Economy

Feels like the first time

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At first listen, I thought Oakland’s Long Thaw approached their straight-up hard rock with ironic jokiness. After all, this clever bunch sport names like Chile Valentine (né Benjamin Prewitt), Diego Snake (a.k.a. Dan Brubaker), and Mr. Forever (born André Zivkovich). Their humor meter defaults to squirm-inducing sexual innuendos, and as Snake puts it, they believe there are "enough hair farmers out there that like to just sit down with a beer and listen to some dude rock."

Well, the joke’s on me, and I thought wrong: file Long Thaw’s heavy sound somewhere between the Melvins and Triclops! and never doubt the band would treat music with sardonic carelessness.

Back in December, when I first saw the combo play, I didn’t expect much, except that I might get bored, and if so, I could kill time in the Stork Club back room by pouring $10 into a pinball machine. My low expectations paid off: not only was I not bored; I was fully entertained by Long Thaw’s classic twin-guitar attack and speedy riff trading, heavy bottom-end drum fills, and soaring, operatic vocals. As much as its members have absorbed the ideas of proto- and post-punk, the band’s economy and aggression compositionally refer more directly to 1980s hardcore and ’90s alternative rock.

Long Thaw formed at the intersection of two Bay Area bands: Boyjazz and Stay Gold Pony Boy. Eager to try his hand at writing and playing his own songs, guitarist Forever got his chance when, he says, "literally within a month I got dumped and I bailed out of Boyjazz." Snake brought some riffs to Forever’s attention, and they clicked enough for the two to start a new project, joined by friends and colleagues DeSoto Vice (Szymon Sipowski) on bass and Savannah Black (Jenya Chernoff) on drums. After a year of auditioning vocalists, Long Thaw found Chile Valentine and came out of its ice age.

Being a classically trained vocalist, Valentine can pitch it high and sustain the notes: he’s turned out to be the icing on the group’s hard-rock cake. In just one year, during which his voice flipped between sounding too over the top and too reined in, Valentine went from singing at karaoke bars to warbling on local stages. "Overall," Forever says, sitting down with the rest of the band at Soundwave Studios, "if [Valentine] weren’t singing, we wouldn’t get the Iron Maiden and Dio comparisons." Sure, Valentine’s amusingly metalesque voice hooks you, but the band’s rhythmic clip and dueling riffs, as well as catchy choruses and bridges, keep you around.

Judge for yourself on the new self-released EP Feels Natural, and notice how well the band fits into the current pop cycle, in which hard rock is undergoing its seeming once-a-decade revival in the form of Queens of the Stone Age and spin-off Eagles of Death Metal. Here in the Bay, Long Thaw’s music seems surprisingly fresh, especially as a muscular counterpoint to the foppish twee-ness of a certain segment of the indie underground. If you came of age during the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the sounds burned in your brain are those of Dinosaur Jr., Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Jesus Lizard, you’ll enjoy Long Thaw’s old-school rock ‘n’ roll, played anew.

LONG THAW

March 2, 4 p.m., call for price

Stork Club

2330 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 444-6174

www.storkcluboakland.com

Noise Pop: Fuck yeah

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Most articles and reviews about Holy Fuck begin with some comment about whether the band’s music did or did not make the writer exclaim, "Holy fuck!" So insert your own exclamatory joke about the group’s name here, and let’s move past the moniker and go on to the music.

Holy Fuck straddle the rock and electronic divide: they mash together techno beats, dirty lo-fi electronics, and loud kinetic-rock rhythms. It’s a perfect of-the-moment sound — the type that indie rock kids love to dance to, balanced with enough chaotic experimentalism to appeal to noise rock and electronic fans. We live in weird times, and this band gets the times.

Perversely, as bad as the war and the economy are, kids are having a great deal of innocent fun these days. You can catch a sweaty, spazzy groove to the not-so-faux-naïf, party-starting sounds of Video Hippos. Or you can bang your head to Holy Fuck’s embodiment of that dance-party spirit.

The songs on their latest record, LP (XL), drive forward kraut rock–style, but the dirty layers of electronic noise on top of their propulsive rhythms have a purer rock vibe: they’re raw, primitive, and energetic. On my MP3 player, "Choppers," the last track on LP, fits snugly up against my next loaded disc, a Can anthology. The sound of Holy Fuck’s recorded output lies somewhere between Trans Am and Suicide, although they don’t stake out the confrontationally icy ground of the latter nor cloak themselves in the distancing self-awareness of the former. Instead, onstage a few weeks ago at the Great American Music Hall, Holy Fuck bopped around unselfconsciously, with quick-change mixes, effects-pedal tweaks, and keyboard jams. It’s a friendly, accessible show, performed by a band dedicated to making electronic music without laptops or sequencers. In fact, not only will you not find a laptop on Holy Fuck’s stage, but you’ll also discover instruments that come with a junkyard aesthetic: film modulators, and a Casio mouth organ.

The group has emerged from a Toronto scene with a vast and supportive music community, one that embraces many genres and in which most performers have more than one musical project going. Although Holy Fuck don’t want to be perceived, as the group’s Brian Borcherdt puts it over the phone, as "hippie lovefest" musicians, their writing process has been somewhat loose, improvisatory, and collaborative. The band has also included a rotating cast of Toronto musicians, which has led some to dub the ensemble an "evil supergroup," Borcherdt says. Still, regardless of what they play and whom they play with, Holy Fuck remain an exciting live band — though I’m still not going to use the easy exclamatory.

HOLY FUCK

With A Place to Bury Strangers, White Denim, and Veil Veil Varnish

Feb. 29, 9 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Money grows on trees

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GREEN CITY A lone fisher casts his line off the wooden dock of Candlestick Point, his favorite spot and one at risk of closure from state budget cuts.

"The tide is too low today to catch anything, but supposedly there’s halibut now after the rain," Ernesto Perez told the Guardian as he walked back to his car empty-handed, hoping to return later.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office has proposed closing 48 of the 278 state parks by July 2009 because of a projected $14.5 billion state deficit. A big chunk of that shortfall is from the car tax Schwarzenegger repealed when he took office, triggering threats to schools, parks, and social welfare programs.

The parks with the lowest revenue or highest maintenance costs were placed on the closure list. Nine Bay Area parks could be affected, ranging from the small Candlestick Point to Henry W. Coe State Park near San Jose, the largest in Northern California.

Although the state could save $13.3 million if the parks close, the governor hasn’t calculated how much would be lost in tax revenue from the businesses these parks sustain, nor does he seem interested in the intrinsic loss of valued public assets.

"Look at how important Hearst Castle is to the central coast’s economy," Roy Stearns, spokesperson for California State Parks, told the Guardian.

The agency was asked to reduce its 2008–09 budget by about 10 percent, achieved mostly through layoffs and closing parks. Rangers will provide rudimentary maintenance of the closed parks, mostly monitoring illegal campers and fires. The state does not know how much money it would need to reopen the parks or when such funds might become available.

"In essence the state is abandoning the parks," Barbara Hill, vice president of the California State Parks Foundation, told the Guardian. She fears poaching, arson, and illegal dumping will proliferate. "How will they be able to properly secure the borders?" she asked.

The CSPF, a nonprofit that helps to preserve state parks, recently secured $17 million to restore tidal marshes in Candlestick Point. If implemented, the project would create the largest contiguous wetland in the city. The plan is now on hold, forcing the area into further decay.

Nature lovers are not the only ones concerned about the state parks’ cuts. If the 48 parks do close, the expected 6.5 million person drop in visitors will certainly impact the revenues of cities, counties, and the state. According to the California Division of Tourism, 73 percent of visitors come to the state for leisure purposes, and each county earns about $1.5 billion per year from tourism.

"It’s a shame to close Candlestick. I don’t know how it will affect my business," Andy Hung, owner of 88 Fishing Tackle on San Bruno, told the Guardian. "Even now there aren’t enough public piers to fish from." If Candlestick closes, Hung believes fishers will migrate somewhere else.

Across the bay in Benicia, people are worried. The city’s main attraction, the Benicia Capitol State Historic Park, is on the parks closure list. "It’s our most significant building, and we’re lobbying so the final budget cut won’t include it," Amalia Lorentz, Benicia’s economic development manager, told the Guardian.

A 2001 study by the California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo found that visitors to Morro Bay State Park contributed $15 million to the local economy over two years and were responsible for the creation of 364 jobs. Benicia has almost three times the population of Morro Bay. Although the Morro Bay park will remain open under the budget cut, eight other parks in the area will close.

Officials say they doubt higher entrance fees are the solution to saving the parks. "We’ve raised fees three times in the last seven years. They’re the highest in the nation, and we don’t want to price people out," Stearns said. Funds to the state park system have been slashed consistently since the 1980s, and parks have been relying more on entrance fees than state funding. Because of a 233 percent increase in day fees in the past six years, California park attendance has dropped by about nine million people, according to state park officials.

Several organizations, including the CSPF, are collecting signatures and donations to encourage Schwarzenegger and the legislature not to sacrifice California’s parks to political expediency.

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

Flesh peddlers

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In the category of coolest stuff in the world, Sasha Wizansky recently sent a copy of Meatpaper (subtitled Your Journal of Meat Culture), a magazine she coedits with Amy Standen, to the Guardian offices. The magazine is a veritable cornucopia, nay, a butcher shop of fascinating articles, from an interview with meat inspectors to found meat photography and a beef heart recipe. I immediately contacted Ms. Wizansky and proposed marriage. What I got in lieu of matrimony was an interview, excerpted below.

SFBG Why did you want to do a magazine about meat?

SASHA WIZANSKY The answer that we usually give for that is we perceived that there is a meat movement going on. We call it the fleischgeist, which stands for "the meat zeitgeist." This was a cross-country trend, which apparently is global as well. People are thinking about meat in new ways. That’s partially in the context of restaurants and home cooking, but also in art and culture. So we started a magazine to report on the fleischgeist and basically collect multiple perspectives on what’s going on and publish them side by side.

SFBG Are you going to include non-meat-eating perspectives?

SW Yeah, that’s actually a huge part of what we do. My coeditor and I believe that people’s choice to not eat meat is actually a big part of the story of meat. That’s something that we’re actually extremely interested in covering. We like to cover all perspectives.

SFBG Do you think there’s been a backlash against vegetarianism and veganism in San Francisco?

SW I personally have witnessed a pretty big shift in maybe the last eight years or so. I moved to San Francisco in ’95 and I felt like most of my friends were vegetarians, and that’s not true anymore. So if my community is representative at all, I think things really have changed. I think part of it is that a lot of the reasons that people were choosing vegetarianism had to do with, you know, organic food and environmental reasons, but now a lot of those same issues are being addressed by meat production. It’s possible now to participate in a sustainable meat economy in a way that wasn’t before.

SFBG Were you ever a vegetarian?

SW I was a vegetarian for seven years. From 13 to age 20. My personal reasons I think had a lot to do with health. Sort of personal choice. There was a moment at age 20 when I decided that it was the right thing for me, healthfully, to eat meat again. And I haven’t gone back.

SFBG What is the most adventurous meat eating experience you’ve had?

SW Well, what I think is really interesting about adventurous meat eating is it’s so much to do with your head and so little to do with your palate. I think the idea of some of these extreme meats is frightening to a lot of people, but the reality is not. I suppose in terms of an extreme meat idea, Amy and I had duck fries at Incanto Restaurant.

SFBG Duck what?

SW Duck fries. Which is a euphemism for testicles. Chris Cosentino, who wrote the recipe for beef heart for [Meat Paper] — that’s his restaurant. The idea of [duck fries] is so extreme; the reality is very mild. They looked like big kidney beans, and they tasted like little sausages.

SFBG As someone who eats meat, do you feel there are moral ramifications and karmic and moral weight to eating meat?

SW This is a tough one. I’m not sure I want to go all the way there about my own choices. But I think it’s complicated. On one level it feels like an uncomfortable thing that an animal should have to die for me to eat. On the other hand, I see myself in a lineage of a species that has existed, you know, forever, eating meat. These are contradictory things, and sometimes it’s a moral tug-of-war. It’s something that I think about a lot. People assume that because I edit a magazine about meat that I’m eating bacon and sausages [all the time]. Actually, I am going to a salami tasting tonight. But I don’t eat meat three meals a day.

www.meatpaper.com

Techsploitation: Information dystopia

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TECHSPLOITATION I was raised on the idea that the information age would usher in a democratic, communication-based utopia, but recently I was offered at least two object lessons in why that particular dream is a lie.

First, a dead surveillance satellite, one roughly the size of a bus, fell out of orbit and into a collision course with Earth. It will likely do no damage, so don’t worry about being crushed to death by flying chunks of the National Security Agency budget. The important part is that nobody knew when the satellite died. Maybe a year ago? Maybe a few days? A rep from the National Security Council would only say, "Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation."

Is this our info utopia, wherein we literally lose track of bus-size shit flying through space over our heads? I mean, how many surveillance satellites do we have? It’s not like I love the techno-surveillance state, but it is a little shocking that the SIGINT nerds who run it are so out of touch that they can’t even keep track of their orbiting spy gear. Still, it’s hard to be too upset when Big Brother isn’t watching.

But that satellite could just as easily have been a forgotten communications satellite dive-bombing our atmosphere. And that would have sucked, especially since last week’s mega Internet outage across huge parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia didn’t bring down the global economy largely because people had satellite access to the Internet. This Internet outage, which took millions of people (and a few countries) off-line, happened when two 17,000-mile underwater fiber-optic cables running between Japan and Europe were accidentally cut. No one is quite sure how they were severed, but it was most likely due to human error — an anchor was probably dropped in the wrong place.

And so big chunks of Dubai went dark, as did many Southeast Asian countries. Businesses couldn’t operate; people couldn’t communicate. The people and businesses that were able to keep running were by and large the ones that didn’t depend on cheap Internet services that use only one or two cables to route their traffic. It’s cheaper to rent time on one cable, but if that cable is cut, you lose everything. Most customers don’t research how their Internet service providers route Internet traffic across the Asian continent — or across the Pacific Ocean — so they don’t realize their communications could be disrupted, possibly for weeks, if some drunken sailor drops anchor in the wrong spot.

