and corporate lobbyist who waved money under his nose. When taxpayers knew that a large part of their money was going to fund juicy jobs for Brown’s cronies and pet projects, it was hard to argue for higher taxes.

And it was the Democratic Party leadership in San Francisco who presided over two of the greatest examples of privatization of public resources in modern history: the Presidio and the Raker Act. Rep. Nancy Pelosi was the author of the bill that, for the first time, turned a national park over to the private sector — and hardly a Democratic leader in the city dared to lift a finger in opposition. And for decades — since the Guardian first broke the story in 1969 — the city’s Democratic power brokers have bowed and genuflected to PG&E and allowed the private utility to control the local electric grid and block implantation of the federal law that mandates public power for San Francisco.

And now PG&E wants to pull off one of the greatest feats of privatization in American history. The company has launched a ballot initiative that would wipe out any further attempts at public power in California, essentially guaranteeing that private companies, not the public sector, control the vast, critical resource of electric power in this state.

It’s the latest big battle between two divergent visions of America — and this time, the folks who have done so much damage to this state and this nation can’t be allowed to win. In fact, maybe the campaign against PG&E can be the turning point, the time when California realizes that privatization, attacks on the public sector, tax cuts for the rich, and political sleaze are a formula for disaster.

The lesson of California

-
0
The lesson of California

news@sfbg.com

Much of the right-wing agenda that has thrown this nation into economic chaos can be traced back to what was once called the Golden State.

The tax revolts that started here under Gov. Ronald Reagan and continued to sweep the country and the world under President Reagan never abated. Indeed, they have only been strengthened by the big business power that created and benefited from them.

But now that California is showing signs of being the country’s first failed state — caught in fiscal freefall and mired in political gridlock as a generation’s worth of neglected problems surge to the surface — this state has become a cautionary tale for that anti-government ideology.

Trends in America tend to start out west, and the economic and political disaster that California has become contains critical lessons for the rest of the country.

Lewis Uhler — president and founder of the National Tax Limitation Committee — speaks candidly and proudly of his key early role in helping build a conservative movement to limit the size of government and do battle with those who want the public sector to actively promote social and economic justice.

Uhler, a UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law graduate who did legal work for conservative causes in the 1960s, was tapped by then-Gov. Reagan in 1970 to be the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, a federally-funded legal assistance program created as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty.

While that may seem like a strange role for an avowed conservative and former member of the John Birch Society, Uhler says Reagan basically brought him in to wreck the program and fight the feds. “I was asked to put my money where my mouth was for my conservative philosophy,” Uhler told the Guardian. “OEO was set up to ensure conflict and confrontation … The mission of legal services was to change public policy through lawsuits they decided to file. I thought it was a corruption of the legal system.”

At the time, public-interest law and liberal economic and social policies were on the rise in California and spreading to the rest of the nation. So the Reaganites fought back.

Rather than helping poor plaintiffs file environmental, consumer protection, equal rights, or other types of lawsuits designed to level the playing field with powerful interests, Uhler blocked lawsuits brought by attorneys he calls “ambulance-chasers” and gutted the program. “Ultimately,” he said, “we vetoed funding for California Rural Legal Assistance.”

And for his efforts, Uhler was rewarded with a cabinet-level position: assistance secretary of the Health and Welfare Agency. Again, his role wasn’t to make the agency more effective, but to make it less effective in a realm where he believes government was too big and too active.

“The problem was uncontrolled state and local spending,” Uhler said. “Intuitively, everyone who gathered around Reagan shared the same philosophy that government doesn’t really contribute anything to economic growth.”

In 1972, Reagan gave Uhler the opportunity to work more directly on the mission of cutting taxes and shrinking the size of government, naming him chair of the Governor’s Tax Reduction Task Force. It was, in many ways, the beginning of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

“I asked to be given the chance to go across the country and find the best free market minds in the country to develop these policies,” Uhler said, explaining that he wanted to borrow the liberal strategy of giving an academic veneer to their ideas, as presidents Kennedy and Johnson had done in the realm of foreign policy. “Our side had never really done that.”

Uhler’s first stop was the University of Chicago School of Economics, where he met with noted free market economists Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and George Stigler, who were brought into the cause.

Today’s vast network of conservative think tanks didn’t exist at that time, so Uhler tapped conservative thinkers from the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, as well as other conservative economists such as Peter Drucker from Claremont McKenna College.

“There were 35 people who helped us design the first effort at a constitutional initiative in California to limit year-over-year growth of the state’s general fund,” Uhler said. “All of us as free market enthusiasts and economists all shared the belief that government beyond a certain level eats the seed corn of the nation and doesn’t produce anything.”

While voters narrowly rejected their group’s first effort to cap government growth — Proposition 1 on the November 1973 ballot — the ground had been prepared and the seeds had been sown for the tax revolts that would sweep the country in the late 1970s, with many of the campaigns coordinated by Uhler and the organization he formed for that purpose in 1975, the National Tax Limitation Committee, and a rapidly growing network of similar, interconnected organizations.

As Uhler worked with Reagan to weaken California’s government from within, his fellow travelers were developing national and international strategies to create aggressive, coordinated, well-funded campaigns to attack government and spread the free market dogma.

In August 1971, Lewis Powell — a conservative corporate attorney who President Richard Nixon had just nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court (where he served from 1972-87) — wrote a confidential memorandum to the leadership of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.”

He sounded the alarm that the ascendant environmental and consumer movements were going to destroy capitalism in the country unless corporate America aggressively fought back in a coordinated fashion, which he spelled out in great detail.

He called for all major corporations to develop aggressive legal and public relations strategies for fighting the left, creation of a network of think tanks and media outlets to push the conservative message, manipulation of the legal system, and sponsorship of university programs to study conservative ideas and incubate future leaders — which all came to pass in the coming decades.

“American business [is] ‘plainly in trouble’; the response to the wide range of critics has been ineffective and has included appeasement: the time has come — indeed, it is long overdue — for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it,” Powell wrote.

Part of that strategy involved having the federal government promote and popularize free market economic theories being developed by Friedman and his colleagues at the University of Chicago, a movement that is well-documented by journalist Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

In 1971, Friedman and his colleagues began working with rich conservatives in Chile who were allied with Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who in turn were conspiring with the CIA to overthrow and assassinate the democratically elected, leftist President Salvador Allende, which they successfully did on Sept. 11, 1973.

Friedman’s economic theories called for a radical restructuring of society — slashing taxes and social spending; removing most regulation and trade restrictions; crushing labor unions; promoting economic growth at any cost — and Pinochet executed the strategy in brutal fashion, ordering the death of at least 3,200 of his political opponents, including the car-bomb assassination of economist Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., in 1976.

Friedman and Pinochet consulted openly and shared a basic disdain for social programs and progressive taxation. “The major error, in my opinion,” Friedman wrote in a letter to Pinochet in 1975, referring to the government antipoverty programs Pinochet dismantled, was “to believe that it is possible to do good with other people’s money.”

The model Pinochet and Friedman developed in Chile would eventually go global — promoted by its top cheerleaders, Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — and be implemented (with disastrous results for most citizens but creating huge profits for wealthy individuals and corporations) in Indonesia, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Russia, Poland, South Africa, Japan, and elsewhere.

But with the corporate media and conservative opinion-shapers focused mostly on economic growth — ignoring persistent poverty and the brutal tactics used to suppress the popular movements that tried to resist Friedman’s “economic shock therapy” — Friedman had become a sort of free-market prophet by the time he died in 2006.

“In the torrent of words written in eulogy to Milton Friedman, the role of shocks and crises to advance his worldview received barely a mention,” Klein wrote. “Instead, the economist’s passing provided an occasion for a retelling of the official story of how his brand of radical capitalism became government orthodoxy in almost every corner of the globe.”

California’s fiscal shackles have been in place since 1978, when Proposition 13 and subsequent measures capped property taxes and required an undemocratic two-thirds vote to either raise taxes or pass the annual budget.

A Republican landlord lobbyist named Howard Jarvis charged onto the field that Reagan, Uhler, and their team had prepared and took advantage of a gaping hole in political leadership to set off a movement that would cripple the United States of America.

There was some logic to it then. Times were good in California in the 1970s, good enough that people were flocking to the state by the millions. That was driving up property values — and thus property taxes.

Jarvis bought his home for $8,000 in 1946; 30 years later, it was assessed at $80,000. In fact, inflation was running at close to 10 percent a year in California. Homeowners were getting huge tax hikes each year, and tenants were getting huge rent hikes at a time when state government had a budget surplus.

Homeowners saw millions of dollars sitting in the coffers in Sacramento while they couldn’t pay their tax bills. Yet nobody in the Legislature or governor’s office came up with a solution.

So when Jarvis showed up with petitions to roll back property taxes and prevent future increases, he found a broad base of support. Even tenants went along — Jarvis and his gang promised that property-tax cuts would be passed on to tenants and would mean the end of the escautf8g rent hikes.

Jarvis collected signatures for a radical measure that essentially blocked all property tax increases and allowed new assessment only when a parcel sold. It was, in the end, a huge tax giveaway to major corporations. Since commercial property turned over far less often than residential property (and since commercial sales could be hidden as stock transfers), big businesses wound up paying far less of the state’s tax burden. Corporations used to pay about two-thirds of the state’s property taxes, and individuals one-third; now that is reversed.

It didn’t help tenants, either. Few of the landlords who saw the benefits of Prop. 13 passed the money along to their renters. Most just kept it. San Francisco activist Calvin Welch likes to say that Howard Jarvis was “the father of rent control.”

The campaign against Prop. 13 warned of the dangers of cutting local government; police and fire chiefs appeared in ads opposing it. But the No on 13 folks never talked about the huge windfall big corporations would get from the measure, or the huge disparities in wealth that would be created by defunding government and dereguutf8g corporations.

If the goal was to skew the concentration of wealth in the state, it worked brilliantly. According to the California Budget Project (CBP) of the Franchise Tax Board, recent data taken before the current economic recession illustrates an ever-widening chasm between the wealthiest taxpayer and the working-class person.

The total adjusted personal income for Californians rose by nearly $64 billion in 2006-07 — with approximately three-quarters of that increase going to the top fifth of wealthiest taxpayers, and 30 percent going to the top 1 percent. That left only $19 billion for everyone else.

“The average taxpayer in the top 1 percent experienced a $128,261 increase in AGI [adjusted gross income] between 2006 and 2007, which was more than three times the total AGI of the average middle-income taxpayer in 2007 ($36,115),” stated the June 2009 report.

This continues a long-term trend in which the wealthy continue to leave the average income-earner behind in a trail of dollar-sign dust. From 1995 to 2007, income gains for that top 1 percent come to a whopping 117.3 percent increase — nearly 13 times more than the gains of the middle-income taxpayer.

The nation’s income gap has reached a “level higher than any other since 1917,” according to a paper by University of California, Berkeley economic professor Emmanuel Saez. According to Saez’s analysis of census data, there’s been a steady increase in the income gap since the 1970s, rising 20 percent over the years.

Yet even today, the defenders of Prop. 13 continue to sound the same consistent themes. “Those who are directly involved in government are a militant special interest,” Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association executive director Kris Vosburgh told us. “They don’t like anything that limits their revenue stream.”

While that last statement could be applied equally to corporations or other private sector enterprises, as Vosburgh reluctantly admitted when asked, he continues to imply malevolence to those who defend government. He said the state’s current fiscal collapse can only be solved by slashing government expenditures.

“It is not valid to be talking about revenue-side solutions,” he said. “Our position is the state has enough money to accomplish its goals.”

People have never liked paying taxes, but the antitax movement is about far more than just that basic individual desire to hold onto our money.

The attacks were well planned, carefully targeted, and part of a much larger effort aimed at maintaining corporate and conservative power, undermining the New Deal, reducing taxes on the rich, and radically reducing the size and scope of the public sector.

As Powell called for, corporations have aggressively challenged, in legal courts and those of public opinion, every significant progressive advance — from San Francisco’s attempt at universal health care to California’s tentative first steps to address global warming.

With a level of discipline unheard of on the left, conservative opinion-shapers pound their talking points and enforce party unity through mechanisms like the “no new taxes” pledge that every Republican in the California Legislature has signed and heeded, under the very real threat of recall.

Opposition to taxes is now so deeply embedded into the psyche of the California electorate, and such a core tenet of today’s Republican Party, that elected officials who tout fiscal responsibility allowed the state’s debts to go unpaid (destroying its credit rating in the process) and its education and transportation systems to be decimated rather considering new revenues.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spokesperson Aaron McLear told us, “He believes we ought to live within our means and pay for only the programs we can afford.”

