Economy

Importing injustice

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› news@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE TRUCKER’S LIFE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POLLUTING THE COMMUNITY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RESISTING CHANGE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEREGULATION HISTORY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EMPLOYEE BENEFITS


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

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

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

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

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

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

Why public broadband works

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By Tim Redmond

I just came across this wonderful report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance called “Localizing the Internet: Five ways Public Ownership Solves the Local Broadband Problem.” The folks at the Institute, which does great work, argue (as we have) that broadband is essential municipal infrastructure. They also say locally owned broadband is good for the economy. All the supervisors should read this before they vote to give it all away to Earthlink.

Needed: a campaign against privatization

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EDITORIAL Of all the cities in the United States, San Francisco ought to be most aware of the perils of privatization. Much of the city burned down in 1906 in part because the private Spring Valley Water Co. hadn’t kept up its lines and thus was unable to provide enough water for firefighting. A few years later, in one of the greatest privatization scandals in American history, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. stole what was supposed to be the city’s publicly owned electricity, costing the local coffers untold hundreds of millions over the past 80 years.

This is a city that votes 80 percent Democratic and has always opposed the Ronald Reagan–George H.W. Bush–George W. Bush agenda. A large part of the local economy depends on public employment (the city, the state, the federal government, and the University of California are by far the largest employers in town, dwarfing any of the biggest private-sector companies).

And yet Mayor Gavin Newsom, who likes to say he’s a progressive, is pushing an astonishing package of privatization measures that would shift public property, resources, and infrastructure into the hands of for-profit businesses. He’s talking about privatizing the golf courses, some city parks, and even Camp Mather. He’s promoting a tidal-energy deal that would give PG&E control of the power generated in a public waterway. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop the ongoing PG&E–Raker Act scandal. And he’s determined to hand over a key part of the city’s future infrastructure to Google and EarthLink (see Editor’s Notes, p. 1).

This nonsense has to stop.

It’s hard to fight privatization battle by battle. Every single effort is a tough campaign in itself; the companies that want to make money off San Francisco’s public assets typically have plenty of cash to throw around. They’re slick and sophisticated, hire good lobbyists, and generally get excellent press from the local dailies. And it works: even board president Aaron Peskin, who generally knows better, is now talking about accepting the private wi-fi deal.

So what this city needs is a unified, organized campaign against privatization.

When Reagan arrived in the White House in 1981, the single biggest item on the agenda of his political backers was an attack on the public sector. The way the right-wingers saw it, government took money from the rich and gave it to the less well-off. Government regulated business activity, costing major corporations a lot of money. Government — "the beast," they called it — had to be beaten back, demonized, and starved.

So the Reaganites used their top-rate public relations machine to make the public sector appear riddled with waste and fraud. They cut taxes, ran up record (for the time) deficits, and forced Congress to eliminate a lot of social programs. More and more of what the government once did was turned over to the private sector — the way the radical right liked it.

That political agenda still rules Washington, D.C., where even a fair amount of the war in Iraq has been privatized, turned over to contractors who are making huge profits while Iraqi and American kids die.

The attack on government has worked so well that even a very modest plan by Bill Clinton to create a national health care system was killed by the insurance industry.

But privatization doesn’t work. Private-sector companies and even nonprofits don’t have to comply with open-records laws and can spend money (including taxpayers’) with only limited accountability. Most private companies are about making money first and serving the public second; that means when private operators take over public services, the prices go up, worker pay goes down (and unions are often booted out), and the quality of the delivery tanks. Look at the real estate development nightmare that has become the privatized Presidio. Look at the disgrace and disaster that the privatized Edison School brought to the San Francisco Unified School District. Look at the glitzy café and the pricey parking lot that have replaced good animal care at the privatized San Francisco Zoo. Look at what has happened around the world when Bechtel Corp. has taken over public water systems — rates have gone up so high that some people can’t afford this basic life necessity.

Look what’s happened to the American health system. Look what’s happened in Iraq.

Government isn’t perfect, and the public sector has lot of management, efficiency, and accountability issues. But at least the public has some hope of correcting those problems. San Francisco ought to be a place where a major movement to take back the public sector is born and thrives.

Almost everyone in town ought to have an interest. Labor, obviously, opposes privatization. So should neighborhood advocates (who care about public parks and open space), environmentalists (because the entire notion of environmentalism depends on a healthy public sector), progressive community groups, and politicians. Even more conservative groups like the cops and firefighters ought to see the need to prevent their jobs from being outsourced to a private vendor.