In fact, few of us anywhere in the world consider the fact that our info utopia is a fragile thing based on networks that are both material and vulnerable. We think of the Internet as a world of ideas, a place "out there," unburdened by physical constraints. Even if you wanted to research which physical cables your ISP uses to route your traffic, it would be very difficult to do without a strong technical background and the help of the North American Network Operators’ Group list, an e-mail list for high-level network administrators.

So why do a crashing spy satellite and a partly dark Internet mean we’ve entered the age of information dystopia? Quite simply, they are signs that our brave new infrastructure is failing around us even as we claim that it offers a shining path to the future. It’s as if the future is breaking down before we get a chance to realize its potential.

But the information age doesn’t have to end this way, in a world where
can-and-string-network jokes aren’t so funny anymore. There are a few simple things we could do. We could help consumers better understand what happens when they buy Internet access by showing them what routes their traffic might take and giving them realistic statistics about possible outages. People could then make better choices about what services to buy. And so could telcos and nations.

Why shouldn’t we have solid research on which ISPs are most likely to suffer the kind of network outages we just witnessed from the severing of those two cables? Consumer groups could undertake this research. Or, since developed nations suffer more, perhaps the United Nations might want to conduct the investigation as a matter of Internet governance. We know where car traffic and sea traffic go. Why don’t we know where Internet traffic goes?

Another thing we could do to stop the information dystopia is to cut down on spy satellites, but that, as they say, is another column.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is investing in semaphore communication networks.

Brad Will and the politics of oil

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MEXICO CITY – Flash back to October 27th, 2006. American photojournalist Brad Will is splayed out on a sidewalk in Oaxaca, Mexico, mortally wounded by the pistoleros of rogue governor Ulisis Ruiz during tumultuous street battles in that southern city. His killers have never been prosecuted.

Now fast forward to this past January 10th. Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the unctuous leader of the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party faction in the Mexican Senate, announces to a gaggle of reporters that the PRI is prepared to back President Felipe Calderon and his right-wing PAN in passing an “energy reform” package that would permit transnational corporations to generate 49% of the nation’s electricity and open PEMEX, the state petroleum monopoly expropriated from its Anglo-American owners in 1938 and nationalized by President Lazaro Cardenas, to such oil titans as Exxon, British Petroleum, and Shell. Beltrones’ personal preference to initiate the proposed “association of private capitals”: Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company which opened itself to private investment back in 1997 and which has extensive experience in deep water drilling.

What is the connection between these two apparently unconnected events? Just this: the cover-up of Brad Wills’ death smoothed the way for the PRI-PAN partnership to privatize PEMEX.

Although his killers were plainly identified as plainclothes police on Ulisis’s payroll, Wills’ inconvenient death was ignored by then-president Vicente Fox despite demands by human rights and journalist protection organizations for a full investigation of the killing, one of 26 perpetrated by Ruiz’s death squads between August and October of 2006. Fox’s successor, Felipe Calderon, followed suit and stonewalled an inquiry into Wills’ murder. Similarly, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico never sought justice for a slain citizen despite the personal pleas of the dead man’s family.

Why such studied indifference?

Because holding Governor Ruiz, a prominent PRIista, accountable for the killing(s) would have upset the burgeoning alliance between the PRI and the PAN to ratify Calderon’s legislative agenda, the most pertinent item of which was “energy reform” i.e. the privatization of PEMEX.

Embassy inaction on Brad Wills’ murder followed the same logic. As U.S. ambassador, Bush crony Tony Garza is charged with representing U.S. interests in Mexico and Washington’s interest in opening up Mexican oil to U.S. transnationals far outweighs its interest in bringing the killers of a freelance anarchist reporter to justice. The U.S. has long contemplated a North American Energy Alliance that would guarantee access to Mexican and Canadian reserves.

To this end, Washington has played an active role in facilitating the impending privatization of Petrolios Mexicanos. Over the past months, U.S. transnationals and their associates in government have orchestrated an extraordinary campaign to hoodwink Mexicans into swallowing the lie that PEMEX is hopelessly broken and must be opened to private capital forthwith for the salvation of the Fatherland.

Last July, ex-Federal Reserve czar Alan Greenspan was beamed into Mexico for a teleconference with the nation’s most exalted business council to deliver an ultimatum: if PEMEX was not fixed quickly, the country faced fiscal crisis. Indeed, the petroleum giant (the 11th largest on the planet) generates 40% of Mexico’s total budget and 100% of a social budget that keeps 70,000,000 Mexicans who live in and around the poverty line, in relative quiescence. By “fixing” PEMEX, Greenspan meant privatizing it.

It should be noted that Alan Greenspan is an expert on fiscal crises – his monetary policies just helped to tripwire such a crisis in his own country, the sub-prime disaster.

The Greenspan game plan was echoed December 13th in a memo issued by the International Monetary Fund urgently counseling legislation to allow private capital into PEMEX before the government went broke. Garza’s embassy chimed in the next day, warning of massive capital flight if the Mexican Congress did not pass Calderon’s “energy reform” package. On December 19th, The Economist, which ironically was founded on the fortune reaped by Anglo oil companies in Mexico that eventually became British Petroleum, opined that “the obvious solution to the disaster of PEMEX is to privatize.” Finally, the U.S. Department of Energy delivered the death knell on January 9th: the lack of investment in PEMEX’s Exploration and Exploitation (PEP) division spelled energy catastrophe – not a good sign for Washington’s North American Energy Alliance strategy. On January 10th, the PRI came on board to back Calderon’s “energy reform.”

Despite the Jeremiads, the putsch for privatization has lost considerable steam globally. In fact, a moderate swing to nationalization seems to be in process. Amidst prognoses of irreparable damage to the Venezuelan economy, Hugo Chavez renationalized sectors of PDVSA, the state oil company, and ran a 12% surge in domestic growth in 2007 in spite of it. Bolivia has renationalized natural gas production and Ecuador is on the brink of doing so. The most successful renationalization has been in Putin’s Russia where Gazoprom and Yukos became major world players overnight.

According to Mexican strategic resource writer Alfredo Jalife, 32% of the world’s petroleum supply is in the hands of private transnationals, 20% is nationalized or in the process of being renationalized, and the rest is held by mixed state-private corporations.

But despite their exaggerated anguish at an energy meltdown if PEMEX is not privatized, the doomsayers do have a point: Petrolios Mexicanos is in deep doo-doo. Daily accidents such as the unquenchable fire that took 21 workers’ lives on a Caribbean oil platform and contaminated surrounding waters last fall, pipeline bombings by the guerrilla Popular Revolutionary Army, and the failure to modernize infrastructure – no new refinery has been built in 20 years – is stark evidence of corporate corrosion.

Despite 100-weak-dollar-a-barrel prices (Mexican light crude tops out around $80 USD these days) that generated $2.3 billion in enhanced revenues during the first ten months of 2007, lack of refining capacity forces PEMEX to shell out $5 billion Yanqui dollars each year to import 40% of its gasoline needs – which is to say that for every $1 of the increased revenues PEMEX takes in, two bucks go out for gas.

Calderon’s solution? The so-called “Gasolinazo”, the President’s gift to the driving public on January 6th, the Day of the Kings (Mexican Christmas), that will increase prices at the pump incrementally each month indefinitely. Increased transportation costs are expected to impact food prices across the board.

But the bad news doesn’t stop there. The big battle over Mexican oil is really a battle over crumbs. If U.S. Department of Energy calculations are on target, Mexico only has 12.9 billion barrels in proven reserves, depletion of which could turn PEMEX into a net importer by 2018 if no new petroleum sources are uncorked before then – although Mexico is the sixth largest international oil producer, it has only 1% of the planet’s proven reserves.

With the Cantarell field in the Sound of Campeche, the magnum star of offshore production that has motored PEMEX since the 1990s, just about tapped out, the clock is ticking. To exacerbate this doomsday scenario, Mexico is pumping out what it has left at a record clip to capitalize on the booming barrel price – PEMEX now produces about 3.2 million barrels daily, fully 1.7 million of which are sent up the Gulf to the U.S., an export platform that is accelerating depletion and subsidizing Washington’s wars around the world.

Given this bleak picture, most experts concur that the only place PEMEX can go to drill for new reserves is deep water, five miles down in the Gulf of Mexico. The only catch is that Petrolios Mexicanos does not have deep water drilling capacity. That’s where Petrobras, as contemplated in the PRI/PAN privatization scheme, would come in handy.

What exactly constitutes privatization? Auctioning off the corporation from the top

to the highest bidder or selling it off piece by piece from the bottom? During 35 years of oil boom and bust, PEMEX has systematically dismantled its Exploration & Exploitation division and handed it over to transnational subcontractors, emphasizes Autonomous National University researcher John Saxe- Fernandez who heads up the UNAM’s Strategic Resources Institute. At the top of Saxe-Fernandez’s list of prominent subcontractors is Halliburton with 159 PEMEX contacts since 2000 worth $1.2 billion USD – Halliburton moved into Mexico in the 1990s during the development of Cantarell when Dick Cheney was CEO.

But subcontracting out choice contracts goes back generations. George Bush pere partnered with PEMEX director Jorge Serrano (who later went to jail) in Zapata Offshore, a drilling outfit that operated in the Sound of Campeche in the 1970s. Today, virtually every major transnational driller has a piece of the Mexican action.

A recent daily La Jornada investigation by energy reporter Israel Rodriguez revealed the signing of a series of secret “pre-privatization” covenants to exploit Mexican fields with Shell (the mysterious “Project Margarita”), Exxon, Petrobras, Nexen (Canada), and StatsOil (Norway.) The contracts, accessed through Mexico’s Freedom of Information Act, contained clauses whose contents cannot be divulged for the next five years.

The PRI/PAN energy scam is currently being hatched in the Mexican Senate’s Energy Commission chaired by Francisco Labastida, a former secretary of energy (as is Calderon) and the PRI’s losing presidential candidate in 2000. Those who have gotten a peek at the details label the energy reform legislation “privatization lite” with foot-in-the-door measures that will allow for the “association of private capital” in such areas as pipelines and refineries. The legislation stops short of amending the Mexican Constitution’s Article 27, which stipulates that the petroleum belongs to the nation.

Skirting a constitutional amendment will deny ammo to AMLO – leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who many believe was swindled out of the presidency in 2006 and who has emerged as the leader of the fight against privatization. This January, Lopez Obrador announced formation of a cross-party Movement In Defense of Petroleum whose battle cry is “Mexico is not for sale!”

The ex-presidential candidate proposes that PEMEX can raise sufficient revenues without opening itself up to private investment by simply cleaning house – the corporation has long been riddled with corruption, bribe-taking, kickbacks and rampant dirty dealing. For decades, the PRI siphoned off millions to finance its electoral campaigns – in 2000, $110 million USD in PEMEX funds were funneled through the gangster-ridden petroleum workers union into Labastida’s campaign coffers, the so-called “PEMEXgate” scandal.

AMLO has also long advocated the construction of three new refineries to offset the escautf8g cost of importing gasoline which he tags “an absurd situation” for the world’s sixth largest oil producer.

In the opposite corner, Lopez Obrador’s archrival Felipe Calderon insists that opening PEMEX to private capital will somehow make Petrolios Mexicanos “more Mexican” (“more productive, more competitive, more Mexicano.”)

“To hand over our natural resources to foreign powers is an act of treason,” AMLO responds, quoting the man who expropriated and nationalized Mexico’s petroleum in 1938, President Lazaro Cardenas. Lopez Obrador’s defense of Mexican oil will be a first test for the grassroots base the leftist has been cultivating since the tainted 2006 election and is sure to frame the next round of his ongoing bout with Calderon and his allies. AMLO, who in the past has been able to mobilize millions, is calling for nationwide protests this March 18th, the 70th anniversary of Cardenas’s expropriation.

Petroleum is a patriotic fluid here. Expropriation of the oil industry from the “extranjeros” (foreigners, literally “strangers”) was the high point of revolutionary nationalism in Mexico. But in a globalized world, the coming battle around the privatization of PEMEX is not just a Mexican matter anymore and, indeed, has far-reaching implications for the future of neo-liberalism in the Americas.

Sprawled in the Oaxaca street, the life blood leaking from him, the last thing Brad Will could have imagined is that in death he would become an accidental pawn to the transnationals’ ambitions to privatize Mexican oil. Tragically, in the end, that may be Wills’ most significant legacy.

“Blindman’s Buff” has opened it lists to new subscribers. Contact the Blindman (his vision is improved) at johnross@igc.org for your lifetime subscription. Warning: there is no way to get off these lists. You will receive BMB until either you or I croak.

Running on empty

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The fourth floor of San Francisco’s City Hall feels remote. Dimly lit and strangely quiet, it conveys a sense of isolation from the powerful people who do their work in the lower levels of the building.

Here, in an unremarkable conference room, is where the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force is conducting its second meeting. Two of its officers are absent, and only one member of the public has turned up to participate. It is an atmosphere that belies the issue’s cataclysmic potential.

The day’s breaking news headlines of oil reaching $100 per barrel for the first time in history is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. One year earlier the price was $58 per barrel. This dramatic increase in such a short span would devastate economies around the world if it continued at anywhere close to that rate.

Chairperson Jeanne Rosenmeier, an articulate, contemplative woman, reiterates the task force’s purpose: "Our charge is to examine how the city is going to handle rising oil prices and possible shortages. That is what we have been asked to do."

The assessment seems like an understatement, perhaps suggesting that the group is merely looking for solutions to how the average citizen could function better without an automobile. Yet in a society built on oil, the consequences of such an energy crisis are likely to be far more sweeping and problematic than merely high gas prices.

While considering models for the study the task force will prepare, Rosenmeier points to Portland, Ore.’s recently completed peak oil report and talks about limiting San Francisco’s effort to outlining the range of scenarios, from small impacts to large. She’s reluctant to acknowledge the extralarge scenario — massive worldwide social unrest and full-scale anarchy in the streets of San Francisco — which she argues would be harmful to the group’s focus.