That simple talking point gets repeated no matter how the question is asked, or when we point out that it means we’re being forced to live within historic lows this year. But they claim the people support them.

“We had tax increases on the May ballot and they were rejected by a 2-1 margin. We should listen to the will of the voters,” McLear said.

Never mind that this regressive, dishonest package of temporary tax hikes was opposed by the Guardian and a variety of pro-tax progressive groups. McLear wouldn’t even admit that point or respond to it honestly.

And he’s certainly right that most polls show a majority of Californians don’t want new taxes. But these polls also show that people want continued government services, more investment in our neglected state infrastructure, and a whole bunch of other contradictory things.

That’s why newspapers and analysts around the world are looking at California, the world’s eighth largest economy, and wondering (as the Guardian of London headline asked Oct. 4): “Will California become America’s first failed state?”

In many ways, it already is. The question now is whether we’ll try to learn from and correct our mistakes. Ryan Riddle contributed to this report. ———–

THE CONSERVATIVE RELIGION

When I asked Lewis Uhler, one of the architects of the Reagan revolution, what Americans believed in these days — where the people he likes to talk about who hate the government (but are also admittedly disillusioned with Wall Street) turn — he answered simply: religion.

It should come as no surprise that many religious fundamentalists tend to side with the free market conservatives — both ideologies require a leap of faith and ignoring certain troubling facts, such as increasing disparities of wealth, natural resource depletion, and global warming.

Their arguments mostly make sense — until these inconvenient truths come up.

Certainly, turning over more public resources to free market capitalists, cutting taxes, and slashing government regulation will spur private sector economic growth, just as advocates claim.

But that growth has a cost. The wealth won’t be shared by everyone. Indeed, poverty has persisted even through even the economic boom of the 1990s — but almost everyone will be affected by underfunded road, education, public safety, and other essential systems.

As the conservative movement has successfully limited taxes and cut regulation over the last 40 years, working class wages have stagnated as the rich have gotten richer. Many of the world’s oil reserves have peaked and gone into decline, and rapidly increasing carbon emissions have collected in the atmosphere and caused global warming.

So how do conservatives respond to these realities as they argue for the continued dismantling of government, which is the only entity with the scope and incentive to deal with these problems? They simply deny them.

Uhler decried the “pseudoscience of climate change” as hindering economic progress and claimed that there’s actually been a global cooling trend in the last 10 years. (Actually the last 10 years have been some of the hottest on record, causing glaciers around the world to melt, according to data and observations from a consensus of the world’s climate scientists, including NASA, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the United Nations Climate Change Conference.)

It’s the same story with the consolidation of wealth, which hurts the free market fantasy that letting the super-wealthy keep more money will eventually trickle down to benefit us all. Uhler simply denied the growing disparity of wealth, saying the “movement between quintiles is significant.”

He was talking about people’s ability to go from poor to rich with a little hard work and initiative, the core idea of free market conservatives. But data from the U.S. Census Bureau and many other entities indicate that median wages have been stagnant for decades (which wouldn’t be true if there was lots of upward mobility) and that most of the wealth created in the U.S. over the last 40 years has pooled with the top 1 percent.

In fact, when it comes to measuring social impacts, Uhler has simply one metric: “Governments at all levels are twice the size they should be to maximize economic growth.” (Steven T. Jones)

 

After the peak

-
0
After the peak

news@sfbg.com

To prepare for the inevitable decline in fossil fuel production, San Francisco’s Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force (see "Running on Empty," 1/30/08) has concluded the city needs to rapidly implement the community choice aggregation and its related renewable energy projects, beef up "buy local" programs, convert unused land (including some park and golf course property) into public food gardens, and consider implementing city carbon, gas, vehicle, and fast food taxes.

The task force presented its findings, contained in a 125-page report, to the Board of Supervisors’ Government Audit and Oversight Committee on Sept. 24. It notes the city’s weak current position with respect to the economy, food security, and transportation, yet it remains to be seen how the Board of Supervisors will answer the task force’s call. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi says he will look for ways to initiate some of the short- and long-term recommendations "to legitimize its most salient parts."

San Francisco is the largest U.S. city to produce a sweeping report on the potential impacts of peak oil, a term that refers to the point of maximum oil production, after which extracting dwindling supplies gets steadily more difficult and expensive. Although there isn’t consensus on when the peak will come, the task force’s message is clear: action must be taken now. "The transition cannot be done quickly; the city faces a limited window of opportunity to begin, after which adaptation will become enormously difficult, painful, and expensive," concludes the report. Without sufficient preparation, dwindling supplies of oil and fossil fuel could have dire impacts on San Francisco’s economy, food supply, and security.

Many actions recommended by the task force focus on developing local sustainability. For example, disaster planning needs to cover peak oil phenomena. If delivery of food is delayed or reduced due to fuel shortage, food prices could soar, creating a great need for local options, particularly for low-income families. So the report recommends maximizing the amount of time San Francisco can sustain itself locally.

Specifically, implementing an aggressive "Buy Local First" program that prompts public institutions to purchase regionally produced food when possible would encourage more local food production. A fast food tax could further support this goal. Other recommendations include establishing food production education programs and conducting a comprehensive evaluation of which public lands could be converted to food production. Although the Bay Area is capable of producing enough food to sustain itself, food currently being produced is not diverse enough, and much of it is exported.

The report also warns of the social unrest that could result from improper preparation. San Francisco’s economy depends heavily on travel and visitors, with about 18 percent of city revenue coming from tourism. Escautf8g energy costs and its myriad impacts could send the economy into a prolonged downward spiral.

"With food becoming increasingly expensive, travel and the distribution of goods significantly affected, and unemployment climbing, economically vulnerable populations — including a high percentage of people of color — could experience increasing malnutrition, and some may not be able to maintain health without government intervention," the report reads.

Such future scenarios should affect today’s decisions in all realms, including transportation. Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable Cities and an elected BART board member, said at the Sept. 24 hearing that it doesn’t make sense to fund highway expansions when future resources might not be able to support even the current number of automobiles on the roads.

In fact, he said, there is a cultural shift already underway in which people want to move away from the car-dependant suburbs and into more pedestrian-friendly urban areas, although policymakers haven’t caught up with this trend yet. While BART and Muni fight uphill battles to expand public transit service with dwindling resources, Radulovich pointed out that the Bay Area Metropolitan Transport Commission (MTC) is proposing to direct $6.4 billion toward highway expansion, despite a decline in vehicle miles traveled. Livable Cities coauthored a resolution, recently approved by the Board of Supervisors, urging the MTC to redirect these funds toward improving transit.

As oil becomes scarcer, the need to create and improve communities where people can safely get around by foot or bicycle will be paramount. Ben Lowe, a task force member specializing in transportation security, noted how important it is to look for regional solutions that go beyond individual cities. There is no magic single solution, but dealing with limited-supply and cost-prohibitive oil requires numerous small solutions as we make this transition.

The main obstacle, as Mirkarimi sees it, is that the sense of urgency is not there. Public officials need to educate the public and "to find something, key pieces of legislation, to rally around," he said. He plans to look into formal ways to keep the seven task force members involved in this process, for example, by matching them with policy experts who can facilitate creation of pertinent legislation.

The task force’s mantra for dealing with forthcoming shortages in oil is to integrate peak oil consideration into government planning and all the decisions made by the mayor and Board of Supervisors. Mirkarimi warns that it would be myopic for San Franciscans not to deliberate on the dangers and opportunities outlined in this report.

Read the report at www.sfenvironment.org/our_policies/overview.html?ssi=20.

Avalos tries to halt pending evictions of low-income families

-
6

By Rebecca Bowe

The toll that the economy is taking on low-income families was painfully apparent at yesterday’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee hearing, when single mothers with weary eyes asked city supervisors to help them stay in their homes.

The hearing was being held to discuss Sup. John Avalos’ proposed legislation to extend a rental-subsidy program administered by the city’s Human Services Agency (HSA) from two years to a maximum of five years. “We have a recession that’s pretty deep, and it is affecting a lot of families in a pretty hard way,” Avalos said. “Families, especially low-income families, are finding it more and more difficult to maintain their employment.”

With unemployment soaring, and many of the people in this program facing challenges such as having a lack of marketable skills, health problems, or language barriers, work prospects are dwindling. Many of the people who testified during public comment said that they were within days of losing their rental subsidies.

“I’m scared to wind up out on the street with my kids,” a woman who spoke in Spanish said via a translator. Many people who enrolled in the program in 2007 have received letters telling them that the city can no longer provide the subsidy, because they’ve reached the program time limit. A phone number for a homeless shelter was listed among the suggested alternatives in the letters, but the shelter has a six-month waiting list. Meanwhile, there are an estimated 17,000 people on the wait-list for public housing in the city.

Throughout the public hearing, small children could be heard crying in the background.

The dining mash-up

-
0

By Paula Connelly

EATgnocchi_0909.jpg

One Monday night a month from 5p.m.-10:30p.m., Tommy Halvorson (executive chef of the Phoenix Supper Club) and 111 Minna team up to offer enthusiastic adventure diners a mash-up cultural experience called EAT. The idea? Order from a menu consisting of small plates (all at $10 or under), then enjoy your food and drinks at cocktail tables while surrounded by art and listening to a DJ’s digestivo tunes.

As an art gallery and lounge in SoMa, 111 Minna is no stranger to the nightlife mashup that has been gaining popularity in San Francisco. These days, most SF museums even host weekly nightlife events that cater to the 21+ crowd by combining later hours, DJs, live music, lectures, and makeshift bars to help the culture go down all the more smoothly. Maybe it’s the bad economy that’s given us a hunger (and thirst) for an inexpensive, DIY cultural experience; it has certainly prompted us to host more dinner and cocktail parties at home. Or maybe it’s because the Internet’s social networking overload has rewired our brains so that we need real life aggregators too. (Stay tuned for Google Wave. ) Whatever the reason, when San Franciscans go out to see and be seen, we want a destination that appeals to our many facets, and we want to get the most bang for our buck .

Satisfying your sense of adventure, thrift, and quality all at once, Mission Street Food has been a pioneer in this category. MSF takes over a hole- in-the-wall restaurant in the Mission on Thursdays and Saturdays and has rotating local chefs design inexpensive, gourmet weekly menus to benefit charity. The brief cocktail menu even has an ode to the musical mash-up genre called the Grey Album, a 32-ounce mix of Old English and Boddington’s, whose name nods to Danger Mouse’s combination of the Beatles’ White album with Jay-Z’s Black album. Yum.

EATroom_0909.jpg

The Kajagoogoo of Jacques Attali

-
0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC For those of you who missed the memo, it all hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for the good people of the ol’ U.S. of A over the last year or so. You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky to realize that if the national unemployment rate is hovering right around 10 percent, that’s not good. If you toss in a confusing war that we are still involved in, the polar icecaps melting faster than Joan Rivers’ face in a boiling torrential downpour, and the small matter of a monster flu pandemic, it’s quite clear: Americans have a right to feel a trifle downcast at the moment.

Yet while we face some strains of a musical slump (screamo, ringtone rap etc.) that is just as woeful as our current financial state, 20th century American history tells us that there may be hope for the future. If you look back through the 1900s, there is a constant byproduct of periods of American crisis. We get some pretty damn awesome music.

Financially speaking, the past year or two has been dominated by scary words like recession and downturn, yet you and I have largely avoided the most bone-chilling term of all. To encounter it, you need to set your DeLorean to the 1930s, where you will find our country in the midst of the most terrifying 10 letters in our economic lexicon — depression.

Beginning with some dramatic leaps in 1929, the Great Depression is the benchmark for what happens when things go horribly wrong. In the U.S., unemployment rates reached an unprecedented 25 percent, and the country, not to mention the rest of the planet, was wallowing in the unpleasant waters of the River Styx.

But something curious happened. As folks were dealing with the decade’s bleakest times, Americans were also writing, recording, and performing some of the finest music in the nation’s history. Legendary jazz artists like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday released some of the best material of their careers, while the roots of country music were sowed by musicians like Jimmie Rodgers, Lead Belly, the Carter Family, and Woody Guthrie. Much of the Depression-era work of these artists combines palpable, affecting melancholy with surprising overtones of faith, hope, and celebration. Music served as a window into the pain of the average American, and also as an escape from the real-life problems people were facing.