Jan Lundberg, the task force member in charge of "societal functioning," politely disagrees. Insightful and exuding a sort of deeply ingrained experience, Lundberg has a goatee and a big mane of blond hair that make him look like a Berkeley-ish version of billionaire Virgin CEO Richard Branson. The resemblance is strangely apt when you consider that Lundberg has defected from more lucrative ventures. His family’s business, the Lundberg Survey, has been one of the premier oil industry research authorities in the world for the past few decades, but today Lundberg is volunteering his time to the task force.

"You have to look honestly at what we are up against," Lundberg tells the Guardian. "Only then can you come up with intelligent responses to what is occurring. If it is a tsunami coming, then you take action for a tsunami."

It might come as news to most San Franciscans that a team of seven relatively unknown, politically appointed volunteers is hashing out the hard realities and dire implications of a potentially massive energy crisis. When the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution (with Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier absent) in April 2006 to acknowledge the looming phenomenon of the global oil supply being exceeded by demand, San Francisco was the first city in the country to do so. It was a precedent that received little attention from the media, perhaps shrugged off as just another wacky resolution steeped in San Francisco values.

For the next 10 months the task force will be preparing a study of mitigation measures to be considered by the city government for implementation into law. Much like the phenomenon of peak oil, their work will also be best assessed in hindsight. For now, some will see them as a team of Chicken Littles sketching a contingency plan for when the sky falls.

Yet if the scientific insights that compelled the Board of Supervisors to form the group prove prescient, then the report that the task force is producing may well be crucial to San Francisco’s very survival.

SLIPPERY SLOPE


Oil has acquired a bad reputation in recent years, as if the resource were not a fossil fuel found in the earth’s crust but a corrupt corporate tycoon spurring international conflicts and gleefully dismantling the ozone layer. Like addicts who blame the substance rather than the habit, we have come to forget that oil is one of the best resources the planet has offered.

"Oil is amazing stuff. The 20th century was basically founded on the wonders of petroleum," explains Richard Heinberg, a professor at New College of Santa Rosa and author of several books, including The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society Publishers, 2003). "Oil is very energy dense and can be made into an amazing range of chemicals and products. Our entire way of life is soaked in petroleum," he says.

This point tends to get lost in the shuffle. It is often forgotten that more than just powering our cars, petroleum is deeply woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Adding up to a global consumption rate of about 86 million barrels per day, oil plays a starring role in agriculture, industry, infrastructure, and transportation. It heats our homes, paves our roads, and grows our food.

So what happens when the global demand for oil begins to outpace the supply? That’s the peak oil question.

"Peak oil is not theoretical. Everyone knows that oil is a nonrenewable resource," Heinberg explains, "so at some point our ability to continue increasing the supply will cease. Everyone knows that it will happen. It is just a matter of when."

Peak oil is inherently a geological concept, formulated by renowned geophysicist Marion King Hubbert. In 1956, as a researcher for Shell Oil, Hubbert presented his theory to the American Petroleum Institute, claiming that the oil output in the mainland United States would peak in the late 1960s or early ’70s. Though dismissed by his colleagues at the time, Hubbert was vindicated when US oil production peaked in 1970 and the nation became forever dependent on foreign sources of petroleum to meet its energy needs.

Hubbert had explained that the production of any petroleum reserve — a single oil well, a particular country, or even the entire planet — follows a similar bell-shaped curve (now referred to as the Hubbert curve). The logic is that as the supply is first tapped, there is a steady increase of oil output that ascends to a peak (or plateau), which represents the maximum amount of oil that will ever be produced from the designated source. As production descends the other side of the curve, the supply is not exhausted, but future yields will always be lower and more expensive to obtain.

For the past 10 years — as the price of crude oil has gone from $12 to $100 per barrel on the world market — scientists, geologists, petroleum experts, and concerned citizens have increasingly pondered the point at which the global oil supply will not only begin to wane but fail to keep up with surging demand.

Proponents of preparing for the impending peak in worldwide petroleum output often cite the steady decline of major oil field discoveries since the 1960s and the alarming number of oil-producing countries that have already hit their peaks. Considering the widespread role petroleum plays in the general day-to-day functioning of our society, an impending decline in overall global production is — to put it mildly — severely worrying.

"People assume that the other side of the peak will be an orderly transition," Lundberg tells us, "but we have no other experience to compare it to."

In 2005 the United States Department of Energy completed a study it had commissioned on the topic of worldwide petroleum depletion titled Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management. Popularly known as the Hirsch Report (for principal author Robert Hirsch), the study consulted a wide range of scientific and oil industry experts.

It painted a startling portrait: "The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking."

"It is one of the most important government reports of the last half century," Heinberg explains, "because it clearly indicates that this global event of peak oil is going to change everything."

Unfortunately, the Hirsch Report has been mostly ignored by Congress, the George W. Bush administration, and the DOE itself (which did not even publish the study for more than a year after its completion). However, the most troublesome aspect of the report is the fact that a sizable selection of the scientists and activists concerned with the topic believe that we’ve already hit the peak. They believe peak oil is happening right now.

PITCHING THE PEAK


"Most people in this country are energy illiterate," David Fridley says. "We can’t substitute millions of years of fossil fuels with something that we can manufacture in a factory, like biofuels. So most people don’t get this sense of anxiety about the situation we’re in."

Fridley knows a fair amount about energy. Currently a staff scientist leading the China Energy Group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he has spent a large portion of his career working in the Asian oil industry. His deep concern over the implications of peak oil incited him to play a key role in the formation of San Francisco’s task force.

"Having spent a year just thinking about this on my own," Fridley tells us, "and everyone around me telling me I was nuts, I decided to join a local group where I could at least meet up with others and see if we might educate people rather than just talking amongst ourselves."

In 2005, Fridley met Dennis Brumm — a veteran San Francisco activist with an address book containing an A-list of the city’s prime political players — who was looking to raise the city’s awareness of the issue.

Together with local activists Jennifer Bresee and Allyse Heartwell, they set their sights on bringing the issue of peak oil before the Board of Supervisors.

"Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee is a friend of mine," Brumm explains, "so I invited him over to my house one night and had him discuss with us the personalities and quirks of the supervisors and their aides."

Having charted the terrain, Brumm’s small group soon began spending its Thursdays and Fridays for the next six months lobbying the supervisors at City Hall. When technical questions were asked, the group referred to Fridley’s decades-long experience in the industry for expert scientific analysis.

In April 2006, with backing from District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and District 1 Sup. Jake McGoldrick, the board passed Resolution Number 224, recognizing "the challenge of Peak Oil and the need for San Francisco to prepare a plan of response and preparation."

For Fridley, the resolution and the formation of the task force were matters of appropriate preparation. "We have two oil tankers come under the Golden Gate every day to fill up the local refinery tanks to produce the fuels that keep the Bay Area running," he says. "What would happen if those tankers don’t come in? Or they don’t come for a week? The city has no plan for that, but we have the ability to be better prepared."

HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL?


When discussing the phenomenon of peak oil, Lundberg prefers to use the term petro collapse. It is a turn of phrase that quickly provides insight into his considerable sense of alarm for the days ahead.

"It is going to be a globally historic event," Lundberg says. "Imagine a nationwide version of [Hurricane] Katrina."

Although ominous in its predictions, Lundberg’s perspective is based on a long road of experience. While he ran the Lundberg Survey with his father in the 1970s, their widely read insider journal for the oil industry predicted the second great oil shock of the decade (in 1979). In the mid-1980s he moved on from the family business to form the Sustainable Energy Institute nonprofit in Washington DC, a move USA Today marked with the headline "Lundberg Goes Green."

As suggested by the title of the online magazine he currently edits — Culture Change — Lundberg has come to view the peak oil phenomenon as being primarily an issue of the American consumer lifestyle.

"We have this crazy way of life based on limited resources that are clearly becoming constrained," he says, "and we’re holding on to yesterday’s affluence without realizing that we have already walked off the cliff."

Chairperson Rosenmeier, one of Lundberg’s colleagues on the task force, is wary that such an explicitly bleak viewpoint may scare public attention away from the matter.

"You have to be careful with peak oil that you don’t immediately leap to ‘We’re all doomed and our economy is doomed,’<0x2009>" she says. "I think there is an intermediate phase, which is what we are being asked to address: the transition from business as usual."

An accountant by trade and a longtime Green Party activist, Rosenmeier ran for state treasurer in 2002, garnering about 350,000 votes. Setting an ambitious pace for her contribution to the report, she recently met with the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to request an analysis of how oil prices are related to the orientation of San Francisco’s economy. For this reason, she appears less concerned with predictions than with producing a heavily researched and well-structured report.

"I have a very strong vision of what I want the report to look like," Rosenmeier says. "I want us to have a uniformity and a more quantitative approach. I do not want to address the disintegration of our society."

The disparity between the views of Lundberg and Rosenmeier reflects the vast spectrum of opinions on how peak oil will manifest, although the extremes go well beyond them: some call peak oil a liberal hoax, while others have converted all of their assets to gold and prepared well-stocked and well-armed bunkers where they can ride out the social and economic storm.

The Web site LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net is now getting as many as 23,000 hits per day. Creator Matt Savinar, a graduate of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, abandoned his law career as a futile concern when compared to the implications of peak oil.

"It is pretty simple," Savinar tells us. "What do you think is going to happen when the oil-exporting countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran say, ‘We cannot export any more because we need to keep it for our own people’? The US will react by starting a war."

Although Savinar gravitates toward the most drastic of peak oil’s potential implications, his concerns are shared by some high-profile figures. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), who has started the small but significant Peak Oil Caucus in Congress, has quoted Savinar’s work in congressional session, while billionaire Richard Rainwater told Fortune magazine he regularly reads Savinar’s site.

Pessimistic about the prospect of mitigating the effects of peak oil, Savinar characterizes the efforts of the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force as "throwing a wet rag at a forest fire." In swinging to the opposite end of the spectrum, the vast chasm between opinions on the matter manifests more clearly. Peter Jackson, the senior director of oil industry activity for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, recently published the results of an in-depth analysis of more than 800 oil fields worldwide, concluding that the declining output rate of established fields is about half as low as originally expected.

"I think the danger of a peak [in global oil production] in the short term is minimal," Jackson tells the Guardian. "I think there are plenty of new developments on the books of oil companies, and the prospects for growth are good."

While Jackson acknowledges that at some point in the future it will be difficult to increase production, his optimistic viewpoint of the current situation helps to flesh out the dynamics of the overall discussion. As Heinberg explains it, "The debate really is between the near-peak and the far-peak viewpoints."

Yet even as Jackson attracts the ire of near-peak proponents such as Heinberg, he still acknowledges the need for swift preparation efforts. "There is still time to think about these issues and plan for the future," Jackson says. "But the sooner we do that the better."

EATING OIL, GROWING FUEL


Toward the end of the task force’s most recent meeting, the group discusses the city’s potential options for producing its own food supply. As Lundberg points out some of the particulars for pulling up pavement to plant crops, the exchange seems like an excerpt from Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia (Bantam, 1990).

"Streets cannot be pulled up as easily as driveways or parking lots," Lundberg explains. "There is soil immediately below a concrete driveway, whereas the earth beneath a street is much farther down."

This talk of tearing up asphalt to transform the city’s urban landscape into a viable agricultural venture may seem strange, until one considers how overreliant modern agribusiness has become on cheap fossil fuels.

"About one-fifth of all the petroleum we use goes into some part of our agriculture system," explains Jason Mark, the task force member focusing on the city’s food supply. "Whether that is through transportation and shipping, tractors and farm machinery, or the making of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides — it all demands oil."

Mark notes that the average American meal travels an estimated 1,500 miles from the farm to the dinner table, a startling figure that can be partly attributed to federal policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement that have encouraged export crops rather than diversified farming for local consumption.

"There is no way that San Francisco is going to feed itself in the short term," Rosenmeier says. "Food is going to be a gigantic issue."

In a larger sense, it already is. This past December the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations urged governments to take immediate steps to mitigate "dramatic food price increases" worldwide. Meanwhile, a recent cover story in the New York Times ("A New, Global Quandry: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories," 1/19/08) cited "food riots" in more than half a dozen countries and asserted, "Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it around the world."

In the US, the Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index cited a 5.6 percent increase of national grocery store prices in 2007, echoing sizable domestic price spikes in milk, corn, and wheat supplies.

"In a situation where you have sharp increases in the price of fossil fuels, you are going to see spikes in the costs and perhaps even the availability of food," explains Jason Mark, a former employee of Global Exchange and a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz’s renowned ecological horticulture program.

Mark now splits his time between editing the environmental quarterly Earth Island Journal and comanaging Alemany Farms. In his task force research, Mark plans to focus on two key challenges: increasing food production within San Francisco and improving both production in and distribution from the farms in the Bay Area.

"The city is pretty lucky because we are surrounded by all of this incredibly productive agricultural land," Mark explains. "If you were to draw a 100-mile radius around Potrero Hill, you could still have a pretty amazing diet."

Of course, the situation is far from simplistic. Climate change has proven to be a wild card in the equation, periodically negating dependable food supplies. Most recently, the entire Australian wheat crop collapsed due to a massive drought, affecting food imports around the world.

Less noticeable, though equally problematic, is the strain that biofuels are putting on food supplies. As increases in oil prices are stimuutf8g demands for alternatives, governments must decide whether crops should be used as food or fuel.

"Increasing our production of ethanol or biodiesel means direct competition with the food supply," Heinberg says. "In other words, we may see millions of people around the world going hungry so that a small percentage of the population can continue to drive their cars."

While such factors translate into a predicament as delicate as it is complex, Mark manages to elude pessimism. "I’m not one of these apocalyptic fetishists inciting for some sort of Mad Max scenario," he explains. "[The task force] is going to come out with a document that, although cautionary in scope, will be really optimistic about how SF can exist as an oil-free city."

GLOBAL WARNING


Amid a vast disparity of opinions from scientists and industry experts expounding both sides of the debate, the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force plans to release its final report in October.

As with the issue of climate change almost two decades ago, the task force members face a long climb toward making an impression on an American population that has shown considerable reluctance to alter its lifestyles.

And while the deliberation over the onset of peak oil is likely to see little decline among skyrocketing energy costs and increasing geopolitical hostilities, the underlying truth may already be far less complicated.