This phenomenon returned in many ways during the late 1960s. While thousands of Americans were fighting a war that nobody seemed to understand, those left behind faced widespread inflation and high interest rates. America again turned to its musicians to air frustrations and fears. Taking cues from artists like Pete Seeger and Doc Watson (who were still active during the generation), a new generation of protest music exploded. The new folk of singers-songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez gripped the nation. So did the socially-conscious soul of troubadours like Marvin Gaye, Gil-Scott Heron, and Sam Cooke.

Though these are perhaps the two most obvious instances of great music being created during hard times in America, they aren’t the only ones. Deep in the 1980s, as white suburbanites were loving Reaganomics and rocking out to Kajagoogoo and Huey Lewis, residents of inner cities across America were stuck smack-dab in GOP-perpetrated trickle-down hell. Groundbreaking artists such as NWA, Ice-T, and KRS-One sprang out of the cities, further igniting the massive cultural and commercial force that is hip-hop.

Which brings us to the big question — can we do it again? While you may call it naiveté, I’m optimistic about the chances of history repeating itself. In just the last year, folk has made quite a resurgence, with Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, the Avett Brothers and others gaining massive followings and selling out venues wherever they play. Also, due to file-sharing, the rise of easily-streamable digital music, and well-run independent labels, artists are able to get their music out to larger audiences without interference from conservative and controlling corporate entities. The rise of independent music is apparent in the lineup of the upcoming Treasure Island Music Festival, widely expected to be one of San Francisco’s biggest concert events this year. Though tickets aren’t cheap, people haven’t minded shelling out for a bill that features only five bands currently signed to a major label.

Not so long ago, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the economy was booming. Things were great for everyone — except the American pop music fan, who was subjected to overproduced boy bands, toothless pop rock (Sugar Ray, Smashmouth), nu-metal, and countless other forms of forgettable garbage. So while your pockets may be empty now, it might be a good thing. Hold out a hope that maybe, just maybe, in 30 years, the music of the next decade will be lauded much like the tunes of the 1930s and the 1960s.

Until then, just sit tight and keep praying for the death of auto-tune.

Censored!

-
0

news@sfbg.com

Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored for 13 years, says he’s finished with reform. It’s impossible, he said in a recent interview, to try to get major news media outlets to deliver relevant news stories that serve to strengthen democracy.

"I really think we’re beyond reforming corporate media," said Phillips, a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored. "We’re not going to break up these huge conglomerates. We’re just going to make them irrelevant."

Every year since 1976, Project Censored has spotlighted the 25 most significant news stories that were largely ignored or misrepresented by the mainstream press. Now the group is expanding its mission — to promote alternative news sources. But it continues to report the biggest national and international stories that the major media ignored.

The term "censored" doesn’t mean some government agent stood over newsrooms with a rubber stamp and forbid the publication of the news, or even that the information was completely out of the public eye. The stories Project Censored highlights may have run in one or two news outlets, but didn’t get the type of attention they deserved.

The project staff begins by sifting through hundreds of stories nominated by individuals at Sonoma State, where the project is based, as well as 30 affiliated universities all over the country.

Articles are verified, fact-checked, and selected by a team of students, faculty, and evaluators from the wider community, then sent to a panel of national judges to be ranked. The end product is a book, co-edited this year by Phillips and associate director Mickey Huff, that summarizes the top stories, provides in-depth media analysis, and includes resources for readers who are hungry for more substantive reporting.

Project Censored doesn’t just expose gaping holes in the news brought to you by the likes of Fox, CNN, or USA Today — it also shines a light on less prominent but more incisive alternative-media sources serving up in-depth investigations and watchdog reports.

Phillips is stepping down this year as director of Project Censored and turning his attention to a new endeavor called Media Freedom International. The organization will tap academic affiliates from around the world to verify the content put out by independent news outlets as a way to facilitate trust in these lesser-known sources. "The biggest question I got asked for 13 years was, who do you trust?" he explained. "So we’ve really made an effort in the last three years to try to address that question, in a very open way, in a very honest way, and say, these are [the sources] who we can trust."

Benjamin Frymer, a sociology professor at Sonoma State who is stepping into the role of Project Censored director, says he believes the time is ripe for this kind of push. "The actual amount of time people spend reading online is increasing," Frymer pointed out. "It’s not as if people are just cynically rejecting media — they’re reaching out for alternative sources. Project Censored wants to get involved in making those sources visible."

The Project Censored book this year uses the term "truth emergency."

"We call it an emergency because it’s a democratic emergency," Huff asserted. In this media climate, "we’re awash in a sea of information," he said. "But we have a paucity of understanding about what the truth is."

The top 25 Project Censored stories of 2008-09 highlight the same theme that Phillips and Huff say has triggered the downslide of mainstream media: the overwhelming influence of powerful, profit-driven interests. The No. 1 story details the financial sector’s hefty campaign contributions to key members of Congress leading up to the financial crisis, which coincided with a weakening of federal banking regulations. Another story points out that in even in the financial tumult following the economic downturn, special interests spent more money on Washington lobbyists than ever before.

Here’s this year’s list.

1. CONGRESS SELLS OUT TO WALL STREET


The total tab for the Wall Street bailout, including money spent and promised by the U.S. government, works out to an estimated $42,000 for every man, woman, and child, according to American Casino, a documentary about sub prime lending and the financial meltdown. The predatory lending free-for-all, the emergency pumping of taxpayer dollars to prop up mega banks, and the lavish bonuses handed out to Wall Street executives in the aftermath are all issues that have dominated news headlines.

But another twist in the story received scant attention from the mainstream news media: the unsettling combination of lax oversight from national politicians with high-dollar campaign contributions from financial players.

"The worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état," Matt Taibbi wrote in "The Big Takeover," a March 2009 Rolling Stone article. "They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders who used money to control elections, buy influence, and systematically weaken financial regulations."

In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, the financial sector spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions, and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. Since 2001, eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates, and the Republican and Democratic parties.

Wall Street’s spending spree on political contributions coincided with a weakening of federal banking regulations, which in turn created a recipe for the astronomical financial disaster that sent the global economy reeling.

Sources: "Lax Oversight? Maybe $64 Million to DC Pols Explains It," Greg Gordon, Truthout.org and McClatchey Newspapers, October 2, 2008; "Congressmen Hear from TARP Recipients Who Funded Their Campaigns," Lindsay Renick Mayer, Capitol Eye, February 10, 2009; "The Big Takeover," Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, March 2009.

2. DE FACTO SEGREGATION DEEPENING IN PUBLIC EDUCATION


Latinos and African Americans attend more segregated public schools today than they have for four decades, Professor Gary Orfield notes in "Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge," a study conducted by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. Orfield’s report used federal data to highlight deepening segregation in public education by race and poverty.

About 44 percent of students in the nation’s public school system are people of color, and this group will soon make up the majority of the population in the U.S. Yet this racial diversity often isn’t reflected from school to school. Instead, two out of every five African American and Latino youths attend schools Orfield characterizes as "intensely segregated," composed of 90 percent to 100 percent people of color.

For Latinos, the trend reflects growing residential segregation. For African Americans, the study attributes a significant part of the reversal to ending desegregation plans in public schools nationwide. Schools segregated by race and poverty tend to have much higher dropout rates, more teacher turnover, and greater exposure to crime and gangs, placing students at a major disadvantage in society. The most severe segregation is in Western states, including California.

Fifty-five years after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, Orfield wrote, "Segregation is fast spreading into large sectors of suburbia, and there is little or no assistance for communities wishing to resist the pressures of resegregation and ghetto creation in order to build successfully integrated schools and neighborhoods."

Source: "Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge," Gary Orfield, The Civil Rights Project, UCLA, January 2009

3. SOMALI PIRATES: THE UNTOLD STORY


Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa were like gold for mainstream news outlets this past year. Stories describing surprise attacks on shipping vessels, daring rescues, and cadres of ragtag bandits extracting multimillion dollar ransoms were all over the airwaves and front pages.

But even as the pirates’ exploits around the Gulf of Aden captured the world’s attention, little ink was devoted to factors that made the Somalis desperate enough to resort to piracy in the first place: the dumping of nuclear waste and rampant over-fishing their coastal waters.

In the early 1990s, when Somalia’s government collapsed, foreign interests began swooping into unguarded coastal waters to trawl for food — and venturing into unprotected Somali territories to cheaply dispose of nuclear waste. Those activities continued with impunity for years. The ramifications of toxic dumping hit full force with the 2005 tsunami, when leaking barrels were washed ashore, sickening hundreds and causing birth defects in newborn infants. Meanwhile, the uncontrolled fishing harvests damaged the economic livelihoods of Somali fishermen and eroded the country’s supply of a primary food source. That’s when the piracy began.

"Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome?" asked journalist Johann Hari in a Huffington Post article. "We didn’t act on those crimes — but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about ‘evil.’"

Sources: "Toxic waste behind Somali piracy," Najad Abdullahi, Al Jazeera English, Oct. 11, 2008; "You are being lied to about pirates," Johann Hari, The Huffington Post, Jan. 4, 2009; "The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other," Mohamed Abshir Waldo, WardheerNews, Jan. 8, 2009

4. NORTH CAROLINA’S NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE


The Shearon Harris nuclear plant in North Carolina’s Wake County isn’t just a power-generating station. The Progress Energy plant, located in a backwoods area, bears the distinction of housing the largest radioactive-waste storage pools in the country. Spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants are transported there by rail, then stored beneath circuutf8g cold water to prevent the radioactive waste from heating.

The hidden danger, according to investigative reporter Jeffery St. Clair, is the looming threat of a pool fire. Citing a study by Brookhaven National Laboratory, St. Clair highlighted in Counterpunch the catastrophe that could ensue if a pool were to ignite. A possible 140,000 people could wind up with cancer. Contamination could stretch for thousands of square miles. And damages could reach an estimated $500 billion.

"Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly and catch fire," Robert Alvarez, a former Department of Energy advisor and Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies noted in a study about safety issues surrounding nuclear waste pools. "The fire could well spread to older fuel. The long-term contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than Chernobyl."

Shearon Harris’ track record is pocked with problems requiring temporary shutdowns of the plant and malfunctions of the facility’s emergency-warning system.

When a study was sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission highlighting the safety risks and recommending technological fixes to address the problem, St. Clair noted, a pro-nuclear commissioner successfully persuaded the agency to dismiss the concerns.

Source: "Pools of Fire," Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch, Aug. 9, 2008

5. U.S. FAILS TO PROTECT CONSUMERS AGAINST TOXICS


Two years ago, the European Union enacted a bold new environmental policy requiring close scrutiny and restriction of toxic chemicals used in everyday products. Invisible perils such as lead in lipstick, endocrine disruptors in baby toys, and mercury in electronics can threaten human health. The European legislation aimed to gradually phase out these toxic materials and replace them with safer alternatives.

The story that has gone unreported by mainstream American news media is how this game-changing legislation might affect the U.S., where chemical corporations use lobbying muscle to ensure comparatively lax oversight of toxic substances. As global markets shift to favor safer consumer products, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is lagging in its own scrutiny of insidious chemicals.

As investigative journalist Mark Schapiro pointed out in Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, the EPA’s tendency to behave as if it were beholden to big business could backfire in this case, placing U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage because products manufactured here will be regarded with increasing distrust.

Economics aside, the implications of loose restrictions on toxic products are chilling: just one-third of the 267 chemicals on the EU’s watch list have ever been tested by the EPA, and only two are regulated under federal law. Meanwhile, researchers at UC Berkeley estimate that 42 billion pounds of chemicals enter American commerce daily, and only a fraction have undergone risk assessments. When it comes to meeting the safer, more stringent EU standard, the stakes are high — with consequences including economic impacts as well as public health.

Sources: "European Chemical Clampdown Reaches Across Atlantic," David Biello, Scientific American, Sept. 30, 2008; "How Europe’s New Chemical Rules Affect U.S.," Environmental Defense Fund, Sept. 30, 2008; "U.S. Lags Behind Europe in Reguutf8g Toxicity of Everyday Products," Mark Schapiro, Democracy Now! Feb. 24, 2009

6. AS ECONOMY SHRINKS, D.C. LOBBYING GROWS


In 2008, as the economy tumbled and unemployment soared, Washington lobbyists working for special interests were paid $3.2 billion — more than any other year on record. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, special interests spent a collective $32,523 per legislator, per day, for every day Congress was in session.

One event that triggered the lobbying boom, according to CRP director Sheila Krumholz, was the federal bailout — with the federal government ensuring that the lobbyists got a piece of the pie. Ironically, some of the first in line were the same players who helped precipitate the nation’s sharp economic downturn by engaging in high-risk, speculative lending practices.

"Even though some financial, insurance and real estate interests pulled back last year, they still managed to spend more than $450 million as a sector to lobby policymakers," Krumholz noted. "That can buy a lot of influence, and it’s a fraction of what the financial sector is reaping in return through the government’s bailout program."

The list of highest-ranking spenders on Washington lobbying reads like a roster of some of the most powerful interests nationwide. Topping the list was the health sector, which spent $478.5 million lobbying Congress last year. A close runner-up was the finance, insurance, and real-estate sector, spending $453.5 million. Pharmaceutical companies plunked down $230 million; electric utilities spent $156.7 million; and oil and gas companies paid lobbyists $133.2 million.

Source: "Washington Lobbying Grew to $3.2 Billion Last Year, Despite Economy," Center for Responsive Politics, Open Secrets.org

7. OBAMA’S CONTROVERSIAL DEFENSE APPOINTEES


President Barack Obama’s appointments to the Department of Defense have raised serious questions among critics who’ve studied their track records. Although the news media haven’t paid much attention, the defense appointees bring to the administration controversial histories and conflicts of interest due to close ties to defense contractors.

Obama’s decision to retain Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush, marks the first time in history that a president has opted to keep a defense secretary of an outgoing opposing party in power.

Gates, a former CIA director, has faced criticism for allegedly spinning intelligence reports for political means. In Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, author and former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman described him as "the chief action officer for the Reagan administration’s drive to tailor intelligence reporting to White House political desires." Gates also came under scrutiny for questions surrounding whether he misled Congress during the Iran-contra scandal in the mid-1980s, and was accused of withholding information from intelligence committees when the U.S. provided military aid to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.

Critics are also uneasy about the appointment of Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn, who formerly served as a senior vice president at defense giant Raytheon Company and was a registered lobbyist for Raytheon until July 2008. Lynn, who previously served as Pentagon comptroller under the Clinton administration, came under fire during his confirmation hearing for "questionable accounting practices." The Defense Department failed multiple audits under Lynn’s leadership because it was unable to properly account for $3.4 trillion in financial transactions made over the course of several years.

Sources: "The Danger of Keeping Robert Gates," Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, Nov. 13, 2008; "Obama’s Defense Department Appointees- The $3.4 Trillion Question," Andrew Hughes, Global Research, Feb. 13, 2009; "Obama Nominee Admiral Dennis Blair Aided perpetrators of 1999 church Killings in East Timor," Allan Nairn, Democracy Now! Jan. 7, 2009; "Ties to Chevron, Boeing Raise Concern on Possible NSA Pick," Roxana Tiron, The Hill, Nov. 24, 2008


8. BIG BUSINESS CHEATS THE IRS


The Cayman Islands and Bermuda are magnets for Bank of America, Citigroup, American International Group, and 11 other financial giants that were the beneficiaries of the federal government’s 2008 Wall Street bailout. It’s not the balmy weather that inspires some of America’s wealthiest companies to open operations in the Caribbean archipelago: the offshore oases provide safe harbors to stash cash out of the reach of Uncle Sam.

According to a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office, which was largely ignored by the news media, 83 of the top publicly-held U.S. companies, including some receiving substantial portions of federal bailout dollars, have operations in tax havens that allow them to avoid paying their fair share to the Internal Revenue Service. The report also spotlighted the activities of Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), which has helped wealthy Americans to use tax schemes to cheat the IRS out of billions.

In December 2008, banking giant Goldman Sachs reported its first quarterly loss, and promptly followed up with a statement that its tax rate would drop from 34.1 percent to 1 percent, citing "changes in geographic earnings mix" as the reason. The difference: instead of paying $6 billion in total worldwide taxes as it did in 2007, Goldman Sachs would pay a total of $14 million in 2008. In the same year, it received $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government.

"The problem is larger than Goldman Sachs," U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, told Bloomberg News. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore."

Sources: "Goldman Sachs’s Tax Rate Drops to 1 percent or $14 Million," Christine Harper, Bloomberg News, Dec. 16, 2008; "Gimme Shelter: Tax Evasion and the Obama Administration," Thomas B. Edsall, The Huffington Post, Feb. 23, 2009

9. U.S. CONNECTED TO WHITE PHOSPHOROUS STRIKES IN GAZA


In mid-January, as part of a military campaign, the Israeli Defense Forces fired several shells that hit the headquarters of a United Nations relief agency in Gaza City, destroying provisions for basic aid like food and medicine.

The shells contained white phosphorous (referred to as "Willy Pete" in military slang), a smoke-producing, spontaneously flammable agent designed to obscure battle territory that also can ignite buildings or cause grotesque burns if it touches the skin.

The attack on the relief-agency headquarters is just one example of a civilian structure that researchers discovered had been hit during the January air strikes. In the aftermath of the attacks, Human Rights Watch volunteers found spent white phosphorous shells on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a U.N. school in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch says the IDF’s use of white phosphorous violated international law, which prohibits deliberate, indiscriminate, or disproportionate attacks that result in civilian casualties. After gathering evidence such as spent shells, the organization issued a report condemning the repeated firing of white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza as a war crime. Amnesty International, another human rights organization, followed suit by calling upon the United States to suspend military aid to Israel — but to no avail.

The U.S. was a primary source of funding and weaponry for Israel’s military campaign. Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus.

Sources: "White Phosphorus Use Evidence of War Crimes Report: Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza," Fred Abrahams, Human Rights Watch, March 25, 2009; "Suspend Military Aid to Israel, Amnesty Urges Obama after Detailing U.S. Weapons Used in Gaza," Rory McCarthy, Guardian/U.K., Feb. 23, 2009; "U.S. Weaponry Facilitates Killings in Gaza," Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service, Jan. 8, 2009; "U.S. military resupplying Israel with ammunition through Greece," Saed Bannoura, International Middle East Media Center News, Jan. 8, 2009.

10. ECUADOR SAYS IT WON’T PAY ILLEGITIMATE DEBT


When President Rafael Correa announced that Ecuador would default on its foreign debt last December, he didn’t say it was because the Latin American country was unable to pay. Rather, he framed it as a moral stand: "As president, I couldn’t allow us to keep paying a debt that was obviously immoral and illegitimate," Correa told an international news agency. The news was mainly reported in financial publications, and the stories tended to quote harsh critics who characterized Correa as an extreme leftist with ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

But there’s much more to the story. The announcement came in the wake of an exhaustive audit of Ecuador’s debt, conducted under Correa’s direction by a newly created debt audit commission. The unprecedented audit documented hundreds of allegations of irregularity and illegality in the decades of debt collection from international lenders. Although Ecuador had made payments exceeding the value of the principal since the time it initially took out loans in the 1970s, its foreign debt had nonetheless swelled to levels three times as high due to extraordinarily high interest rates. With a huge percentage of the country’s financial resources devoted to paying the debt, little was left over to combat poverty in Ecuador.

Correa’s move to stand up against foreign lenders did not go unnoticed by other impoverished, debt-ridden nations, and the decision could set a precedent for developing countries struggling to get out from under massive debt obligation to first-world lenders.

Ecuador eventually agreed to a restructuring of its debt at about 35 cents on the dollar. Nonetheless, the move served to expose deficiencies in the World Bank system, which provides little recourse for countries to resolve disputes over potentially illegitimate debt.

Sources: "As Crisis Mounts, Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate and Illegal," Daniel Denvir, Alternet, November 26, 2008; "Invalid Loans to Ecuador: Who Owes Who," Committee for the Integral Audit of Public Credit, Utube, Fall 2008; "Ecuador’s Debt Default," Neil Watkins and Sarah Anders, Foreign Policy in Focus, Dec. 15, 2008

——–

OTHER STORIES IN THE TOP 25

11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine

12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief

13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War

14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts

15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco

16. US Repression of Haiti Continues

17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan

18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature

19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor

20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates

21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare

22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team

23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud

24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion

25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

Read them all at www.projectcensored.org

How an online newspaper can succeed

-
0

EDITORIAL Dave Iverson, host of KQED’s Friday Forum show, introduced the Sept. 25 program with a pretty obvious comment: "Conversations about the future of journalism, and newspapers in particular, are rarely optimistic affairs." He went on to describe the new effort by Warren Hellman, KQED, and the UC Berkeley journalism school to create a new media outlet in San Francisco (a story that broke first in the Guardian‘s politics blog).

The guests, including Neil Henry, dean of the j-school; Carl Hall, the former San Francisco Chronicle reporter; and Jeff Clarke, president of KQED; talked in vague platitudes about the big new plans — and then spent much of the time defending and lauding the Chronicle, which one guest called "a great paper."

But that’s not how the callers saw it — and not how much of the Bay Area perceives San Francisco’s major daily newspaper. And therein is a critical lesson for the new journalistic effort.

For the record: we would hate to see the San Francisco Chronicle fail. A daily newspaper plays a crucial role in urban life, politics, and society. No number of part-time bloggers and citizen journalists will ever be able to perform the watchdog role of a fully-staffed newspaper.

And we welcome the new effort by Hellman and his crew. With the dramatic decline in the Chron‘s fortunes, there’s less and less coverage of crucial news in the city, and an aggressive new outlet could be very good news for San Francisco.

But the people who manage the new venture need to understand that the problems the Chronicle faces are not entirely due to the economy and changes in the newspaper business. Frankly, the Chron has consistently spurned, ignored, trivialized, and sought to discredit the entire progressive movement and a wide range of progressive issues. It’s been a conservative newspaper in one of the nation’s most liberal cities. It’s been a cautious publication, wary of serious challenges to the city’s power structure. There’s not a single liberal or progressive columnist at the paper. Opinion writers like C.W. Nevius seem to disdain everything about San Francisco and urban life in general. The political coverage tends to treat the left as something to be mocked. There’s no real labor reporting any more, no aggressive consumer reporting, little pursuit of big structural corruption issues.

It’s little wonder then that a significant percentage of San Franciscans (in particular, younger people) see no reason whatsoever to pick up the San Francisco Chronicle. And KQED (which gets big donations from some of the city’s biggest corporations and the social and political elite) is hardly the voice of young, progressive San Francisco. (Pacific Gas and Electric Co., for example, is one of the greatest corporate criminals in San Francisco history — and also a major KQED donor.)

As one local media observer told us, this new Web-based publication "can’t just be about getting the old band back together for another tour."

If a new online city newspaper is going to succeed, it’s going to have to take San Francisco — with all its diverse communities — seriously. It’s going to have to be willing to offend the big-business power structure. It’s going to need a strong, independent, editorial voice that includes, rather than marginalizes, the progressive point of view. And it’s going to have to attract writers who are interested in communicating to a generation that has abandoned the Chron.

That means Hellman and the gang have to hire a respected editor — and vow not to interfere if the stories and editorials don’t support the agendas of the members of the nonprofit board.

The nonprofit model is tricky for newspapers: foundations and big donors have their own interests, and they often want the organizations they bestow their largesse upon to behave in ways that are antithetical to good journalism. If this new group can make it work (and produce a locally- operated product — unlike the Chron, which is owned by Hearst Corporation in New York) we’re all for it. But a new model of journalism in San Francisco will require more than a new publishing technology. That’s going to be the hardest part.

Tax reform plan goes nowhere

-
2

By Tim Redmond

The governor’s tax-reform commission released its report today, and it probably won’t amount to much, because nobody seems to like it.

But the report shows how badly skewed the whole notion of “tax reform” has been warped in this state. The central premise of the report is that the top income tax rate — the rate that the very rich pay — should be reduced, and the overall income tax structure flattened. The argument: Since the income of the richest Californians changes with the economy, flattening out the tax structure will give us more budget stability.

But that’s an utter crock. As Lenny Goldberg, the director of the California Tax Reform Association, notes:

1. The top personal income tax rate should not be lowered, since figures presented to the Commission demonstrate clearly that the volatility problem is a function of the distribution of income, not a steeply progressive tax. In fact, the tax is relatively flat, assessing the same marginal rate on the upper-middle class (90k +) as the very rich, with a very quick ride through the brackets. If anything, the bracket structure should reflect the federal structure, which has increasing brackets and rates at $137,000, $208,000, and $372,000.

As Phil Spilberg’s presentation on March 16 pointed out, the top 1% take an extraordinary share of income (25%), nearly doubling since the early 1990’s. Their tax burden moves consistently with their share of income, so their disproportionate share of taxes is a function of their disproportionate share of income. That fact alone is what leads to volatility, but lowering their tax burden only exacerbates the mal-distribution of income. And any tax cuts share income with the federal government at a marginal rate of 35%, likely to become 39.6%, so are effectively a capital outflow.