"The era of cheap oil is over," Lundberg says. "Period." *

The next meeting of the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force will be on Feb. 5 at 3 p.m. in room 421 of City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF. Members of the public are strongly encouraged to attend.

————————————————————–

OIL ALTERNATIVES

In the event of sudden petroleum shortages, how do the alternatives stack up?

Ethanol: The Republican choice for weaning the nation off oil is a lucrative venture for red state constituents in the Midwest. However, the drawbacks are numerous. Corn ethanol requires almost as much oil energy to produce as it is meant to replace. Furthermore, it will require 4.8 billion — yes, billion — acres of corn to match the world’s current rate of annual oil consumption.

Hydrogen fuel cells: Touted by conservatives as some kind of miracle fuel because its tailpipe by-product is simply water vapor, hydrogen is a long way from being a viable fuel for cars, if that’s even possible. It takes even more energy to produce than ethanol and can explode in collisions.

Nuclear: Expensive and unpopular, nuclear power faces numerous logistical hurdles (particularly safety and long-term waste storage) that make it infeasible in the short and middle terms.

Natural gas: A major source of current United States energy consumption (25 percent nationally), natural gas is extremely difficult to ship, making importation from far-off sources impractical. Its supplies are running low in the US, and this nonrenewable fossil fuel is likely to parallel oil in its decline.

Wind: This clean power source is being quickly developed around the world as a major generator of electricity. Currently in the US, it accounts for about 1 percent of domestic electricity production, so offsetting the loss of fossil fuel plants would require a massive commitment. Downsides include the danger to migrating birds and the fact that sometimes the wind doesn’t blow.

Solar: This is Marion King Hubbert’s choice for replacing fossil fuels. It is a renewable generator of electricity, yet the shortcomings so far have been with finding more efficient and less toxic battery technology to store it. But improving research and strong consumer demand for solar panels point to a promising future.

Ammiano: On the state of the union

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Due to writer’s strike Homer Simpson writes George Bush’s State of the Union: “Iraq – check, economy – check, mmmmmm – stimulus package.”

(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Jan. 29, 2008) B3

Liars, Liars, band on fire…

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liars small.bmp

Gotta love those Liars, the most interesting band to come out of the turn-of-the-century NY rock scene that begat the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Not only do they continue to turn out stellar LPs like 2006’s Drum’s Not Dead (Mute), they are freakin’ amazingly powerful live. Magnetic frontman Angus Andrew fielded a few e-mailed questions earlier this week – you can peer at him yourself when the band headlines at Slim’s, Friday, Jan. 25.

SFBG: So what’s new with Liars?

Angus Andrew: We’ve just finished a brief but much-needed break from touring. Being let back in the world after so long on the road can be shocking and exhilarating. What is Zoey 101? Who is Hannah Montana? What are they eating in Boston? I guess you could say we’ve been immersing ourselves in culture, but more specifically, it has enveloped us.

SFBG: The last time I talked to you, Angus, you were about to move to Berlin, i believe. What’s happened in the interim?

AA: Yes, I moved to Berlin, and we recorded our last two albums there. It’s a great city that’s energized in some ways by its dark history and the need to prove itself otherwise. In Berlin, quite apart from Germany, there is no economy, but rather an overcompensation of humanity.

Daily Journal: Trial to start in Bay Guardian’s suit over rival’s ad costs

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SAN FRANCISCO – For the 30th anniversary edition of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, founders Bruce B. Brugmann and Jean Dibble, his wife, posed for a cover shot in front of their home.

Dibble wore an apron and an overall-clad Brugmann held a pitchfork, recreating one of this country’s most famous paintings, Grant Wood’s 1930 “American Gothic.”

The photo was a nod to the couple’s Midwestern roots. Wood’s portrait depicted an Iowa dentist and his sister; Brugmann and Dibble came to San Francisco from Rock Rapids, Iowa, to start the Guardian in 1966.

But it wasn’t a pitchfork that got the unapologetically left-leaning newspaper going. It was a lawsuit.

In 1970, Brugmann sued the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, which operated the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner under a joint operating agreement. Brugmann’s complaint asserted that the agreement constituted a monopoly.

The case settled for $500,000, and Brugmann used the money to increase the frequency of his publication.

Forty years later, Brugmann is back in court with another anti-competitive lawsuit.

This one, against SF Weekly and its parent chain, New Times Newspapers, asserts that the Weekly sold its advertisements below what it cost to produce them in an effort to push the Guardian out of business. Bay Guardian Co. v. New Times Media, 435585 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed Oct. 19, 2004).

Jury selection is set to begin Thursday in San Francisco County Superior Court, Judge Marla J. Miller’s courtroom.

Brugmann’s suit also claims below-cost ad sales or “predatory pricing” by the East Bay Express, which New Times bought in 2001 but sold last year. New Times merged with and became Village Voice Media in 2006. Its 17 publications make it the largest chain of alternative newsweeklies in the United States.

New Times executives and its attorneys deny that either the East Bay Express or SF Weekly sold ads below cost in an effort to rid the market of the Guardian.

Experts say predatory-pricing cases are interesting because of the inherently economic and somewhat theoretical aspect of the claims. What is cost, and how should it be determined? And, perhaps more important, does the plaintiff need to prove that the defendant would be successful post-predatory pricing?

In California, at least, the latter may be debatable.

SF Weekly launched in 1989. When New Times bought the Weekly in 1995, the Bay Area became one of three places New Times had a direct competitor in the market. In the second and third places, Cleveland and Los Angeles, New Times competed with rival Village Voice Media papers. In 2002, a “market-swap” deal between the chains eliminated head-to-head competition in those cities but caught the attention of the Justice Department. In January 2003, both companies signed a consent decree agreeing to aid competition by selling the rights to their former paper names. Neither admitted wrongdoing.

Brugmann points to that incident as evidence that New Times has a history of eliminating competition, but a pretrial motion from New Times barred any reference to the deal at trial.

The Weekly and the Guardian are both distributed free and depend largely on advertising revenues.

Although generally more politically moderate – and far less likely to take on such constant Brugmann targets as Pacific Gas and Electric Co. – the Weekly closely parallels the Guardian’s other qualities, including ubiquitous advertising for medical-marijuana clubs, “escort” services and bars and restaurants.

San Francisco Kerr & Wagstaffe attorneys H. Sinclair Kerr, James M. Wagstaffe and Ivo Labar represent New Times.

Labar said Brugmann is using the Weekly as a “scapegoat” for his own problems in dealing with new challenges in print media.

Michael Lacey, executive editor of the new Village Voice chain, agreed.

“[A lawsuit] is how Bruce got into the business, and now, in the twilight of his years, it’s how he’s hoping to maintain his business in a really tough media market,” Lacey said.

But Brugmann denies that’s the case.

“Of course that’s their story,” he said. “But from our point of view, the fact that the economy is not good and there are other problems in this business only makes this problem more acute.”

The problem Brugmann refers to began after New Times’ purchase of the Weekly.
According to Brugmann, his advertising staff started coming to him saying they were having problems making sales.

An exhibit in the Guardian’s court documents shows a list of dozens of advertisers, with Guardian employee notations alongside them: “Couldn’t match SFW,” “Great Deal with EBE [East Bay Express],” “Ludicrous deal from SFW,” “SFW giving away free ads,” “Will come back if match SFW,” “Match SFW or we’ll pull ads.”

Brugmann said he tried warning the Weekly about its practice. But when the ad rates didn’t go up, he sued.

“We had to sue them to get an even playing field,” he said.

Brugmann’s complaint asserts that the Weekly is using its parent company’s resources to lose money in San Francisco until the Guardian folds – like a broadsheet.
“This is a situation where a chain has decided that it could take over the market and either run a small family-owned company out of business or at least cripple them so they wouldn’t be an effective competitor,” said Ralph C. Alldredge, a San Francisco attorney who represents the Guardian.

E. Craig Moody and Richard P. Hill of San Francisco’s Moody & Hill also represent the Guardian.

In opposition to the Weekly’s motion for summary judgment (which was denied by San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard A. Kramer in October), the Guardian points out that Weekly executives knew their paper could make money in the Bay Area market if they raised their advertising rates.

The Guardian’s papers also cite evidence of wrongful intent. One piece of evidence is that, in a meeting with Weekly staff shortly after New Times bought the paper, Lacey told his employees he wanted the Weekly to be “the only game in town.”

Lacey points out that statement was made well before the period covered by Brugmann’s lawsuit and that he was speaking about editorial content, not advertising.

“I write for a living, and I edit for a living,” he said. “I have nothing to do with advertising. I never have.”

According to Lacey and attorney Labar, the Weekly would be no better off with the Guardian out of the picture.

“That doesn’t change our business profile here,” Lacey said. “I guarantee you, like mushrooms cropping up, there will be publications cropping up. Everybody takes a piece of the same sorts of actions.”

Labar agreed.

“This isn’t a city with two newspapers,” he said. “It’s a city with unlimited means to advertise.”

In papers, the Weekly point to several other newspapers or online advertising outlets that clutter the Bay Area market: a weekly supplement in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chronicle itself, The Onion and craigslist, among others.

But the Guardian’s papers assert that New Times executives called the Bay Area advertising market a “zero sum game” with the Guardian and kept track of the number of advertising inches purchased by each Bay Guardian customer in a weekly “Guardian Report.”

Experts say predatory-pricing cases face very different odds depending on where they are filed. Attorneys say California superior courts generally are seen as more friendly to plaintiffs.

That’s largely because federal courts have been swayed by decades-old economic theory that is skeptical of the plausibility of predatory-pricing claims, some say.

“[The theory] was highly critical of the idea that predation could ever work,” said Daniel A. Crane, an antitrust professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “For one, it’s extremely expensive. Then, you not only have to prevail, you have to recoup [recover your losses]. If another firm comes into the market, you don’t get to recoup. It’s almost a suicidal way of doing business.”

Crane, who has written about predatory-pricing cases, said economic theory also has developed in support of predatory-pricing claims. But in his view, the theories often don’t stand up in the real world.

Don T. Hibner, an antitrust attorney with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in Los Angeles, agreed.

“With enough ifs, we could put Paris in a bottle,” Hibner said, paraphrasing a French proverb. “We want to use economic theory to buttress facts and common sense. If we’re going out on a limb and all we have is economic theory, God help us.”

To protect competitors from purely theoretical claims, Hibner said federal courts have adopted tougher standards for plaintiffs in predatory-pricing cases. First, they’ve adopted a method of calcuutf8g cost that takes into account only variable costs.

California uses a method called “fully allocated costs,” which factors in all costs, both fixed and variable. That method generally yields a higher cost, making it easier for a plaintiff to show that any sale was below cost.

Second, federal courts require the plaintiff to prove that the defendant would in fact be able to recover or recoup its losses after the plaintiff was pushed out of the market. California courts have not directly addressed the issue of recoupment, making the recoupment prong debatable, attorneys say.

Cost and recoupment are the “two horns on which you can be hooked” in federal courts, according to Maxwell M. Blecher, of Blecher & Collins in Los Angeles. Blecher most often represents plaintiffs in predatory-pricing cases.

Hibner said the California statutes dealing with sales below cost “seem to mean what they say,” he said.

The primary statute at issue, Business and Professions Code 17043, reads, “It is unlawful for any person engaged in business within this state to sell any article or product at less than the cost thereof to such vendor, or to give away any article or product, for the purpose of injuring competitors or destroying competition.”

Hibner said literal readings of the statute sometimes can shift the protection of antitrust laws from consumers to “inefficient competitors.”

But according to Alldredge, the language makes the Guardian’s case simple.

“All you do is take all of their costs and divide that by the number of inches of advertising space they sold,” he said. “That tells you how much the cost is per inch. Whenever they sell below that cost, under California law, they’ve committed a violation.”
And, he added, under California’s Unfair Practices Act, with even one below-cost sale, a defendant’s negative intent is presumed.

That places the burden on the defense to show that they had another reason for selling below cost.

“Why were we selling below cost on certain advertisements?” Labar asked. “We couldn’t get a higher price.”

Labar said the triable issue of fact is intent.

“They’re trying to say a handful of documents and a couple of statements indicate we were trying to run them out of business,” he said. “We say, ‘No, they indicate we were trying to compete.'”

Copyright 2008 Daily Journal Corp. Reprinted with permission. This file cannot be downloaded from this page. the Daily journal’s definition of reprint and posting permission does not include the downloading, copying by third parties or other any other type of transmission of any posted articles.

Endorsements

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President, Democrat

BARACK OBAMA


This is now essentially a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, and no matter how it comes down, it’s a historic moment: neither of the front-runners for the White House (and by any standard, the Democratic nominee starts off as the front-runner) is a white man. And frankly, the nation could do a lot worse than either President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama.

But on the issues, and because he’s a force for a new generation of political activism, our choice is Obama.

Obama’s life story is inspirational, and his speeches are the stuff of political legend. He can rouse a crowd and generate excitement like no presidential candidate has in many, many years. He has, almost single-handedly, caused thousands of young people to get involved for the first time in a major political campaign.

The cost of his soaring rhetoric is a disappointing lack of specific plans. It can be hard at times to tell exactly what Obama stands for, exactly how he plans to carry out his ambitious goals. His stump speeches are riddled with words like change and exhortations to a new approach to politics, but he doesn’t talk much, for example, about how to address the gap between the rich and the poor, or how to tackle urban crime and poverty, or whether Israel should stop building settlements in the occupied territories.

In fact, our biggest problem with Obama is that he talks as if all the nation needs to do is come together in some sort of grand coalition of Democrats and Republicans, of "blue states and red states." But some of us have no interest in making common cause with the religious right or Dick Cheney or Halliburton or Don Fisher. There are forces and interests in the United States that need to be opposed, defeated, consigned to the dustbin of history, and for all of Obama’s talk of unity, we worry that he lacks the interest in or ability to take on a tough, bloody fight against an entrenched political foe.

Still, when you look at his positions, he’s on the right track. He wants to raise the cap on earnings subject to Social Security payments (right now high earners don’t pay Social Security taxes on income over $97,000 a year). He wants to cut taxes for working-class families and pay for it by letting the George W. Bush tax cuts on the rich expire (that’s not enough, but it’s a start). He wants to double fuel-economy standards. His health care plan isn’t perfect, but it’s about the same as all the Democrats offer.

And he’s always been against the war.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of that. Obama spoke out against the invasion when even most Democrats were afraid to, so he has some credibility when he says he’s going to withdraw all troops within 16 months and establish no permanent US bases in Iraq.

Hillary Clinton has far more extensive experience than Obama (and people who say her years in the White House don’t count have no concept of the role she played in Bill Clinton’s administration). We are convinced that deep down she has liberal instincts. But that’s what’s so infuriating: since the day she won election to the US Senate, Clinton has been trianguutf8g, shaping her positions, especially on foreign policy, in an effort to put her close to the political center. At a time when she could have shown real courage — during the early votes on funding and authorizing the invasion of Iraq — she took the easy way out, siding with President Bush and refusing to be counted with the antiwar movement. She has refused to distance herself from such terrible Bill Clinton–era policies as welfare reform, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and don’t ask, don’t tell. We just can’t see her as the progressive choice.

We like John Edwards. We like his populist approach, his recognition that there are powerful interests running this country that won’t give up power without a fight, and his talk about poverty. In some ways (certainly in terms of campaign rhetoric) he’s the most progressive of the major candidates. It is, of course, a bit of a political act — he was, at best, a moderate Southern Democrat when he served in the Senate. But at least he’s raising issues nobody else is talking about, and we give him immense credit for that. And we’ve always liked Dennis Kucinich, who is the only person taking the right positions on almost all of the key issues.

But Edwards has slid pretty far out of the running at this point, and Kucinich is an afterthought. The choice Californians face is between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And Obama, for all of his flaws, has fired up a real grassroots movement, has energized the electorate, and is offering the hope of a politics that looks forward, not back. On Feb. 5, vote for Barack Obama.

President, Republican

RON PAUL


We have a lot of disagreements with Ron Paul and his libertarian worldview. He opposes the taxes that we need to make civil society function and the government regulations that are essential to protecting the most powerless members of society. From its roots in the Magna Carta and Adam Smith’s economic theories to the Bill of Rights, it’s clear the United States was founded on a social compact that libertarians too often seem to deny. And Paul compounds these ills in the one area in which he departs from the libertarians: he doesn’t support federal abortion rights. He’s been associated with some statements that are racially insensitive (to say the least). He clearly shouldn’t be president.

But he won’t — Paul isn’t going to win the nomination. So it’s worthwhile endorsing him as a protest vote for two reasons. His presence on the ballot serves to show up some of the hypocrisies of the rest of the GOP field — and he is absolutely correct and insightful on one of the most important issues of the day: the war.

Paul is alone among the Republican candidates for president in sounding the alarm that our country is pursuing a dangerous, shortsighted, hypocritical, expensive, and ultimately doomed strategy of trying to dominate the world militarily. He opposed the invasion of Iraq and thinks the US should pull out immediately. It’s immensely valuable to have someone like that in the GOP debates, speaking to the conservative half of our country about why this policy violates the principles they claim to hold dear.

Paul is absolutely correct that if we stopped trying to police the world, ended the war on drugs, and quit negotiating trade deals that favor multinational corporations over American families and workers, we would be a far more free and prosperous nation.

President, Green

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY


We endorsed Ralph Nader for president in 2000, in large part as a protest vote against the neoconservative politics of the Bill Clinton administration (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, welfare "reform," etc.). And Nader’s Green Party campaign had a place (particularly in a state the Democrats were going to win anyway). We’ve never been among those who blame Nader for Al Gore’s loss — Gore earned plenty of blame himself. But four years later we, like a lot of Nader’s allies and supporters, urged him not to run — and he ignored those pleas. Now he may be seeking the Green Party nomination again. Nader hasn’t formally announced yet, but he’s talking about it — which means he still shows no interest in being accountable to anyone. It’s too bad he has to end his political life this way.

Fortunately, there are several other credible Green Party candidates. The best is Cynthia McKinney, the former Georgia congressional representative, who has switched from the Democratic to the Green Party and is seeking a spot on the top of the ticket. McKinney has her drawbacks, but we’ll endorse her.

The real question here is not who would make a better president (that’s not in the cards, of course) but who would do more to build the Green Party and promote the best course for a promising third party that still hasn’t developed much traction as a national force. We’ve been clear for years that the Greens should be working from the grass roots up: the party’s first priority should be electing school board members, community college board members, members of boards of supervisors and city councils. Over time, leaders like Mark Sanchez, Jane Kim, Matt Gonzalez, and Ross Mirkarimi can start competing for mayor’s offices and posts in the State Legislature and Congress. Running a presidential candidate only makes sense as part of a party-building operation. (That’s what Nader did in 2000, and for all the obvious reasons he’s incapable of doing it today.)

But the Greens insist on running candidates for president, so we might as well pick the best one.

McKinney has a lot to offer the Greens. She’s an experienced legislator who has won several tough elections and taken on a lot of tough issues. As an African American woman from the South, she can also broaden the party’s base. She was a solid progressive in Congress, where she was willing to speak out on issues that many of her colleagues ducked (she was, for example, one of the few members to push for an impeachment resolution).

McKinney has her downside — in recent years she’s been flirting with the loony side of the left, getting a bit close to some Sept. 11 conspiracy theories that hurt her credibility (although she’s also made some very good points about the attacks and the lack of a serious investigation into what happened). And some of her supporters have made alarmingly anti-Semitic statements (from which, to her credit, she has attempted to distance herself). But she has to come out now, strongly, to denounce those sorts of comments and show that she can build a real coalition.

With those (serious) reservations, we’ll give her the nod.

Proposition 91 (use of gas tax)

NO


Prop. 91 is essentially an effort to ensure that revenue from the state’s gas tax goes only to roads and highways. It’s a moot point anyway: Proposition 1A, which passed last year, did the same thing, and now even proponents of 91 are urging a No vote.

But we’re going to take this opportunity to reiterate our opposition to Prop. 1A, Prop. 91, and any other ridiculous effort to restrict the use of gasoline tax revenues.

It should be clear to everyone at this point that the widespread overuse of automobiles is having far bigger impacts on California than just wear and tear on the roads. Cars are the biggest single cause of global warming, and they kill and injure more Californians than guns do, causing enormous costs that are borne by all of us. Driving a car is expensive for society, and drivers ought to be paying some of those costs. That should mean extra gas taxes and a reinstatement of the vehicle license fee to previous levels (and extra surcharges for those who drive Hummers and other especially wasteful, dangerous vehicles). That money ought to go to the state General Fund so California doesn’t have to close state parks and slash spending on schools and social services, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing.

Proposition 92 (community college funding)

YES


Prop. 92 is another example of how desperate California educators are and how utterly dysfunctional the state’s budget process has become.

The measure is complicated, but it amounts to a plan to guarantee community colleges more money — a total of about $300 million a year — and includes provisions to cut the cost of attending the two-year schools. Those are good things: community colleges serve a huge number of students — about 10 times as many as the University of California system — many of whom come from lower-income families who can’t afford even a small fee increase. And, of course, as the state budget has gotten tighter, community college fees have gone up in the past few years — and as a result, attendance has dropped.

Part of the way Prop. 92 cuts fees is by divorcing community college funding from K–12 funding — and that’s created some controversy among teachers. Current state law requires a set percentage of California spending (about 40 percent) to go to K–12 and community college education, but there’s no provision to give more money to the community colleges when enrollment at those institutions grows faster than K–12 enrollment.

Some teachers fear that Prop. 92 could lead to decreased funds for K–12, and that’s a real concern. In essence, this measure would add $300 million to the state budget, and it includes no specific funding source. This worries us. In theory, the legislature and the governor ought to agree that education funding matters and find the money by raising taxes; in practice, this could set up more competition for money between different (and entirely worthy) branches of the state’s public education system — not to mention other critical social services.

But many of the same concerns were voiced when Prop. 98 was on the ballot, and that measure probably saved public education in California. The progressives on the San Francisco Board of Education all support Prop. 92, and so do we. Vote yes.

Proposition 93 (term limits)

YES


This is pathetic, really. The term-limits law that voters passed in 1990 has been bad news, shifting more power to the governor and ensuring that the State Assembly and the State Senate will be filled with people who lack the experience and institutional history to fight the Sacramento lobbyists (who, of course, have no term limits). But the legislature isn’t a terribly popular institution, and the polls all show that it would be almost impossible to simply repeal term limits. So the legislature — led by State Assembly speaker Fabian Núñez, who really, really wants to keep his job — has proposed a modification instead.

Under the current law, a politician can serve six years — three terms — in the assembly and eight years — two terms — in the senate. Since most senators are former assembly members, that’s a total of 14 years any one person can serve in the legislature.

Prop. 93 would cut that to 12 years — but allow members to serve them in either house. So Núñez, who will be termed out this year, could serve six more years in the assembly (but would then be barred from running for the senate). Senators who never served in the assembly could stick around for three terms.

That’s fine. It’s a bit better than what we have now — it might bring more long-term focus to the legislature and eliminate some of the musical-chairs mess that’s brought us the Mark Leno versus Carole Migden bloodbath.

But it’s sad that the California State Legislature, once a model for the nation, has been so stymied by corruption that the voters don’t trust it and the best we can hope for is a modest improvement in a bad law. Vote yes.

Propositions 94, 95, 96, and 97 (Indian gambling compacts)

NO


We supported the original law that allowed Indian tribes to set up casinos, and we have no regrets: that was an issue of tribal sovereignty, and after all the United States has done to the tribes, it seemed unconscionable to deny one of the most impoverished populations in the state the right to make some money. Besides, we’re not opposed in principle to gambling.

But this is a shady deal, and voters should reject it.

Props. 94–97 would allow four tribes — all of which have become very, very wealthy through gambling — to dramatically expand the size of their casinos. The Pechanga, Morongo, Sycuan, and Agua Caliente tribes operate lucrative casinos in Southern California, spend a small fortune on lobbying, and convinced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to give them permission to create some of the largest casinos in the nation. Opponents of this agreement have forced the issue onto the ballot.

The tribes say the deals will bring big money into the state coffers, and it’s true that more gambling equals more state revenue. But the effective tax rate on the slot machines (and this is all about slot machines, the cash engines of casinos) would be as little as 15 percent — chump change for a gambling operation. And none of the other tribes in the state, some of which are still desperate for money, would share in the bounty.

The big four tribes refuse to allow their workers to unionize. While we respect tribal sovereignty, the state still has the right to limit the size of casinos, and if the tribes want the right to make a lot more money, they ought to be willing to let their workers, not all of them Indians, share in some of the rewards. We’re talking billions of dollars a year in revenue here; paying a decent salary is hardly beyond the financial ability of these massive operations.

The governor cut this deal too fast and gave away too much. If the tribes want to expand their casinos, we’re open to allowing it — but the state, the workers, and the other tribes deserve a bigger share of the revenue. Vote no on 94-97.

Proposition A (neighborhood parks bond)

YES


This $185 million bond has the support of a broad coalition of local politicians and activists, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and every member of the Board of Supervisors. It would put a dent in the city’s serious backlog of deferred maintenance in the park system.

The measure would allocate $117.4 million for repairs and renovations of 12 neighborhood parks, selected according to their seismic and safety needs as well as their usage levels. It would also earmark $11.4 million to replace and repair freestanding restrooms, which, the Recreation and Park Department assures us, will be kept open seven days a week.

The bond also contains $33.5 million for projects on Port of San Francisco land, including a continuous walkway from Herons Head Park to Pier 43 and new open spaces at regular intervals along the eastern waterfront. While some argue that the Port should take care of its own property, it’s pretty broke — and there’s a growing recognition that the city’s waterfront is a treasure, that open space should be a key component of its future, and that it doesn’t really matter which city agency pays for it. In fact, this bond act would provide money to reclaim closed sections of the waterfront and create a Blue Greenway trail along seven miles of bay front.

One of the more questionable elements in this bond is the $8 million earmarked for construction and reconstruction of city playfields — which includes a partnership with a private foundation that wants to install artificial turf. There’s no question that the current fields are in bad repair and that users of artificial turf appreciate its all-weather durability. But some people worry about the environmental impact of the stuff, which is made from recycled tires, while others wonder if this bond will end up giving control of 7 percent of our parkland to the sons of Gap founder Don Fisher (their City Fields Foundation is the entity contributing matching funds for city-led turf conversions). Although the Rec and Park Department has identified 24 sites for such conversions, none can take place without the Board of Supervisors’ approval — and the supervisors and the Rec and Park Commission needs to make it clear that if neighbors don’t want the artificial turf, it won’t be forced on them.

Prop. A also earmarks $5 million for trail restoration and $5 million for an Opportunity Fund, from which all neighborhoods can leverage money for benches and toilets through in-kind contributions, sweat equity, and noncity funds.

And it includes $4 million for park forestry and $185,000 for audits.

With a 2007 independent analysis identifying $1.7 billion in maintenance requirements, this is little more than a start, and park advocates need to be looking for other, ongoing revenue sources. But we’ll happily endorse Prop. A.

Proposition B (deferred retirement for police officers)

YES


We’ve always taken the position that relying exclusively on police officers to improve public safety is as useless as simply throwing criminals behind bars — it’s only part of the solution and will never work as an answer all on its own.

But we’re also aware that the city is suffering a dramatic shortage of police officers; hundreds are expected to retire within a few short years, and those figures aren’t being met by an equal number of enrollees at the academy.

So we’re supporting Prop. B, even if it’s yet another mere stopgap measure the police union has dragged before voters, and even though the San Francisco Police Officers Association is often hostile to attempted law enforcement reforms and is never around when progressives need support for new revenue measures.

Prop. B would allow police officers who are at least 50 years of age and who have served for at least 25 years to continue working for three additional years with their regular pay and benefits while the pension checks they’d have otherwise received collect in a special account with an assured annual 4 percent interest rate.

The POA promises Prop. B will be cost neutral to taxpayers, and the city controller will review the program in three years to ensure that remains the case. Also at the end of three years, the Board of Supervisors, with a simple majority vote, could choose to end or extend it.