In other words, the reason that tax receipts drop off so much during recessions is that the very rich have too much of the state’s total income. If anything, the tax rate is too flat now.

I’m somewhat intrigued by the new business tax proposals, which amount to what the Europeans call a “value added tax.” You take the total sales of a business, subtract its total costs, and tax the net proceeds, which are supposed to represent the value added during production. It’s a little trickier when you apply that to services, but I don’t think any sane person watching the state’s tax system disagrees with the concept that services ought to be taxed.

But overall, the tax reform commission has offered a very limited perspective — which is too bad, because California’s tax system is a mess and badly needs a comprehensive overhaul.

Energy efficiency gets a boost, but foxes still guard the hen house

-
2

By Rebecca Bowe

electric meter.jpg

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved a $3.1 billion budget yesterday for statewide energy efficiency programs that will be in place until 2012. California’s powerful investor-owned utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric Company, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas and Electric Company, and Southern California Gas Company — are in charge of implementing the programs, while the funding is derived from ratepayers.

While the decision marks the creation of the largest energy-efficiency program in the country, some question the wisdom of the colossal investment, because it relies on utility companies to implement dramatic reductions in energy use.

It’s the greatest financial contribution the state utility commission has ever pledged toward energy efficiency. According to the CPUC, the potential energy savings will negate the need for three new 500-megawatt power plants, and avoid 3 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. The funding from this decision could create between 15,000 and 18,000 green jobs, the CPUC estimates.

The decision will provide $260 million for local efforts such as municipal building retrofits. It also requires utilities to track progress toward goals and strategies established in a long-term statewide plan for reducing energy use. Included in the effort is an ambitious home-retrofit program, which sets a goal of 20 percent energy savings for up to 130,000 homes.

“This investment in California’s clean energy economy is just what we need to create new jobs for our communities and fight global warming pollution,” said Lara Ettenson, director of California Energy Efficiency Policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a prominent environmental organization.

Not everyone shares NRDC’s optimism, however.

The Division of Ratepayer Advocates (DRA), an independent consumer advocacy division of the CPUC, warned that the powerful utility companies should be closely monitored to see how they make use of such a tremendous sum.

In a statement released this morning, the DRA highlighted “a continuing need for stronger mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability in the utilities’ use of the billions of dollars of ratepayer money.” Utility giant PG&E has been criticized in the past for misuse of energy-efficiency funds.

The $2.8 billion rate hike

-
0

news@sfbg.com

In the middle of what economists are calling the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, when California unemployment rates have hit post-WWII records, commercial defaults are rising, and families and businesses are hurting, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is asking for electricity rate hikes that would take at least $47 million out of the local community, a Guardian analysis shows. By some estimates, the impact could be has high as $787 million.

And the economy is already losing between $174 million and $483 million a year because the city hasn’t created a public power system. So the total impact on the San Francisco economy of paying PG&E’s high private rates could total $2.8 billion. That’s money that local residents can’t spend on good and services, local businesses can’t use to hire more workers and city government can’t collect taxes on.

The analysis is based on work done in 2002 by Irwin Kellner, chief economist for Marketwatch and a former economics professor at Hofstra University. Kellner analyzed the savings to the Long Island economy after that community replaced a private utility with a public power system (see "The $620 million shakedown, 9/4/2002).

It’s not a complicated set of calculations.

During the fiscal year ending in 2009, San Francisco residents and businesses paid $644 million on electricity, according to data from the city’s Controller’s Office. If PG&E’s proposed 6.5 percent average rate hike is approved for 2011 (with additional hikes of 1.4 percent and 1.1 percent the following two years) that number would ultimately rise to $704.5 million.

Over the next four years, as those rate hikes kick in, San Franciscans would be handing PG&E an extra $157 million. That’s $106 million businesses won’t have to pay employees or make capital improvements, and $51.3 million consumers won’t have to spend in local businesses.

"That’s $51 million less that would otherwise go into San Francisco neighborhood businesses," said Ted Egan, chief economist in the city’s Office of Economic Analysis. "Instead the $51 million goes to PG&E, and they won’t spend it all in San Francisco. Some will go to shareholders and outside the region, so the rate hike would end up having a larger impact than the initial $51 million."

That "larger impact" is called the multiplier effect: if you give one dollar to someone likely to spend it locally, he or she will buy shoes at a local shoe store, whose owner will use the dollar to buy groceries at the local grocery store, whose owner will pay the counter worker, who will spend the money on paint at the local hardware store — and by the time it’s circulated through the local economy, that dollar has created far more than a dollar’s worth of economic activity.

Economists argue on how to figure the exact impact of that dollar. Kellner has done studies of the economic impact of utility rates and estimates the multiplier — the economic impact of electricity rate hikes — to be five, expanding the $157.4 million to over $787 million.

Egan takes a more conservative view of the San Francisco economy and consumer spending. He estimates that the multiplier for utility rate hikes is closer to 0.3 — or slightly higher when commercial rates are factored in. According to his estimate the impact would be closer to $47,231,083.86.

The multiplier suggested by federal government economists during the stimulus bill discussion is 1.8, the number cautiously posited by Cynthia Kroll, senior regional economist for the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley. Based on her calculations, PG&E would be yanking $283 million out of the local economy.

Either way, it’s a huge sum of money, particularly in a bad economy.

A PATTERN OF RATE HIKES


This latest rate hike, Mindy Spatt, communications director of the Utility Reform Network told us, is only part of a pattern of attempts by PG&E to raise rates. Every three years, utility companies present a general rate case to the California Public Utilities Commission. But Spatt said utilities can come to the PUC in between to ask for other rate hikes.

"They’re constantly coming back to the commission for this that and the other thing," she said. "[PG&E] came back after they got money for smart meters to get money for smarter meters.

"Overall, the pattern is that rates continue to go up," she continued. "The only other thing going up is executive compensation. We are still plagued with blackouts, we still get crappy service."

She’s right: data from other local utilities show that PG&E rates are anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent higher than cities that have public power. PG&E would like its customers to believe that higher rates will improve service and reliability — but that’s not what’s happening.

"They don’t spend the money on giving us good service, instead [they focus] on convincing us they are giving us good service," Spatt said.

In its announcement of the proposed hike, PG&E claimed the rate hikes are to maintain infrastructure and reliability. A further $1.1 billion is also being asked for as part of a Cornerstone Improvement Project to increase reliability.

"Reliability" is an old battle horse trotted out every few years as the justification for rate hikes. PG&E is consistently less reliable than other local utilities and even less reliable than other large private utilities. So the company constantly asks for money to upgrade its system — except that reliability doesn’t seem to improve much, and it hasn’t improved much in the past decade, according to California Public Utilities Commission data.

"It’s interesting to compare their rates to municipal utilities and how much higher they are," Spatt said. "What do we get for the extra money we pay? Because by most measures they’re not doing a great job."

In fact, Guardian research shows that local municipal utilities have consistently better reliability records than PG&E (see "The blackout factor," 8/5/09).

PUBLIC POWER SAVINGS


The direct cost of PG&E’s high rates costs the local economy — and those losses are compounded by the money that could have been saved with public power.

A detailed Guardian analysis concluded last year that San Francisco would be able to cut electric rates by 15 percent if it ran its own utility (see "Cleaner and cheaper," 9/10/2008). That’s an entirely reasonable estimate, according to Jeff Shields, general manager of the South San Joaquin Irrigation District, which is fighting with PG&E to take over electricity distribution in its service area. He projects similar savings for his customers.

Shields thinks his system (and one in San Francisco) could cut rates even further. As nonprofit, he explained, SSJID can save money in multiple areas and pass those savings onto customers.

"We don’t pay taxes on earnings," he told us. "PG&E, as a shareholder company, can collect an 11.45 percent margin of profit. We don’t pay that. We don’t have the same overhead. We don’t have high-rises or corporate jets."

Public power agencies pay less to borrow money, are eligible for tax-exempt financing, typically have a higher credit rating and often keep a substantial cash reserve.

"[Selling electricity] will continue to produce substantial income," he said. "As a nonprofit, the only thing we can do with that income is continue to drop rates."

Other municipal utilities, like Silicon Valley Power in Santa Clara, have been able to keep rates low as PG&E has continued to raise rates. Larry Owens, customer services manager at SVP, said its residential rates are half of PG&E’s, and less for larger users.

The opportunity cost of not having municipal power — factoring in PG&E’s proposed rate hike and the assumption, based on Guardian and SSJID analyses, that rates would be lowered by at least 15 percent — is approximately $545 million over the next four years. Theoretically, that money could have resulted in a $980 million to $2.8 billion bump in the local economy.

This doesn’t include what some municipal utilities call "general fund transfers" or money that goes directly into a city’s piggy bank to be spent on libraries, schools, public health, and other services.

"Private sector utilities pay money to shareholders," said Joyce Kinnear, utility marketing services manager in Palo Alto. "We give these payments to the general fund to give services to local residents."

In Palo Alto’s case, this amounts to more than $9.25 million annually, or 9 percent of annual sales revenue, according Ipek Connolly, senior resource planner for the Palo Alto Utilities Department. Alameda Municipal Power’s Alan Hanger says AMP pays at least $4.2 million into city coffers. Silicon Valley Power, according to Owens, sends 5 percent of its revenue back to the city in the form of $12.92 million.

Shields, at SSJID, said the utility plans to give 4 percent of revenue to a public benefits program for "various social services, conservation, and energy efficiency programs." This, in addition to general fund transfers, constitutes a direct contribution to the community 50 percent larger than PG&E’s.

"Public power systems provide a direct benefit to their communities in the form of payments and contributions to state and local government," Nicholas Braden, director of communications at the American Public Power Association, told us. "The total value of the contributions made by the publicly-owned utilities often comes in many forms and is not always easily recognized. In addition to payments such as taxes, payments in lieu of taxes, and transfers to the general funds, many of the utilities make other contributions in the form of free or reduced cost services provided to states and cities."

San Francisco has a 7.5 percent utility user tax, but the tax is only levied on homes and businesses. In other words, PG&E takes hundreds of millions out of the local economy — and gives back nothing.

————-

HOW SF COULD LOSE $2.8 BILLION

Amount San Franciscans paid for electricity IN 2009: $644 million

Additional cost of PG&E rate hike (per year): $157 million

Multiplier (maximum estimate): $787 million

Reduction in costs under public power: $483 million

Multiplier: $2.1 billion

Total impact of high PG&E rates: $2.87 billion

SOURCE: Guardian research based on public records

————

RATE HIKES HIT THE POOR HARDEST

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. estimates that its current rate hike proposal will add between $2.23 and $16.76 per month to an average residential electricity bill. That may not seem huge — but it adds up.

"Each rate hike in and of itself isn’t that much money," acknowledges Mindy Spatt of the Utility Reform Network (TURN). "But overall, rates are very high."

And if you’re in one of the 24,000 San Francisco families that, according to U.S. census data, livie in poverty, even the smallest increase in utility bills can have serious ramifications.

"A few dollars here, and a few there can really affect low-income households," said Stephanie Chen, legal fellow at the Greenlining Institute, a public policy research and advocacy group. "It can mean the difference between ‘Do I pay the power bill, or do I buy groceries?’"

Utility bills are not a discretionary expense, and, as unemployment continues to rise and adjustable rate mortgages continue to adjust upward, more households are finding themselves squeezed on all sides. Depending on timing and cash flow, Chen said it would be easy to imagine a formerly stable household unable to pay the utility bill.

And if a household can’t pay the bill for two weeks, PG&E sends a notice of termination and shuts off power. According to Spatt, PG&E shuts off 15,000 households in its service area each month.

"Rate hikes are certainly not going to bring down that number," she said. "These are not people who can’t pay for a Mercedes and got it repossessed. They are people who are losing heat, electricity, the ability to cook."

To turn the power back on, PG&E requires a deposit of twice the average bill to reestablish credit. If a household can’t pay its regular bill, paying twice the amount is even harder.

Spatt says TURN is working to push the CPUC to do something about this and help consumers who are struggling. Chen says utility companies already know their customers are hurting during the recession.

"All the utilities are facing decaying infrastructure concerns and renewable energy goals," Chen said. "They are facing increased costs, which they pass on to ratepayers. We know rate increases are inevitable — but we want to make sure they are necessary and cost-effective."

Of human bondage

-
0

culture@sfbg.com

529-madison.jpg
Swingin’ with a star: Madison Young, photographed by Pat Mazzera

San Francisco is America’s capital of kink. Consider Sunday’s Folsom Street Fair (www.folomstreetfair.org) as a flagship holiday and the Armory, occupied by Kink.com, as a kind of sexual City Hall, and there’s little dispute.