POA president Gary Delagnes added during an endorsement interview that department staffers in San Francisco who reach retirement age simply continue working in other police jurisdictions. If that’s the case, we might as well keep them here.

No other city employees are eligible for such a scheme, which strikes us as unfair. And frankly, one of the main reasons the city can’t hire police officers is the high cost of living in San Francisco — so if the POA is worried about recruitment, the group needs to support Sup. Chris Daly’s affordable-housing measure in November.

But we’ll endorse Prop. B.

Proposition C (Alcatraz Conversion Project)

NO


We understand why some people question why a decaying old prison continues to be a centerpiece of Bay Area tourism. A monument to a system that imprisoned people in cold, inhumane conditions doesn’t exactly mesh with San Francisco values.

But the Alcatraz Conversion Project, which proposes placing a half–golf ball–like Global Peace Center atop the Rock, is a wacky idea that looks and sounds like a yuppie tourist retreat and does little to address the island’s tortured past. People don’t have to support everything with peace in the title.

The proposal includes a white domed conference center for nonviolent conflict resolution, a statue of St. Francis, a labyrinth, a medicine wheel, and an array of what proponents call "architecturally advanced domed Artainment multimedia centers."

We agree with the ideal of dedicating the island to the Native Americans who fished and collected birds’ eggs from this once guano-covered rock for thousands of years and whose descendants carried out a bold occupation at the end of the 1960s. But this proposal seems based on wishful thinking, not fiscal or environmental realities.

The plan is backed by the Global Peace Foundation, which is a branch of the San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, a Mill Valley nonprofit founded by Marin resident and Light Party founder Da Vid. It’s just goofy. Vote no.

Next week: Alameda County endorsements.

A no-new-cuts budget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is home?

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I’ve never been inside here before. I don’t like to come in here, because I feel alienated in my own neighborhood by this place, and that is kind of what this play is about," Danny Hoch said recently. His new solo stage production, Taking Over, opens Jan. 16 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Speaking the day before he flew out West from New York to begin rehearsals with rep director Tony Taccone and looking around in half disgust, the New York–born actor-playwright was seated inside the Roebling Tea Room, a recently opened, funkily decorated but high-end restaurant directly across the street from his home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he has lived for the past 20 years.

The yuppie meeting place was Hoch’s choice, as much for convenience, it seemed, as to further emphasize the point of what his new work is all about. "Williamsburg is ground zero for gentrification not just in New York but in the country, because it has provided a blueprint for how fast and how violent displacement and economic development can happen in a short amount of time," Hoch said. "And Taking Over is about how gentrification is really masking the idea of colonialism and how everybody is kind of searching for a sense of home and disconnected from where their home is. And in the kind of neofeudalism that is the new economy of North America, people looking for home wind up displacing people who are home."

As in his previous solo plays, such as the Obie Award–winning Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop — which 10 years ago also premiered at the Berkeley Rep — Hoch channels a myriad of characters of various ages, races, and genders. Embodied with his ever-sharp dry observant wit, these include a major real estate developer, a Dominican taxi dispatcher, a French real estate agent, a revolutionary gangsta rapper, and a New York University student — a "clueless hipster" from Michigan who protests that she feels "like a homeless person" after her parents cut her monthly allowance from $5,000 to $3,000.

Another engaging character is the guy who was just released from incarceration after serving time under New York’s controversial, draconian Rockefeller drug laws. But he’s been gone so long he doesn’t recognize his old hood. "When he arrives they’re shooting a movie on his old block, and he talks to a PA on the movie set and says, ‘When I was growing up here people never came to shoot a movie. People shot things all right — like [other] people or heroin — but not a movie,’<0x2009>" Hoch explained. "And then he points to [a] woman in the window and says, ‘That’s my mother.’ And the PA asks him, ‘Oh, she doesn’t want to come down and check out the movie set?’ And he says, ‘No, she’s still afraid to go outside from the ’80s.’<0x2009>"

According to Hoch, the Bay Area has consistently been the most receptive to his work. "The Berkeley Rep is one of the only theaters, if not the only theater, that would support this kind of show from its inception. A theater in New York that needs to economically sustain itself [is] not going to commission or fund a show at this level about gentrification in New York, because it’s going to alienate their very audience." In fact, for the past 10 years Hoch has been unable to make a living as a writer or an actor in his hometown. "New York stories are no longer viable in New York City because the market is being informed by Americans. This is why you have Subway and Domino’s and Applebee’s and TCBY all over New York City — so that Americans can feel at home," he said.

"Do you know how many vintage clothing stores there are around here and stores that I can’t even identify with what the fuck it is that they are selling?" Hoch asked rhetorically. "How do you economically sustain that? You sustain that with disposable income, not income income. That is how you sustain this many bars and a tearoom like this. I tell you, this neighborhood didn’t need another tearoom. We needed more teachers. We needed a hospital. We needed better schools."

TAKING OVER

Through Feb. 10, $27–$69

See Web site for showtimes

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2025 Addison, Thrust Stage, Berk.

1-888-4-BRT-TIX

www.berkeleyrep.org

Careers & Ed: The Roots of teaching

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› culture@sfbg.com

The last day of class before Christmas break presents a challenge for any educator, in any class, at any school. It’s usually considered completely devoid of teachable moments, a phenomenon that’s chalked up (pun intended) to prevacation excitement: PlayStation daydreams, visions of sugarplum romance, and the promise of two and a half weeks of sleeping in don’t exactly encourage industrious behavior.

So the popular course of action among teachers remains the party approach — some snacks, some games, a dose of holiday frivolity. Why swim against the prevailing yuletide, hopelessly and in vain, when you can just float home on a mess of soggy pizza boxes lashed to some two-liter pontoons?

When I visited Claire Keefer’s class Dec. 14, she seemed to be taking this approach. Sure enough, she’d brought a bag of her favorite Christmas candies, a little soda, and some healthier-looking crackers. And she informed her students they’d be playing a game for the better part of the period. But before giving in to the swell of a winter recess so near at hand, during the second-to-last period of the calendar year Kiefer gave her students an honest-to-goodness assignment. She asked them to pull out their journals and respond to a writing prompt she’d posted on the board. And they did, after a collective, semipolite grumble.

And before they knew it — before I knew it — Kiefer’s prompt became a complex sociopolitical discourse on the visual representation of traditional Christmas characters like your boys Jesus, Santa, those creepy little white-guy elves (hee-hee), et al.

Being the literate, postfeminist, righteously liberal San Franciscan that I am, it wasn’t difficult for me to see the purpose of Kiefer’s holiday exercise: to allow her students to problematize the whiteness that so often masquerades as normalcy by paying special attention to holiday symbols.

Looking back on my high school experience, I can say for certain that they, those nefarious they, never stretched my cultural IQ like that. Kiefer’s kids have access to these kinds of ideas. I listened as her students commented on race, power, religion, and misnormalized iconography with intelligence, all quite comfortable in the task. Dare I say, what an important challenge? (I’ll admit I didn’t know Jesus was brown skinned until well into my second year of college.) And what a show of teaching chops it was, to take the least teachable moment of the least teachable day of 2007 and pull some learning out of it.

Quite unlike the stereotype of the emergency-credentialed twentysomething pushover left to rattle all alone in an urban trial by fire, at 26, Kiefer cuts a most confident, no doubt pedagogic figure. Her intelligence, craft, and experience have made her transition from jail to prison to Balboa High School a seamless one.

Jail? Let me explain. Kiefer teaches Roots, a classroom-based initiative that serves children affected by incarceration, which falls under the umbrella of a California nonprofit called Community Works. To clarify: Kiefer works for Community Works at Balboa High School, where she teaches the Roots elective. At a glance, one might conjecture a circumstance of triangulated, bureaucratic-type tension, considering she basically has two bosses, Principal Patricia Gray at Balboa and Ruth Morgan of Community Works. Yet both not only hold Kiefer in the highest regard but also seem equally keen on giving her all the support she needs. And as to the question of distance between Kiefer and the rest of the faculty at Balboa, there is none, plain and simple. Everybody knows her, and everybody knows she puts her students first.

One of the great advantages of teaching Roots is that Kiefer gets to develop and implement the curriculum as she sees fit, in a manageable, supportive classroom environment. Small class size really helps, as does the freedom to design a program that encourages students to respond to their feelings by communicating creatively.

"We always go back to incarceration, sharing personal stories, learning empathy, meeting it head-on." Some of her kids have been incarcerated themselves; most attend her Roots class because their parents have recently been or are currently incarcerated. Control of her curriculum means Kiefer can account for the academic and emotional complexities of her classroom and adjust, midstream if necessary, to the needs of a group of 9th to 12th graders of varied ages, from diverse backgrounds, and with different personalities. Kiefer tailors her lessons to make room for all types of learners.

Curriculum design, creative writing, learning and teaching empathy — these happen to be Kiefer’s experiential strengths. "I’ve never not designed my own curriculum," she says. How many teachers, at 26, can claim such autonomy? How many teachers, at 26, have already worked for years inside correctional facilities? The public school system has placed Kiefer perfectly, in exactly the right circumstances, with kids who respond to her sense of responsibility, her gift of honesty, and her desire to challenge them.

In fact, there is something of a university feel to her classroom dynamic, and she is well aware that her MFA qualifies her to be a college-level instructor. However, neither tweedy aspirations nor hubris figure into Kiefer’s seeming raison d’être. Instead, it has everything to with finding those places where "the need is so transparent," she said. Kiefer’s life path seems so clearly marked as to appear predestined.

At the age of 20, during summer break from Tulane University and entirely of her own volition, Kiefer contacted the Cobb County Jail in Marietta, Ga., asking to be let inside to teach. When someone at the jail returned her call, offering her an administrative position at the facility, she politely insisted, "I already have a job. I just want to teach creative writing." She took the $8 per hour position then offered to her and started showing up about eight hours per week, as much as she could.

She spent her senior year of college editing the school’s literary magazine, the Tulane Review, while volunteering with adult literacy programs in New Orleans. She graduated with a double major in religious studies and English in 2003 and immediately afterward embarked on a yearlong Josephine Louise Newcomb Fellowship.

With the acceptance of her proposal, a plan involving a three-month stint teaching inside three institutions, Kiefer found herself first at San Quentin, then at Noriega, a federal institution in Miami, and finally at the Dale Women’s Facility in Vermont, implementing her curricula, sharing her love of the written word, and saddling her students with rigorously academic assignments. She always stresses the importance of word economy and limitation and is notorious for teaching entire sections around somewhat esoteric poetic forms — e.g., the villanelle and the sestina. "Society doesn’t expect much from [prisoners]. I sure as hell was going to," she said.

The same uncompromising, formal approach has helped Kiefer earn a reputation at Balboa for sticking to her guns, but her firmness comes with the deepest, most genuine regard for those around her. Thinking back on her first semester-long class at San Quentin, which she titled Art in Response to Gang Violence, Kiefer recalled, "A lot of these guys needed this creative outlet, or channel, and I needed to find a community."

Her attachment to the place was so profound that she returned to San Quentin in 2005, a year after her fellowship had ended, to teach one night per week while running down an MFA at San Francisco State University — all while holding a full-time position at Saint Vincent’s in Marin, where, she said, she learned how to handle emotional turbulence in young people after being threatened, groped, and cussed at, seeing desks and chairs fly, and watching a BBQ grill crash to the ground from a second-story window. Trying times at St. Vincent’s taught her how to be available at an authoritative distance.

Kiefer took the Roots job at Balboa High School just last year, the final one of her MFA program at SF State. Some attribute her teaching skill to her lifelong study of the written word, as students do make the best teachers. However, while acknowledging her diligence, she noted that fate, more than any other factor, has landed her right where she needs to be. Ask her if educating kids who’ve been affected by incarceration is something of a calling, and without hesitation she’ll tell you, "Totally."

"Prison education has been proven to prevent recidivism, and it injects humanity into the reality of being incarcerated…. Our society has it so wrong: we’re doing nothing to rehabilitate," Kiefer said with obvious sincerity. Her urgency is born of six years’ hands-on experience, and it still has her visiting prisoners and their families on her own time and acting as an advocate.

Notwithstanding her clarity of vision, though, she says she can be very wrong now and again. For example, I asked if she’d ever failed at anything. "I have a terrible sense of direction," she said. Well, Ms. Kiefer, I beg to differ. Your inner compass seems perfectly calibrated.

Sneak attack on public power

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EDITORIAL This is Mayor Gavin Newsom’s idea of shaking up his administration: fire a Public Utilities Commission director who has been doing a pretty decent job, then replace her with a city controller who has been pretty good at his job but will most likely be terrible at hers. The result should please nobody but Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

We’ve had our concerns about PUC director Susan Leal; she’s been tiptoeing oh-so-cautiously around public power when she ought to be leading the charge to kick PG&E and its illegal monopoly out of town. But at least she’s moving in the right direction, generally — and the fact that PG&E wants to get rid of her is a sign that she’s the kind of person the city ought to have at the helm of this crucial agency.

The logic of firing Leal makes so little sense. She has little more than a year left on her contract, and to pay her mandatory severance will cost the city $500,000, which the treasury can ill afford. And Newsom hasn’t pointed to anything she’s done wrong.

But city hall insiders say PG&E thinks she’s too aggressive about public power, and the giant utility can’t tolerate that. So Newsom quietly announced Friday afternoon, Jan. 4, that she was going to be replaced.

Of course, Newsom technically can’t fire the PUC general manager — only the commission can do that. And under the Brown Act, the state’s open-meetings law, the mayor can’t call them all and seal the deal; the commissioners have to hold a meeting and talk about it. That meeting ought to be open to the public. The commissioners will try to close the doors, arguing that the general manager’s future is a confidential personnel matter — but that privilege exists to protect the employee, not the commissioners, and Leal has every right to waive it. She should fight back here, demand that the panel meet openly and discuss in public why she is being dismissed — and take the opportunity to challenge any claims against her and to make her case both for public power and for her continued employment.

This is far more than a simple dispute between an executive employee and an appointed commission; there are key policy issues at stake here — public power, community choice aggregation, and the city’s energy future — and they shouldn’t be settled in secret.

Ed Harrington has been a decent controller in many respects — but he’s never shown any indication of supporting public power. In fact, he’s done the opposite — every time the issue has come before him, he’s found a way to help PG&E. His estimates of the cost of public power ballot measures have been so wildly inflated as to be professionally embarrassing. For more than five years he’s refused to do what Sup. Chris Daly has requested and calculate the cost to the local economy of high PG&E rates. And Harrington was a senior PUC staffer when the sellout contracts with PG&E, Turlock, and Modesto were negotiated.

The Board of Supervisors should hold a hearing on these personnel changes and demand that Harrington appear and discuss publicly his position on CCA and PG&E. At the very least the voters should have the right to see this for what it appears to be: a Newsom-PG&E sneak attack on public power. And the board should pass Sup. Sophie Maxwell’s proposal to give it the authority to appoint some members of the PUC.

Year in Film: Things we lost in the theater

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The economy: Apocalypse Now — or at least soon. Iraq: No End in Sight. Israel: "Putting Out Fire with Gasoline (Theme from Cat People)." China, in its role as the principal backer of our colossal national debt: I Spit on Your Grave. Our president: National Lampoon’s Permanent Vacation.

In 2007, as life increasingly resembled lurid or delusional fiction, movies stepped up to the social-responsibility plate and started presenting a franker version of reality.

That is, the movies nobody saw.

The ones everyone did see, in quantifiable box office terms, were Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, the third Bourne and Pirates flicks, a fifth Harry Potter, and … Transformers. In other words, movies whose major reference points are other movies, comic books, and video games. (The Bourne films are refreshingly low-CGI, but they offer only a pretense of institutional critique.) If most multiplex patrons’ level of caring or knowledge about international and domestic politics was turned into a film, it could be titled Whatever-Man 3.

The summer — that silly season of things blowing up and boob jokes — is likely to spread even wider across the calendar henceforth, because this fall and winter offered serious year-end awards-bait stuff, and nobody wanted it.

Europeans have branded this the best year for United States cinema in a long time. But the ambitious, uncompromising two-and-a-half-hour-plus dramas released late in the year — 1970s ambling-epic throwbacks such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Into the Wild, and There Will Be Blood — are against-the-wind efforts. Even intelligent dramas wrapped in easy-access thriller form, like Eastern Promises, Michael Clayton, Zodiac, Rescue Dawn, and Gone Baby Gone, have attracted few takers. (You could deem the long, self-important American Gangster an exception, were it not so derivative. Check out Larry Cohen’s 1973 Black Caesar.)

Commercially speaking, this fall’s glut of somber dramas — including Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Things We Lost in the Fire, Reservation Road, We Own the Night, and Lions for Lambs — collapsed like a row of dominoes. Their failure was variously blamed on an overcrowded marketplace and being pushed prematurely off screens by the latest CGI extravaganzas. Several of them just weren’t good, but even the best expired quickly.

Two films likely to face off for Academy Awards, No Country for Old Men and Atonement, have drawn larger numbers, though in their different ways neither has much to say about the world we live in now. No Country turns a minor Cormac McCarthy novel into a major Coen brothers effort that’s still just a great genre piece at the end of the day. Atonement turns a brilliant Ian McEwan novel into a sumptuous Merchant-Ivory-like affair, muffling the book’s bitter heart.

Every movie that did try to wrestle with our extremely precarious, morally compromised place in the scheme of things basically tanked. Maybe that’s less surprising than the fact that so many filmmakers actually got to make works dealing in one way or another with the current American realpolitik, if only on the relatively neutral, empathetic trickle-down level of grieving military spouses (Grace Is Gone), traumatized soldiers readjusting to civilian life (Home of the Brave), or World Trade Center widowers (Reign Over Me).

The Crash crowd shunned scenarist Paul Haggis’s much better (though not politically daring or even pointed) second film as director, In the Valley of Elah. It fictionalizes a real-life case (Iraq vet Richard Davis’s 2003 murder), as did Brian De Palma’s Redacted, drawn from a 2006 incident in which several US soldiers gang-raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then killed her entire family. An atrocious movie because of its ill-chosen mockumentary form, loutish tone, and garbled message, Redacted ironically attracted widespread notice due to the loud protestations of Bill O’Reilly and other conservative pundits who proclaimed it treasonous. They didn’t say it was fraudulent — as Republican saint Ronald Reagan once told us, "Facts are stupid things."

Despite the lure of Angelina Jolie and the publicity stumping of her producer–spouse–love slave Brad Pitt, Michael Winterbottom’s more overtly fact-based A Mighty Heart — about kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s murder by Pakistani jihadists — got no audience love. Ditto Rendition, with America’s sweetheart Reese Witherspoon as another agitating spouse with a missing husband, this one an Egyptian-born US citizen imprisoned and tortured by the CIA on dubious terrorism charges.

That the year’s better feel-bad dramas didn’t take off despite their star power is disappointing, if not unexpected. But it truly depresses that Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight, the year’s best documentary — and arguably best movie, period — failed to break out despite universal raves. This engrossing, incendiary, genuinely balanced chronicle of how the George W. Bush administration destroyed and betrayed Iraq — and probably doomed everyone to a general fucked-up-ness only global warming might trump — doesn’t even bother indicting the reasons we attacked in the first place. It’s busy enough simply detailing the arrogance and ineptitude that have turned our supposed reconstruction of the nation into a lit match hovering beside the tinder of pissed-off former allies worldwide.

No End in Sight should have been a must-see that marshaled voter-taxpayer opposition to the freaks in the seats of power. It should at least have ignited as much enthusiastic outrage as An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11. But it was an intended bombshell that landed like a softball on Astroturf.

There are a few more politically charged movies in the pipeline, notably director Kimberly Peirce’s first feature since Boys Don’t Cry, Stop Loss. But given the commercial cold shoulder such films have received lately, what can we expect from a post–writers’ strike Hollywood that will be looking to restore its brief income slowdown as safely as possible? Gems like Norbit, Because I Said So, Bratz, Good Luck Chuck, Daddy Day Camp, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Halloween, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, License to Wed, Saw IV, and Wild Hogs — not to mention the three- to fivequels. Even when those movies bombed, they landed softly enough (often redeemed by profitable DVD releases) to affirm the wisdom of sticking to strict formulas.

Escapism: good. Wholesale obliviousness: better. Will there be a 2010 equivalent to 2007’s finest narrative flick, The Assassination of Jesse James (estimated cost: $30 million; domestic gross: $3 million, despite a career-best Brad Pitt)? Not likely.

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALPHABETICAL NARRATIVE TOP 10

1. Adam’s Apples (Anders Thomas Jensen, Denmark)

2. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)

3. Colma: The Musical (Richard Wong, US)

4. Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, US)

5. Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, et al., US)

6. Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, US)

7. The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden, US/Iceland)

8. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US)

9. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, US)

10. Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer, Australia)

Learning from Enrique

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› news@sfbg.com

While chatting with her Guatemalan house cleaner one day, journalist Sonia Nazario casually asked the immigrant mother of four if she planned to have more children. The house cleaner broke down and began crying. She explained to Nazario, a Los Angeles Times reporter, that she hadn’t seen her kids in 12 years, having migrated to the United States so she could make money to send home to them.

Nazario realized her house cleaner’s plight was a common one among Central American women, whose families are so often abandoned by the fathers that the women must do whatever is necessary to ensure that their kids have enough to eat. "Most Americans don’t understand that kind of desperation," Nazario explained to a crowd at San Francisco Public Library’s Koret Auditorium on Nov. 28.

She felt bewildered that someone could come to work in the US while leaving her children behind to live in squalid conditions in Central America. At first, Nazario said, she even felt a bit judgmental. But her house cleaner’s story inspired Nazario to learn more about the level of desperation so many immigrants and their families live with.

Touched by the women’s sacrifices and curious to learn more about the struggles of immigrants — undocumented immigrants in particular — Nazario embarked on an epic journey that led to her writing a newspaper series about a Honduran boy named Enrique who braved numerous obstacles so he could reunite with his mother in the US.

The series won Nazario a prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and became the blueprint for her book Enrique’s Journey (Random House, 2006), which is currently being developed as an HBO special. Nazario’s work offers a complex and insightful perspective on an immigration issue that has often been oversimplified by pandering presidential campaigns.

TRAIN OF DEATH


Tens of thousands of Latin American youths travel from their home countries toward the US each year on top of trains. The perilous, Odyssey-like trip takes weeks to complete, and migrants rarely reach their goal on their first try. Enrique, for instance, attempted the journey eight times. Other immigrants try dozens of times.

Nazario, wanting to understand the struggles of undocumented immigrants as intimately as possible, replicated Enrique’s journey by boarding the top of a train in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and riding through the heart of Mexico in a three-month excursion. Having received permission from Mexican officials and with the resources to spend the occasional night in a hotel, she didn’t rough it to the extent that migrants — adults and children alike — have to.

But that’s doesn’t mean it was easy. On returning to the US, Nazario began having nightmares about being raped by bandits during the journey and ended up in therapy to deal with the trauma.

The US-Mexico border, she noted, is far from the most daunting leg of the journey for these immigrants: the hardest part is the lush southern Mexican state of Chiapas, which migrants call "the Beast." The region is home to Mexican immigration authorities, corrupt cops who are out to shake down and deport travelers, and ruthless gangsters who control the tops of many of the trains. Mexico deports roughly 200,000 illegal immigrants each year, mostly from Central America.

Enrique still wears the scars of a beating he sustained at the hands of bandits. Torrid heat, all the more unbearable to those riding atop trains made of metal, exhausts and wears down the travelers in an unforgivable fashion.

They call the trains los trens de la muerte, or the trains of death, due to the regularity of death and maiming that occurs when immigrants fall off. Nazario, during her trip, was once hit in the face with a branch and nearly tumbled off the train top, an experience she describes as "harrowing."

HUMAN FACE


The ubiquity of bandits and harmful forces along the railroads is not without a yang to its yin. The enormous compassion of the people of Veracruz, an impoverished region in the south of Mexico, made an indelible impact on Nazario. When trains pass by villages, crowds of supportive villagers throw food and water to the migrants. When townsfolk have no material possessions to share with the immigrants, they offer them their prayers.

Nazario has not only studied the physical dangers experienced by undocumented immigrants during their northbound trips but also analyzed the psychological toll taken by splitting up families. Enrique and many children like him have often wondered of their absent mothers, "Does she really love me?" Enrique, whose mother left him when he was five and was apart from him for 11 years, would stare out his window every Christmas during his mother’s absence, hoping for her return.

Hundreds of thousands of Latin American children have trouble adjusting socially without parental guidance. Given that many fathers in Latin America’s third world enclaves "stray in more ways than one," as Nazario said, many mothers come to the US to find work. Sometimes children like Enrique grow up resenting, even hating, their mothers. Most mothers, Nazario learned, only intend to be away for a year or two, but when they discover that the quality of life and opportunities in America aren’t quite as golden as advertised, their stays become extended indefinitely.

Nazario learned through countless interviews that many children left behind can’t fully comprehend why their mothers left, and they say they’d rather remain penniless than apart.

CROSSING OVER


The immigration debate is hotly contested in the US, particularly in the wake of the May Day protests and the George W. Bush administration’s failure to pass a comprehensive immigration reform package. Rather than bombard listeners and readers with ideological pleas to mend America’s broken immigration system, Nazario mixed her humanizing account of the immigrants’ hardships with relevant facts. Dedicated journalist that she is, she parroted neither the La Raza talking points nor Pat Buchanan’s.

Around 100,000 children like Enrique cross the US border annually in search of their parents. And while the US permits about one million immigrants to enter the country legally each year, they are joined by an additional 850,000 people who enter illegally. Business interests seeking "cheap and compliant" labor lobby on behalf of the influx of undocumented workers, Nazario explained.

Undocumented immigrants undoubtedly do many jobs that Americans won’t, Nazario noted, most prominently agricultural and domestic work.

That said, the large number of undocumented immigrants does undercut wages for some Americans and denies citizens and legal immigrants jobs in fields like construction.

SOLUTIONS


"The women I talked to said it wouldn’t take radical changes to keep them in Honduras," Nazario told her audience. The US, she argued, must play a more proactive role in helping Latin American nations develop their economies. For instance, many products the US imports from China could just as easily be manufactured in countries like Honduras, which would dramatically reduce the number of illegal immigrants from Central America and keep more families together.

In an e-mail to the Guardian, Nazario said that if the US is serious about reducing the flow of undocumented immigrants through its borders, it should not only supply foreign aid to nations in need but also provide "micro-loans through NGO’s to women to create jobs in these countries. They then pay back the loan, which can go to another woman to start a business, and create jobs."

A quarter of El Salvador’s citizens, she added, live outside the country, mostly in the US. Were it not for El Salvador’s dismal economy, most of those people would choose to remain in their native land.

Renee Saucedo, the community empowerment coordinator for La Raza Centro Legal in San Francisco, an immigrant rights organization, told us that "using enforcement and punitive policies are never going to be effective…. Many of the reasons people are forced to uproot their families are because of global free trade agreements." Saucedo said the only effective way to deal with the issue of illegal immigration is to develop policies that serve the poor majority, not the economic elite.

Nazario believes, based on her conversations with countless immigrants, that the US government’s decision to build a fence along the border with Mexico is wasteful and will not accomplish its goals. "People this determined will find their way over a wall, under a wall, around a wall." *

Green City: The baby question

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› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY I remember exactly where I was — sitting on a BART train, reading yet another magazine article about global warming — when it hit me harder than ever before: the year 2050 is going to suck.

Predictions suggest it’s going to be hotter, colder, drier, wetter, and stormier in all the wrong places. Sea levels will be up. Resources will be down. The view from 2007 is not good. So how can I, an educated, middle-class American woman, reasonably consider having a child with such a future to offer?

To have or not to have is the baby question everybody asks. I’ll admit I’ve been on the fence for a long time. A survey of my female role models reveals that exactly half took the motherhood plunge (including my own mother), yet the other half refrained. I’m clearly drawn to the childless life for a number of reasons, and reading the International Panel on Climate Change reports released this year has given me one more.