But it may seem peculiar for a city so committed to gender and sexual equality to be the patron city of BDSM: a complicated acronym that stands for bondage and discipline (BD), domination and submission (D/s), sadism and masochism (SM). In crude terms, BDSM relationships are marked by deliberate and sometimes extreme inequality, where a submissive party voluntarily forfeits partial or complete physical, psychological, and emotional control to a dominant one. Although "switching" does occur, D/s — the Dominant (capital D) and submissive power dichotomy — may seem to be everything our traditional concept of liberal empowerment and classical feminism rail against.

But while it might be difficult for some to grasp, BDSM — which includes a broad spectrum of sexual acts including (but not limited to) bondage, corporal punishment, electrostimulation, piercing, branding, suspension, golden showers, and asphyxiation, as well as general play relationships like age play, pet play, medical play, and cross-dressing — is controlled by a strict code of behavior referred to as "SSC," or "safe, sane, and consensual." San Francisco even has its own BDSM nonprofit, the Society of Janus, which was founded in 1974 to promote safe adult power exchange.

529-fivestar.jpg
Ropes aficionado Fivestar, photographed by Pat Mazzera

And unlike that other U.S. capital, Washington, D.C., where women are systemically outnumbered in the decision-making process, in San Francisco’s kinky community, strong and sexually empowered women are well represented — if not always well understood.

Women in BDSM, unfair as it seems, often receive some of the harshest criticism from a varied opposition. D/s women frequently find their lifestyles attacked by religious groups, academics, psychologists, and sexual conservatives, as well as much of the midsection of the United States. Whether stigmatized as self-loathing antifeminists or insatiable man-eating jezebels — or dismissed as insane — much misinformation has been spread about women (gendered, self-identified) who operate within the community.

However, the strong, independent-minded D/s women of San Francisco will have the vanilla (their term for those who do not engage in BDSM activities) know that BDSM is not what you think. Indeed, BDSM: It’s Not What You Think! premiered last year at the Frameline Film Festival. Frameline, the longest-running film festival dedicated to LGBT programming, featured a cast of prominent figures in the San Francisco leather community, many of them women.

For the women of bondage in our city, many of whom maintain 24/7 D/s relationships, BDSM is considered a liberating force. The following profiles are shout-outs to just some of these women, each representing a different facet within the BDSM spectrum. Most have participated in the community for more than a decade — and all really, really love what they do.

In San Francisco, the old Rousseauian adage "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains," could easily be rephrased as: "Woman is born free, and everywhere she uses chains to get off".

529-madison2.jpg
Madison Young, photographed by Pat Mazzera

MADISON YOUNG, THE INGÉNUE

Madison Young refers to herself as the "kinky girl next door." With blue eyes, strawberry blonde hair, and a translucent, Kidmanesque complexion, Young is one of the most recognizable performers in the adult entertainment industry, though perhaps more recognizable to those who enjoy inflicting pain on women tied with rope.

"I found a Kink.com posting on Craigslist," Young says. "I had been involved in kinky sex before then, and was really into things like fisting and golden showers and light bondage. But I had never really done flogging or anything around rope bondage. Peter [Ackworth] was the first person who ever tied me up, and I fell in love with it instantly." Since then, she’s become famous, adored by fans for her raw, honest performances and for her incredible toughness.

And Young is really, really tough. Run a simple Google Image search and you’ll find photos of her subjected to things that would make a Navy Seal weep — like being suspended from one elbow by a single rope strung from the ceiling, with her legs pulled apart as far as legs can go. Young is one of the few working models who can withstand what is known as a "category five suspension," bondage positions so grueling they can only be endured for mere seconds. "I have a really high pain tolerance," she says. On a scale of 1 to 10? "Out of the models that exist, I’m a 10."

A self-identified masochist, Young’s interest in bondage is uniquely centered around rope. "I’m not really into metal restraints, scarves, zip ties, or anything like that. It has to be rope."

Young is also among a small but growing number of women who are writing, directing, and producing porn, and runs her own production house called Madison Young Productions. She also finds time to run Femina Potens, a female-focused art gallery located in the Castro.

www.madisonbound.com; www.feminapotens.org

529-Midori.jpg
Midori, photographed by Constance Smith

MIDORI, THE SENSEI

Midori, the artist formerly known as Fetish Diva Midori, is adamantly opposed to being portrayed exclusively within the confines of BDSM. "A lot of people, sure, see my bondage stuff. But that’s just one of many, many things that I do."

That may be so, but all the same, you can’t talk about San Francisco’s women of bondage without including a legend like Midori. While she might claim "I don’t distinguish S-M, because it’s just all sexuality," she is a huge personality, respected sex-educator, and popular author in the realm of BDSM. Her sought-after bondage workshops include weekend-long intensives on "rope bondage dojo," a type of bondage she developed and trademarked.

For Midori, growing up in Japan has had an enormous impact on her work, and her heritage manifests itself not only her rope bondage specialty in but also in her academic interests. She published a collection of S-M stories titled Master Han’s Daughter based in a Tokyo of the future and developed a course on contemporary sex culture in Japan. She also has written instructional books like The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage and Wild Side: The Book of Kink and taught sex education courses all over the world.

Although stunning, this one-time fetish model and former professional dominatrix is wary of her status as a sex symbol. "If people appreciate my writing and enjoy my classes and get something out of it, and dig my work because of my art and my activism and stuff that I do, hey, that’s great. I think I’m, like, way past the age of being the pretty something, because after all I’m well in my 40s. There are certain people in my private life, well, I hope they think I’m sexy. But beyond that, I hope people appreciate my work because of its content."

www.planetmidori.com; www.ropedojo.com

529-Simone.jpg
Simone Kross, photographed by Constance Smith

SIMONE KROSS, THE ROLLING STONE

The perceived life of a traveling dominatrix is alluring: exotic getaways, extravagant dinners, five-star hotels transformed into makeshift dungeons. But the reality is not easy.

Says Simone Kross, a traveling pro-domme: "The perception is maybe that I am wealthy and I have clients flying me around and it’s really exotic and glamorous. It’s really not. It’s hard work, and I pay my own way. The clients and sessions help me fund getting from one place to the next, but it’s not as glamorous as it may seem. At least not for me."

Kross has no illusions about her frequently grueling work. While working out of hotels, she runs her advertising on Eros Guide, a large online erotic service listing. "I can get busy to the point where I might not see the outside of a hotel room for three or four days. After I finish my sessions I can be pretty tired, order room service, and go to bed. I could be doing sessions from one in the afternoon until 10 at night."

An added stress is traveling with heavy gear. "The biggest problem is weight requirements, because you have to keep it under 50 pounds," she says. What could be so heavy? "You’d be surprised," she says. "Leather and metal, D-rings, rope, whips. I don’t even use half the gear I pack, but you never know what someone requires for a scene. The shoes also tend to weigh quite a bit."

Explaining a suitcase full of floggers, rope, gags, whips, and harnesses to airport security might seem awkward, but Simone says "they have checked my bags because they are a little heavier, but no one has given me any problems."

You can see Kross, a gorgeous brunette with cheekbones that appear perfectly convex from every angle, in action on Men in Pain, a chapter of Kink.com.

www.simonekross.com

529-Natasha.jpg
Natasha Strange, photographed by Constance Smith

NATASHA STRANGE, THE PRINCESSA

Now that the age of feudalism has passed, not many women can admit to having a coterie of ladies-in-waiting, so Natasha Strange’s "pink posse" — cross-dressing clients who have offered their services to her — is quite the blast from the past. And their title is not in name only: these ladies (or "sissy boys") actually do wait on Natasha.

For instance, Sissie Sandra’s responsibilities include walking Strange’s dog and running errands, duties that Sandra faithfully blogs about on a site called "Sandra in Waiting." Who knew moving someone’s car to avoid a street- cleaning ticket could be so erotic?

To her ladies-in-waiting, Strange is "the Princessa": a draconian ruler (they wouldn’t have it any other way) whose Marie Antoinette-esque whims become the word of law. With her wide blue eyes and long wavy hair, she resembles a cupcake Glinda the Good Witch, and it’s not hard to see why her pink-clad sissies have grown attached over the years.

Strange lives a charmed life. Her career began at Fantasy Makers, a fetish house in Oakland, when she was 25. Through her relationships with dedicated clients, her talents as a mistress, and sheer luck, she has fallen into a life many young dominatrices can only dream of.

She doesn’t take that luck for granted. "I have been really, really lucky to establish myself with a clientele that is really devoted to me," she says. "I don’t have to go out and hustle nearly as much as I did when I started out, even in this economy."

While she isn’t taking new clients, Strange hasn’t retired as a dominatrix just yet.

"I don’t think good dommes really retire. They sort of fade away. They take their favorite clients and they go. That’s probably what I’m starting to do. I haven’t advertised anywhere in two years. I’ve taken 90 percent of my website down. But I still have my tight-knit little group of subbies and sissies."

www.kittenwithawhip.com; sandrainwaiting.blogspot.com

529-Val.jpg
Val Langmuir, photographed by Constance Smith

VAL LANGMUIR, THE ACTIVIST

If you’re not living a BDSM lifestyle, it’s unlikely that you’ve heard of the Exiles and the sizable contribution they have made to the San Francisco BDSM scene.

This group, an educational organization (for women) that teaches safe BDSM (between women), had several lives before becoming the organization it is today. Says Val Langmuir, co-coordinator, "The Outcasts was the name of the former group. It originated in 1984 and ceased to exist in 1997. The Exiles was founded in 1997 by former Outcasts and immediately held its first program: Guns, Knives, and Choking, Oh My."

While it appears as if these women enjoy flirting with death, hardcore BDSM is the reason the Exiles exist in the first place: they want to make sure women know how to engage in it and survive. Their classes have included controversial topics like "Brutal Affection: Punching, Kicking, Slapping, and Sex," "The Art of Hazardous Age Play," and a program educating attendees on breath play, or what Langmuir describes as "how not to kill yourself when engaging in erotic asphyxiation." Langmuir moved to San Francisco 12 years ago from London, where she protested the horrifying Spanner Operation in 1990 that saw 16 Manchester gay men arrested and thrown in jail for participating in BDSM. Since then, Langmuir has been dedicated to advocating the right to participate in BDSM.

She has been involved with the Exiles since its inception. "We have meetings in the Women’s Building the third Friday of every month. Usually at each meeting, I’ll see at least one new face."

www.theexiles.org

529-Selina.jpg
Selina Raven, photographed by Constance Smith

SELINA RAVEN, THE MRS. ROBINSON

A former Catholic schoolgirl who attributes her sadistic tendencies to "all of those Sunday mornings spent contemputf8g the bloody figure of Christ," Raven began her pro-domme career in a structured, hierarchical way: she apprenticed. "There aren’t a lot of other women who are practicing BDSM as professionals who went through the process of apprenticing themselves to an older mistress. There’s only one other woman in SF right now, Eve Minax, who has actually done things in a more traditional manner."

Now Raven is not only one of the most established mistresses in San Francisco (and a 2007 Guardian Best of the Bay winner), but something of a mentor to up-and-coming dommes. Perhaps it’s because Raven benefited personally from the tutelage of an older mistress, Sybil Holiday, that she "always resolved to be a friendly face in the community, in being that person who I wish was around when I was 18: a little wicked but armed with good information and good experiences. That’s why I see myself as Mrs. Robinson."

A popular guest lecturer at UC Berkeley and sex educator at the Academy of SM Arts, an organization based in Menlo Park with workshops around the Bay Area, Raven is a happily-settled Oaklander with a supportive leather family. "I have my slave, and I have my former apprentice. And her boy lives with us too. I do not lack for love and companionship, but it’s not in the traditional hetero-normative form."

www.selinaraven.com

529-Eve.jpg

EVE MINAX, THE TRANSFERRED QUEEN

"I love diapering," says Eve Minax. "Age-play is a huge force in my life."

AB/DL, which stands for adult baby/diaper-lover, is a paraphilia most people tend to find either comical or disturbing. Minax disagrees. "Diapering in and of itself isn’t about age play as much as it is about getting somebody into a primal state — that baby state, that place before you’re actually living, thinking, feeling, in civilization."

In terms of maternal figures, Minax — who is six feet tall in heels, with short spikes of orangey-red hair and a fluty, theatrical voice — looks more Auntie Mame than Mommy Dearest. That is, if Auntie Mame looked like she could flog you into an intensive care unit. (In fact, the first time I met Minax in person, her right wrist was in a cast. She sprained it while flogging a client too enthusiastically.)