By virtue of our existence, we’re all contributing to global warming, and my impact will be at least doubled by every child I have. According to Al Gore’s carbon calculator (at www.climatecrisis.net), I’m emitting 2.35 tons of carbon dioxide per year, well below the national average of 7.5. But that would certainly increase if I were to have a baby. I’d need a bigger place to live, and that would require more heat and electricity. More flights back East to see Grandma and Grandpa would be in order, and I’d probably buy a car, not to mention all that crap that babies need.

I would become more like the average American, who has a life span of 77.8 years and, according to estimates by the Mineral Information Institute in Golden, Colo., needs 3.7 million pounds of minerals and energy fuels to construct and support a lifetime of stuff — from cars and roads to batteries and soap.

It seems like an effective way to cut our impact on the earth would be to cut population, yet such a strategy almost never comes up.

"In the entire discussion of climate change, there’s been no mention of population," Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University, told me.

The IPCC’s fourth assessment, released in November, discusses mitigation measures but never suggests decreasing population — except as the unintended result of a natural disaster. Historic attempts to limit population growth have never been popular. China has been chastised for its one-child policy, as were environmental groups like the Sierra Club, which called for limiting immigration in the 1970s to curb population growth in the United States.

"It’s an incredibly personal decision," environmentalist and author Bill McKibben told me. "In our culture it’s not one that’s easy for people to talk about." He addressed it in Maybe One (Simon and Schuster, 1998), in which he explains his decision to have a child after years of saying he and his wife wouldn’t.

McKibben says he wrote the book to uncover the weak mythology that only children are spoiled, myopic brats, to show how religious beliefs have been manipulated, and to point out that an increasing population is really an economic advantage.

Ehrlich, who thinks the US should at least have a population policy, also had one child with his wife, Anne. The realization that having more would contribute to an unsustainable future for their daughter led them to author numerous books on the subject, including The Population Bomb (Ballantine Books, 1968), one of the bellwethers on the impact of unchecked population growth. Since then the issue has essentially disappeared from public consciousness, and Ehrlich thinks that’s because the world’s total fertility rate has, in fact, dropped — from five children per woman to three. In the US it’s decreased even further, to less than the replacement level. This has created the impression that population is no longer a problem.

But that’s not entirely true. While birthrates may be down, the overall population has still grown, because life expectancy has increased. Most of us don’t die when we give birth. We go on living, breathing, eating, drinking, shitting, idling in traffic, jetting between cities, and consuming more and more of the dwindling resources we have — with a child or two at our side.

And the equation is simple, right? The more people, the bigger the problem.

"Well, it’s not a direct multiplier," McKibben said. He offers as an example an Amish family of eight "living simply" and having less of an impact than the average American Brady Bunch. "In global terms it’s so much more about consumption."

Ehrlich and McKibben agree that’s really the problem. "An important point, which is usually missed, is the next 2.5 billion people are going to have a much bigger impact than the last 2.5 billion," Ehrlich said.

According to his research, we’ve surpassed the earth’s carrying capacity, and Americans are only able to overconsume because Africans, Indians, Asians and other developing countries are underconsuming.

If the entire world population ate and drank and drove around like Americans — which is the aspiration of many — we’d need two more Earths.

"The current population is being maintained only through the exhaustion and dispersion of a one-time inheritance of natural capital," the Ehrlichs and Gretchen Daily wrote in the 1997 book The Stork and the Plow (Yale University Press), in which they grapple with the question of a sustainable population for Earth.

Their answer: about two billion. How many are we now? Worldwide, 6.5 billion, which will rise to about 9 billion by 2050 — with most of the growth slated for developing countries. Family planning and education are largely considered the primary factors in keeping the US population under control, and that’s where international efforts have focused, according to Kristina Johnson, population expert for the Sierra Club.

This has required an artful dance around the Mexico City Policy, in place in one form or another since 1984, when Ronald Reagan refused aid to any international agencies that use any monies for abortions. So while we’ve managed to handle our head count at home, we’ve done the opposite abroad.

As for how to deal with our enormous abuse of natural resources, technology has long been hailed as the solution. The guiding principle has been that our children will be smarter than we are, so we’ll leave it up to them to figure it out. However, as the Ehrlichs conclude in their most recent book, One with Ninevah (Island Press, 2004), "The claim that ‘technology will fix the problems’ has been around for decades — decades in which the putative advantages of claimed technological ‘fixes’ have often failed to appear or proved to be offset by unforeseen nasty side effects."

For example, we essentially avoided large-scale famine by figuring out how to reap more crops from our soil. But we haven’t mastered how to do this without the use of pesticides and, increasingly, genetically modified organisms that have transformed diverse farms into precarious monocultures.

Today we’re counting on technology even more, but some of the proposed solutions still raise questions. Do we have enough acreage to grow biofuels? What would be the long-term impacts of capturing carbon emissions and burying them underground? Ditto for spent nuclear fuel.

And all of these variables factor in those 2.5 billion people to come, without suggesting people consider not having children.

If there’s a mantra for any concerned citizen to adopt, it should be less. Use less. Buy less. Be less of a draw on the system. But as Richard Heinberg writes in Peak Everything (New Society, 2007), "People will not willingly accept the new message of ‘less, slower, and smaller,’ unless they have new goals toward which to aspire."

Cutting carbon emissions is a serious goal, and it looks like leadership is going to have to come from within. The Bali talks have produced no binding agreement except … more talks.

Our elected representatives have finally raised US fuel-economy standards for the first time since 1975, to the slightly less shameful level of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Environmentalism is peaking as a popular movement, but the credo to consume less has been divorced from its consciousness.

"Green" products are now the fastest-growing consumer market. In fact, this holiday season you can buy a pair of chic Little Levi’s for your kid. They’re just $148 at Barney’s, and "a portion of proceeds" will go to the Trust for Public Land. How much? Who knows? The company isn’t saying. Just shut up and shop and don’t worry about it — they’re organic. *

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

Polishing SPUR

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› amanda@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re getting warmer

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>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR SPECIAL GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT

› news@sfb.com

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

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

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

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

TEN YEARS WARMER


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A HINT OF A MOVEMENT


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

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

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

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

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

THE RACE OF ALL TIME


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The endless budget deficit

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Of course Gavin Newsom knew that a budget problem was ahead. He sees the figures. He also knows that it’s not about the economy or the looming recession; as Controller Ed Harrington put it, “our revenues here in the city are doing fine.”

That is, the revenue is on track, on budget, as predicted.

The problem is that the revenue San Francisco brings in isn’t enough for the level of spending. It’s no surprise: The city has to give its key employees nice raises, as Newsom did, because it’s so expensive to live here. City payroll is going to keep going up as long as housing prices do — and as long as Newsom doesn’t address the real housing issues.

All the talk of a hiring freeze and cutting out middle managers is nonsense; it won’t go anywhere. And sure, there’s fat in the city budget, but not $250 million worth. If Newsom were honest, he’d admit there’s a real structural problem here:

San Francisco voters want extensive public services (and that’s fine). City officials want to pay employees well (and they should). The city is trying to put resources into all sorts of problems that the federal and state governments have ignored (and that’s just not going to change).

To make it all work, we need more money. About a quarter billion dollars a year. Once you admit that, you can start talking about how to find it — who has to pay more taxes. But as long as you’re in denial, the problem will never go away.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Asbestos is nasty stuff. It’s the scariest kind of environmental contaminant: you often can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, it hangs around for a while, and it’s hard to get rid of. Asbestos fibers are tiny, invisible to the naked eye — and once they get in the air, they don’t tend to settle quickly. A single fiber can take eight hours to fall six feet in utterly still air; with the wind blowing, the stuff can float around for days or weeks. If you inhale it, you don’t typically notice, and there’s no easy test for exposure. But it sticks around in your lungs forever and can cause cancer and other deadly diseases 10 or 20 years down the road.

At that point, of course, it’s nearly impossible to prove exactly where and when you were exposed.

I learned all of this years ago when I was writing about asbestos contamination in the San Francisco public schools. For years the stuff was used as insulation (and as linings in automotive brake pads), and for good reason: it’s essentially a rock that you can weave into something resembling cloth. And because it’s a rock, it’s tough and doesn’t burn. Of course, when the insulation coverings get old, as they did in the schools, and the asbestos starts to leak out, you have a public health emergency of such major proportions that schools have to be shut down and lots of expensive, difficult remediation work done.

Now there’s another asbestos story in San Francisco, and it’s a more tricky one: Lennar Corp., which has the master redevelopment contract in Bayview–Hunters Point, has been digging up an area that’s full of naturally occurring asbestos. The area badly needs economic development, so it’s harsh to ban any type of construction there. And I think it’s possible to build safely in the area — but it’s complicated and expensive, and since there are residents (and schoolkids) nearby, there’s zero margin for error. You have to be willing (or forced) to watch every whiff of dust, to monitor the air with sophisticated equipment — and to shut down work the moment it appears that the dust isn’t being or can’t be controlled.

That doesn’t mesh well with a financially troubled company that is trying desperately to avoid costly construction delays.

As Sarah Phelan reports on page 16, a Lennar manager who was threatening to shut down work because subcontractors weren’t controlling asbestos-laden dust was fired and is now suing. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District is threatening multimillion-dollar fines. Yet Lennar is still complaining that any effort to shut down the site, even for short periods of time, would be unfair — because, the company says in a confidential memo, that would cost $40,000 a day.

This doesn’t sound like a company that can be trusted — yet Mayor Gavin Newsom now wants to give the outfit even more public land. A measure headed for the June 2008 ballot would allow Lennar to develop thousands of homes at Candlestick Point — and possibly build a new stadium for the 49ers. The stadium deal is pure political bullshit; Newsom doesn’t want to be accused of "losing" the local football team, so he’ll toss whatever public cash he can scrape up in the Niners’ direction. But the team wants to leave, the stadium does little for the neighborhood economy, and Lennar is going to keep cutting corners (and public safety) to improve its bottom line.

Sounds like a bad deal to me.

Pyramental

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Books are cool, and they can make you taller. Often they even tell you things, things you never thought you’d want to know. They’re like platform heels that talk! But they speak in a flippant whisper, and what they say is delicious.

Sure, books may not be able to dish on how Tyra got rid of her "vag arms" this season (hello, Scotch tape in her hairy pits) or why that one annoying girl on the 22 Fillmore’s still pumping that goddamn "Hot Pocket, drop it" song on her tinny-ass cell phone over and over, a mound of discarded sunflower seed shells scattered around her pastel Superfecta IIs. (Please go download some Lupe Fiasco "Superstar" to your knockoff Chocolate already, sweetie. Seriously. It’s November.)

What books can tell you sometimes is that you’re right. I love that! Take The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, by Elizabeth Currid, a new spine that fingerless-gloved intellectuals are cracking all over the Muni. It basically argues that — fuck Wall Street — the arts are the real forces that drive Manhattan’s hopping money market. (Too bad the best new artists can only afford to live in Queens now.) And guess where the linchpins are? Where art, fashion, and music intersect and all the brainy hotties trade lucrative ideas? That’s right: night clubs. All the fabbest deals are made on the dance floor, Ms. Elizabeth says, and nightlife, in which "creative minds set the future trends," should be boosted to top priority by any wannabe successful city, extralegal activities be damned. Of course she’s talking about New York, so her tome’s a tad inapt for our little blow jobs–for–tourists trade show here. But still, nightlife rules! One day it’ll make us all rich and famous! In your face, space coyote.

Speaking of books: I once dated a tech bear. It was the mid-’90s, the Interweb was still shiny, and bears hadn’t morphed into hedge-trimmed candy ravers yet. Don’t hate! Tech bears were hot — I’m still an all-day sucker for them — and this one, like so many others of his ilk, not only could build a Unix server out of two Cherry Coke cans and a pizza box but also spent his nights tripping on krunk and composing ambient electronic odes to his heroes Brian Eno and Arthur Russell. I couldn’t drag his ass onto a dance floor to save my life, but his windowless bedroom in the Tenderloin was a glittery cornucopia of strobe effects and rapid-fire bleeps. Go figure.

If only there had been some kind of school for him to attend, some place that would have guided him toward a career in digital-audio arts before he blew his mind on meth and moved back to the Midwest to become a gay trucker for Montgomery Ward!

Better late than never, maybe; now there is. Pyramind, a full-on media music and production school, is taking over SoMa and providing some of San Francisco’s brightest club-music makers with the skills to conquer the digital world. I recently found myself being chaperoned, somewhat bewildered, through Pyramind’s labyrinthine main campus by director and president Greg Gordon, in the company of old-school dance floor mover and shaker Paul dB. As they led me from one cavernous, soundproofed room to the next, each full of top-flight equipment, giant projection screens, a plethora of enormous monitors, and some mighty fine-looking students, I realized: maybe I should just give up writing and start composing the soundtrack for Halo 4. I could help launch a puke-colored Mountain Dew energy drink in 2009!

My temporary flight of fancy — how could I ever give up getting kind of paid to down well-vodka cosmos and introduce you to several psycho drag queens almost every week? — wasn’t such a pie in the sky. Pyramind’s hooked up with major prestidigitalators like Apple, Ableton, Digidesign, M-Audio, and Propellerhead. Students get possible career leads and exposure to some of the biggest biggies — Pyramind calls these companies "strategic partners," but to me a strategic partner is someone you sleep with to get back at your ex.

But the school is just part of a grand master plan. Pyramind is octopoid, with recording studios, a distribution service, international programs, a music label called Epiphyte headed by industry legend Steffan Franz, a well-established musical showcase–club night called TestPress that’s expanding to other cities (and has spawned an Epiphyte-released CD of bouncy tunes), and, with the recent acquisition of another huge campus a few doors down from the main one, an independent party venue. Pyramind’s stacked. And hey, in case any terrorists were thinking of hijacking any future Pixar productions (although wasn’t Cars terrifying enough?), Pyramind’s got the seal of approval, I shit you not, from Homeland Security. Calling all tech bears: drop that Cheeto and get in the digi-know now.

www.pyramind.com


www.epiphyterecords.com/

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