And speaking of intensive care, Minax is known as much for her medical play as she is for age play — in case you’re on the market for a rectal exam.

After eight years of working in San Francisco and living in Chicago, Minax finally made the decision to make SF her home base last year, much to her own delight. "I come from Chicago. I’ve lived in Paris. I’ve lived in Melbourne. But San Francisco is the mecca for alternative sexuality. All everyone ever talked about was San Francisco! It was almost like having a religious experience. I wanted to wait until I was about to retire, but then finally I was like: fuck it, I’ll just move here."

Minax’s current projects writing a cookbook of "food and BDSM pairings", such as "pork ribs with a side of rubber gimp".

www.mistressminax.com

Editor’s note: This list is by no means exhaustive. There are an impressive number of women making an impact on San Francisco’s BDSM scene. In particular, we’d also like to give a nod to Cleo Dubois, Sybil Holiday, Madame Butterfly, Luncida Archer, Mistress Morgana, Fivestar, Maitres Madeline, Janet Hardy, Hollie Stevens, and Princess Donna.

Stopping PG&E’s fraudulent initiative

-
0

EDITORIAL A ballot measure that could spell the end of public power in California is headed for either the spring or fall 2010 ballot — and so far, the opposition is missing in action. This is a profoundly important issue, and every elected official, city council, board of supervisors, and utility agency in the Bay Area needs to immediately come out in opposition and start organizing to defeat it.

The source of the proposition, of course, is Pacific Gas and Electric Co. PG&E is facing political wildfires all over the state as communities rebel against bad service and high rates. In Marin County, a community choice aggregation (CCA) plan is moving along, full speed. In San Francisco, CCA is a little slower, but still on track. These efforts could turn two of PG&E’s most profitable territories into public power beachheads. Meanwhile, in San Joaquin County, a public power movement is trying to take over part of PG&E’s service area, and PG&E just spent millions of dollars fighting a similar effort in Davis.

So the utility has decided to fight back — not just in the local communities where activists can beat PG&E back, or in the state Legislature, where the giant company has fewer and fewer friends, but with a ballot initiative that has a misleading name, a misleading political message — and tens of millions of dollars to back it up.

Signature-gatherers are out in force already, collecting names for a measure called "New two-thirds requirement for local public electricity providers." The paid petition crews are describing it as a "right to vote" measure, giving the public a chance to weigh in on government action.

What the measure would really do is require a two-thirds affirmative vote before any public power agency could add new customers, or any local agency could get into the power business. It would force the existing CCA movements to get two-thirds of the local voters to approve their efforts.

That’s an almost impossible standard — particularly when PG&E spends millions to block public power efforts everywhere they appear.

The two-thirds voting requirement is increasingly being assailed as undemocratic. The state Legislature has been paralyzed by its own two-thirds requirement for passing a budget, and there are multiple moves to reduce that threshold. The two-thirds mandate for passing local taxes has been widely blamed for driving cities and counties to the brink of fiscal ruin.

And yet PG&E is trying to add a new, crushing mandate — aimed entirely at snuffing out public power advances. The impact on the state will be enormous. As Megan Rawlins reports on page 8, high PG&E rates and the lack of public power cost the San Francisco economy alone as much as $2.8 billion a year. Multiply that by a factor of 10 or 20, and you see what a devastating financial blow this PG&E move would be to California’s crumbling economy.

So where, exactly, is the opposition?

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi called a meeting last week at the offices of the Utility Reform Network (TURN) to try to get other public power communities involved in a statewide campaign. But it’s been slow going.

That’s not going to work. Every elected agency in the Bay Area needs to get this on the agenda — now. Every city official (starting with Mayor Gavin Newsom, who wants to be governor) and every state official (starting with Attorney General Jerry Brown, who also wants to be governor) needs to loudly and publicly denounce this move, help establish a high-level coalition to beat it back, and start raising money for the campaign.

There may be a legal strategy, too. The law that authorized cities and counties to set up CCAs bars PG&E and other private utilities from interfering with local CCA efforts — and it’s pretty clear that this initiative is designed to do exactly that. City Attorney Dennis Herrera needs to immediately investigate the possibility of suing to get this disastrous initiative off the ballot. *

A new California tax revolt

-
0

OPINION Don’t miss the struggle underway over the future of the University of California.

Some see it as just another chapter in the unfolding story of the state’s economic decline. That’s partly true. But what’s really interesting is what it could become.

If it’s played right, the showdown over university fees and salaries could inspire a revival of sorts of the California tax revolt. Except this time, the rebels wouldn’t be tax-haters, like we saw in 1978 with Prop. 13. This time, the protests would be coming from parents and future parents of UC kids, and future employers of UC graduates. They’d be protesting, alongside UC students and employees, the ever-steeper fee hikes — essentially an education tax — that threaten to make our public universities cost as much as any private school.

This pro-tax movement would force a rewrite of state law, arguing that higher education is a public good so important that property-owners and corporations are morally and economically obliged to chip in.

You already know the back story. The state and global financial crises have pushed the UC system into intense contraction, compounding years of rising student costs. Top UC administrators receive bonuses while issuing pay cuts, layoffs, mandatory furloughs, and sharply increasing student fees (undergraduate costs are rising by $2,500, to more than $10,000 next year, with more hikes likely soon).

Many people believe the fee hikes are inevitable. Is it true? Or have we been merely well-trained by the Thatcherian promise that there’s no alternative to a shrinking public sphere? In fact, the administration’s budget claims are impossible to verify because much of the university budget is, literally, a state secret.

What’s clear is that the UC system is less and less accessible to everyday Californians, who are already languishing in a flailing public school system. Meanwhile, the state’s economy depends heavily on UC graduates, who are both innovators and laborers in every economic sphere.

We know how we got here. Prop. 13’s budget-starving effects have intersected effectively with the prevailing inclination to privatize just about everything. The global financial crisis — and California’s particularly harsh variation of it — created the opening for long-imagined cuts across the board.

But the latest budget moves have jolted faculty and students awake. Bit by bit undergraduates, who are typically fairly mono-focused on their grades and individual futures, are paying attention. Graduate students from departments as diverse as English and chemistry are convincing colleagues to drop their dissertations (momentarily) to organize demonstrations.

If you know anything about academic life these days, in an age of constant budget cuts, economic restructuring, and individualistic competition, then you know how unusual this is. Widespread political mobilization on campus is rare. But on Thursday, Sept. 24, faculty are staging a systemwide walkout from classes. That same day, rallies, marches, direct action, and union pickets are planned in what could be the beginning of a season of protest on all ten campuses.

Let’s be real. In isolation these protests will simply be a marker on the steep downhill slide of our educational system.

But with broad and consistent community support, the campus insurrection could merge with tax-reform efforts already underway to form a California pro-tax revolt, a movement for property tax and budget reform to reverse Prop. 13’s ill effects. Pro-taxers could harness campus activism, arguing — perhaps even for the sake of the economy — to save public education in California. *

Rachel Brahinsky is a PhD candidate in the geography department at UC Berkeley. For more information, visit www.gradstudentstoppage.com/news-and-events.

Lennar’s third quarter earnings are down

-
0

Text by Sarah Phelan

Lennar kicked off the first day of fall by reporting a $171.6 million third quarter fiscal loss for the period ending August 31. That’s more than double Lennar’s $89 million third quarter loss in 2008.

In a peppy press release posted at the corporation’s investor relations website, Lennar President and CEO Stuart Miller attributed his company’s 3Q loss to lower sales volumes and falling house prices.

“While high unemployment and foreclosures will continue to present challenges, consumer sentiment has significantly improved as homebuyers have recognized that the residential housing market is stabilizing,” he said.

“Assuming the economy continues to stabilize, we believe our improved sales environment, increasing pre-impairment gross margins and ability to leverage S,G&A [ selling, general and administrative expenses] should enable us to return to profitability in fiscal 2010,” Miller concluded.

That’s a pretty big assumption that Wall Street apparently wasn’t swallowing: it sent Lennar’s shares down 53 cents, or 3.2 percent, to $16.01 in yesterday’s midday trading.

Further casting doubt over Lennar’s hopes of a 2010 comeback is the fact that it’s still unclear if lawmakers will decide to extend a federal tax credit of up to $8,000 for first-time homebuyers which expires Nov. 30.

Prison report: What the state really wants

-
5

By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His dispatches appear twice a week.

I guess this is sort of a continuance from my last blog, which was, What Plan?My sentiment hasn’t changed — what the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has offered the three-judge panel is a “plan” that will surely get rejected.

The political rhetoric indicates that the state will fight — but it really is weak rhetoric, spoken just between the ears of constituents by politicians who want to appear tough on crime.

For those who that don’t deal directly with lawyers and politicians on a daily basis, the “we-will-fight-the-feds” speech really is weak. They have to say that — to appear tough on crime and strong for public safety (in their minds anyway). But I believe a good percentage of them are silently grateful for the escape granted to them by the feds. Ultimately, the court will reject their weak plan and take over long enough to release dozens of thousands of us .

If CDCR and the politicians who say they’re against releases felt as strong as they would have you think, a much more robust, pragmatic, well-thought-out process to deal with overcrowding would have been presented.

The Republicans claim to be against big government. If they really thought that way about the release scenario, they would have pushed for a plan that would have been acceptable to the courts and kept the big federal government out of the California prison system.

The Democrats who speak against releases and federal interference are just hypocrites scampering for a way to ride out the potential political fallout they perceive if they don’t “speak out” against releases.

Meanwhile, the ones who are speaking up for sanity are not getting the shaft that the others so feared.

The long-term results of the current budget cuts for health care, welfare and education are not seen as threats to public safety. But its so right in front of everyone to see and it’s not too complicated to explain nor to understand:

— Cuts to welfare mean more people have to find a way to feed themselves and their families. Consequently, they may steal or deal drugs.

— Cuts to health care mean less money to pay for you and your family’s health — consequently people will steal or deal drugs to pay for health care.

— Cuts to education mean a less-educated workforce that can’t get jobs because the economy sucks so they get on welfare …. oops, there is no welfare. Consequently, they steal or deal drugs to pay for food or healthcare or both.

Of course, there are those that wind up on drugs because it’s easier to worry about the next high than your next meal.

40,000 now — or what, 400,000 in five years?

Stiglitz: GDP Fetishism

-
0

Here is our monthly installment of Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Unconventional Economic Wisdom column from the Project Syndicate news series. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.

GDP Fetishism

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

NEW YORK – Striving to revive the world economy while simultaneously responding to the global climate crisis has raised a knotty question: are statistics giving us the right “signals” about what to do? In our performance-oriented world, measurement issues have taken on increased importance: what we measure affects what we do.

If we have poor measures, what we strive to do (say, increase GDP) may actually contribute to a worsening of living standards. We may also be confronted with false choices, seeing trade-offs between output and environmental protection that don’t exist. By contrast, a better measure of economic performance might show that steps taken to improve the environment are good for the economy.

The harshest cut

-
0

news@sfbg.com

"I wake up at night at 3:30, hearing the logging trucks and knowing what’s happening," Susan Robinson complains. "It makes me sick."

Robinson lives just off State Route 4 in Arnold, a Calaveras County community perched on the western slope of the Sierra.

For the past nine years, this feisty retiree has been clamoring to get Sierra Pacific Industries, California’s leading timber company, to stop clear-cutting the forest. "I’m the daughter of a forester myself. I am not anti-logging," she told us. "Of course, SPI should be able to log its land. But it shouldn’t have the right to obliterate everything."

A decade ago, logging and forestry practices in the Sierra were big news. Media reports, protests, and legislative action focused on SPI’s practice of slicing through entire large tracts of land, hacking down every tree, bush, and seedling and leaving nothing but devastation behind.

But most of the news media have long since moved on to other issues — and the clear-cutting continues. If anything, the pace at which SPI is felling the forest has hastened since the intensive logging controversies grabbed headlines in the 1990s.

"When I recently read the June 2000 issue of the Guardian exposing SPI’s activities in the Sierra, I was pained because I thought, ‘Wow! This could have been written yesterday,’" said Marily Woodhouse, a Sierra Club organizer in Shasta County.

It’s not as if nothing has changed under the Sierra sun. Some timber companies have adopted more responsible practices. But SPI is still a major problem. And as the largest private landowner in the state, its footprint is huge. Conservation activists have been exploring new opposition tactics while maintaining their diligent efforts on the legislative, legal, and educational fronts.

Susan Robinson and the other members of the Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch often take visitors to tour the backcountry roads and see the damage for themselves. On Winton Road, plots managed by SPI are adjacent to the Stanislaus National Forest, which is administered by the U.S. Forest Service — and the contrast is staggering.

Patches SPI harvested two years ago are still bare due to herbicide spraying. Between stumps, 10-inch-long replanted ponderosa pines may poke their frail limbs out of the churned soil, but there’s nothing left on a 20-acre lot for deer, bobcats, raccoons, or woodpeckers to eat, rest on, or breed in. No bees pollinating. No chickarees denning. It will take decades for the seedlings to reach maturity.

On the opposite side of the gravel road, on Forest Service land, sugar pines, ponderosa pines, lodgepole pines, incense cedars, oaks, and white firs of different ages shelter ferns, mushrooms, and berry plants. The forest has been thinned to reduce fire hazard, but it has not been converted to a monoculture tree farm.

"What grows back after you clear-cut is a plantation," said Doug Bevington of Environment Now. "A forest is not simply a collection of trees. What makes a forest a vibrant ecosystem is its diversity, having different species and different ages. And it’s the diversity of the forest that creates the habitat to support more species of life."

CLEAR-CUT FRENZY


You don’t need to travel to the Sierra to get the picture — connecting to Google Earth will suffice. Zoom into Arnold and levitate above Highway 4. Beyond the lush forest "beauty strips," the landscape looks like a moth-eaten blanket of evergreens.

Over the past 10 years, SPI has clear-cut 18 square miles in Calaveras County alone. (Clear-cut also includes slightly more moderate logging techniques that leave few trees and snags remaining on an otherwise desert-like tract.)

State records show that between 1996 and 2006 SPI clear-cut 270,000 acres of forests and dumped 335,000 pounds of herbicide into the soil. That’s roughly 420 square miles of scalped woodland. SPI isn’t the only timber company clear-cutting in this state, it just happens to be the most zealous. And it owns 1.7 million acres.

Proponents and opponents of clear-cutting agree on one point: it’s the most productive and the cheapest way to grow timber. But environmentalists say the ecosystems pay a heavy price for the practice.

Mark Pawlicki, SPI’s director of government affairs, told us that the company meets the standards set by the state’s Forest Practice Rules, and that Californian clear-cutting regulations are the strictest in the country. California allows 20 acre cuts; in Washington, the denuded area can reach 240 acres.

Timber harvest plans are not only reviewed the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), but also by the California Department of Fish and Game, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, and the California Geological Survey. Recently, SPI has even started to replant its clear-cuts with two or three different tree species.

The scientific community recognizes that clear-cutting has greater ecological impacts than any other harvesting method. Such radical treatment may be the only way to salvage logs from woods killed by insects or fire. And the industry is forced to mitigate some of the impacts — buffer zones, for instance, are required for waterways supporting aquatic life.

But that’s not enough: the tiny tributaries feeding the waterways aren’t protected, so sediment and debris can end up in the protected streams, affecting water quality, fish species, and amphibians. The water cycle is inevitably disrupted, with snowpack melting earlier in the season and rainfall running off the naked slopes. The fragmentation of the forest displaces animals that move around for their living, putting pressure on surrounding lands.

Environmental organizations are also concerned about exacerbation of climate change.

In national forests, clear-cutting has been phased out for more than a decade. Members of Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch wonder why the state can’t make the same rules for private loggers.

"I do reckon that private companies have to make profits," said Forest Watch activist Addie Jacobson. "But we do see companies like Collins Pine harvest timber in a way that all of us are happy with yet make some profit."

GREEN WOOD


Collins Pine has been managing 94,000 acres of timberland in Plumas and Tehama counties since 1941. It primarily uses selective cutting, where only certain trees are sparsely removed. Chief forester Jay Francis says that after a month, you can hardly tell a logged area from a pristine one.

"Our owners do not want us to do anything that compromises the values of our Sierra mixed-conifer forest, whether its wildlife, clean water, recreation, esthetics," he told us. "So we do a very minor amount of clear-cutting. In fact, we just turned in a plan for a 15-acre clear-cut for health reasons. We have an infestation of root-rots in an area. That’s probably the first clear-cut we’ve done in 50 years."

Those cuts are less than six acres wide, meeting the rules of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international organization that certifies sustainable forest management. Since its inception in 1993, FSC has developed standards to accommodate the commercial, social, and environmental values of forestland. It has the backing of the world’s leading environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. Consumers can rely on its label to buy environmentally and socially responsible wood products.

Collins Pine was the first privately held logging company in North America to receive FSC certification, in 1993. There are now 22 certified companies.

Gary Dodge, director of science at FSC U.S., contrasted FSC’s approach to wildlife with CAL FIRE’s, which only protects state-listed endangered species. "We also believe that it’s the role of the forest to prevent common species from becoming rare, or prevent rare species from becoming extinct," he said.

In the iconic North Coast redwoods of Mendocino County, the Mendocino Redwood Company has taken its cue from Collins Pine. In 1998, MRC took over 228,800 acres from the environmental villain Louisiana Pacific. From the start, MRC managers stated that they aimed for the business to be a good steward and a successful business. The company received FSC certification in 2000.

"There are a lot of models for what it means to be a successful business, but there are fewer for what it means to be a steward of the land," Sandy Dean, chairman of MRC, told us. "We think quite literally that it is to leave it better than we found it. It includes a reduction in the level of harvest, the elimination of clear-cutting, and the adoption of a specific policy to protect old-growth trees."

SPI is not impressed by this trend. "By and large, the companies that exclusively use selective logging just have a different objective than we do," Pawlicki said. "They’re not growing as much timber as we are."

SPI, nevertheless, is also using the buzz-word sustainability. According to Pawlicki, the state of California requires timber companies to be sustainable anyway. "You can’t cut more than you grow under California law." Jumping on the green-building bandwagon, SPI has also sought certification — with an organization called the Sustainable Forest Initiative that is not recognized by the LEED green building rating system.

NEW BATTLEGROUNDS


These days, conservation activists are trying out new strategies to compel SPI to straighten up its act. ForestEthics’ Save the Sierra campaign aims at protecting forests using the market as a weapon. "The average person may not have heard of SPI," said activist Joshua Buswell Charkow, "but they know its clients: Home Depot, Lowe’s, Kolbe & Kolbe [Millwork Company].

Some environmental groups still resort to litigation. "I’m not too optimistic to think that the industry will reform itself," said Brendan Cummings from the Center for Biological Diversity.

The center recently filed three lawsuits against CAL FIRE for approving timber harvest plans without properly analyzing the greenhouse gas emissions from each specific project. Instead, the agency accepted SPI’s broad assertion that growing its tree plantation over the next 100 years would offset the immediate carbon release caused by plowing the soil and burning the slash. But even if that’s true, the nature of the climate crisis is such that we need to curb emissions right now, said Cummings. In response, SPI withdrew its plans.

Concerned Sierra citizens are also challenging logging plans in the courts. In Shasta County, Marily Woodhouse has been opposing a plan to clear-cut 809 acres in the vicinity of the Digger Creek that flows through her town of Manton for fear it will disrupt an already heavily logged watershed. The Battle Creek Alliance, the coalition she helped form, filed suit in January 2008. "What happens if they drop a plan? Eventually they come back again," she said.

"The lawsuits do slow things down. But the fact is, [the loggers are] never going away."

Past experience has taught activists to be wary. Ten years ago, when SPI’s frenetic activity first came under public scrutiny, rallies and media coverage curtailed the timber giants’ greed. Yuba Valley residents led a protest against a plan to scrape 171 acres along the banks of the South Yuba River. And farther South, locals from Arnold faced with an 884-acre clear-cut launched Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch. SPI kept a low profile for a while, even declaring to the press it would scale back clear-cutting in Calaveras County — only to redouble its practices a few months down the road.

The Yuba River site has been spared, thanks to the intervention of the Trust for Public Land, which has been able to purchase 110,000 acres from SPI. Those parcels, also located in the Tahoe region and Humboldt County, were transferred to public ownership for conservation.

On the policy front, Forests Forever has been leading the charge for 20 years. The lobbying group has sponsored three initiatives in Sacramento to ban or further restrict clear-cutting. The last bill was killed by the Assembly Natural Resources Committee in April 2008.

"There’s a lingering sense that logging is still an economic driver in the state," said Forests Forever executive director Paul Hughes. "But tourism and retirement, which depend on healthy forests, actually contribute more to the economy."

Skeptics say that 80 percent of the wood used in California comes from Washington and Oregon or from the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, where clear-cutting is the norm anyway. But as Hughes put it, "You’ve got to start somewhere to fight this abomination."

On health care, just win

-
0

EDITORIAL This could very well be the pivotal moment in Barack Obama’s presidency. If he loses on health care reform — or worse, if he caves in to right-wing bullying tactics and abandons a strong public option — then not only will the American people and economy suffer, but Obama will have hobbled his ability to effectively address the myriad problems facing this country.

The time for negotiating with Republicans on health care is over. They have proven to be hostile and irrational obstructionists interested only in sabotaging both Obama and health care reform, repeatedly telling lies to incite anger and fear in the populace. Beyond being irresponsible, they have abandoned their role as good-faith participants in the political process.

Even when U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius suggested on Aug. 16 that private co-ops might be an acceptable alternative to the public plan — a tactical and policy mistake that understandably outraged progressives — Republicans refused to come back to the bargaining table.

With that gesture, Republicans showed that their overheated denunciations of the public option were simply a political ploy. They will scream "socialized medicine" on behalf of insurance companies no matter what is in this reform package, so Obama and the Democrats need to ignore them, develop the strongest possible plan, and do whatever it takes to get it through Congress this fall, even when that means stretching procedural rules to require only a bare majority vote for the most controversial elements.

The Democrats have already compromised enough. As the Guardian has said ("It’s the insurance companies, stupid," 7/22/09), a single-payer system is the only reform that will bring the cost savings this country (and its residents and businesses) desperately needs. Democrats were foolish to abandon that so early, a decision that emboldened conservatives and insurance industry shills in both parties and led to the current standoff.

So if Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are right that starting over on health care reform would cause the moment of possibility to be lost — and we aren’t sure they’re right, although we understand the point — then they need to get tough and push through their plan without letting it get watered down any more.

Despite the over-amplification of right-wing talking points, the political winds have shifted in this country. Progressives are ascendant and they expect fundamental reforms. Pelosi (to her credit) acknowledged as much in August when she said that health reform bill without a strong public option wouldn’t be approved by the House.

That’s because the House Progressive Caucus, led by Rep. Lynn Woolsey from Petaluma, now has more members than the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, 81 to 52. It’s not the 1990s anymore, when then-President Bill Clinton felt he had to compromise with the emerging right wing to get anything done. Now Democrats finally need to acknowledge progressives and enlist their help in moving a bold reform agenda.

Today, the Republicans have been thoroughly discredited, but the Democratic Party is its own worst enemy. The people who gave the Democrats substantially congressional majorities expect action, and if the Democrats can’t toughen up and deliver, this country is headed for a real political crisis that could easily spin out of control.

Obama and Pelosi need to seize the moment and pass a health reform bill that includes a robust public option and explicitly allows states like California to experiment with single-payer systems, which is the only system that will truly hold down health care costs and drive a stake through the heart of the insurance industry, which is ruining not just the health care system, but the political system as well. *

Editorial: On health care, just win

-
1

Republicans will scream "socialized medicine" on behalf of insurance companies no matter what is in this reform package.

EDITORIAL This could very well be the pivotal moment in Barack Obama’s presidency. If he loses on health care reform — or worse, if he caves in to right-wing bullying tactics and abandons a strong public option — then not only will the American people and economy suffer, but Obama will have hobbled his ability to effectively address the myriad problems facing this country.

The time for negotiating with Republicans on health care is over. They have proven to be hostile and irrational obstructionists interested only in sabotaging both Obama and health care reform, repeatedly telling lies to incite anger and fear in the populace. Beyond being irresponsible, they have abandoned their role as good-faith participants in the political process.

Even when U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius suggested on Aug. 16 that private co-ops might be an acceptable alternative to the public plan — a tactical and policy mistake that understandably outraged progressives — Republicans refused to come back to the bargaining table.

With that gesture, Republicans showed that their overheated denunciations of the public option were simply a political ploy. They will scream "socialized medicine" on behalf of insurance companies no matter what is in this reform package, so Obama and the Democrats need to ignore them, develop the strongest possible plan, and do whatever it takes to get it through Congress this fall, even when that means stretching procedural rules to require only a bare majority vote for the most controversial elements.

1...343536...51Page 35 of 51

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org