A campaign against privatization could link wi-fi, PG&E, tidal power, and the golf courses. The campaign could force anyone running for office to address a no-privatization pledge. It could appear any time one of these rotten schemes pops up in town — and send a message that San Francisco doesn’t accept the economic agenda of the radical right.

Who’s going to call the first meeting? 2

The catch

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› paulr@sfbg.com


How shocking, shocking to learn that frozen seafood being imported from China is so likely to be tainted — with pathogens, antibiotics, and even (according to the fastidious New York Times) "filth" — that our very own Food and Drug Administration felt obliged to issue an alert about it at the end of last month. Globalization, we have long been assured — mainly by shills for transnational corporations — is a great blessing, a means of producing the most goods at the lowest cost per some sterile and one-dimensional rule of economic efficiency. It’s the gospel according to Wal-Mart, and it certainly does seem to be producing a great flood of goods, if not great goods. And it probably is a great blessing — for the shareholders and executives of transnational corporations.

But there is a central fallacy to the case for globalization, and it is this: that we can reap the benefits of a global economy while keeping its problems quarantined overseas. Let the Chinese use child labor and foul their environment! We are safe here, in our low-prices-always bubble. Except, as we learn from the parable of the dirty frozen fish, we’re not. In a shrinking world, benefits and burdens alike tend to be distributed worldwide, and there are reasons — many of them unsavory — that articles produced in poorer countries (for consumption in rich ones) tend to cost less. Lower prices aren’t magic, and the fact that we are encouraged not to notice the connection between low prices and the methods that yield them tells us that the connection is important. If we saw and understood the connection, we might well act differently. We might stop to consider that the true cost of some item isn’t necessarily reflected in its retail price — and that more expensive items are sometimes worth the money.

You don’t get something for nothing, and if that’s the offer, then it’s time to start poking around. There’s almost certainly a catch, and the catch is seldom in our interest.

In my recent piece about Emily Luchetti and Stars (Without Reservations, 6/20/07), I slightly misconstrued the restaurant’s life span. In fact, Stars did survive for a few years into the new millennium — but under new ownership. Founder Jeremiah Tower sold out well before the year 2000.

The City College shell game

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Part one in a Guardian series

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

The motto of San Francisco’s community college is "The truth will set you free."

For taxpayers, that’s a painful irony. Since 1997, the district has moved around $130 million in bond money in a fiscal shell game, taking funds that the voters were told would go to one set of projects and spending the money on others.

The half-billion-dollar bond program is now at least $225 million over budget, in part because of what the school admits was shoddy planning, and City College is considering asking voters to approve yet another set of bonds to catch up.

And all of this happened without a detailed performance audit.

Among the transfers and overruns we’ve discovered in a review of the bond program:

•<\!s>City College made up for a planned gym’s mammoth budget shortfalls by transferring more than $53 million from other projects, like the new Performing Arts Center, improvements to the Balboa Reservoir (that massive, sunken eyesore of a parking lot west of the Ocean Avenue Campus), and an academic partnership with San Francisco State University.

•<\!s>Construction on the Performing Arts Center was supposed to begin in 2004, but it’s gone nowhere. According to the school’s most recent estimates, the center now will cost $125.8 million, an increase of 152 percent from the original $50 million.

•<\!s>Two new campuses planned for the Mission and Chinatown neighborhoods are now running a combined $78 million over budget. School administrators this May requested an additional $6 million to complete the Mission campus. Plans for the Chinatown facilities were originally unveiled in 1997 to voters, who were later told construction would begin in 2006. Today the designs are mired in a political battle with neighborhood residents, and City College hasn’t broken ground on the project.

In at least one case, the school has acknowledged that a $1.3 million reallocation took place without prior authorization from its independently elected overseers, the Board of Trustees. Administrators later asked the board to consent to the transfer retroactively.

"We’re always asked to take this money and move it from here to here," complained trustee Milton Marks III, one of the few consistent critics on the board who in the past voted against such reallocations. "It may be justified…. But when I ask if there are programmatic changes, nobody can answer me."

The school calls the transfers "reallocations," and as of May the administration and the board had agreed to shift the bond money five times.

In one case, administrators asked for $70 million in transfers mere weeks after the 2005 election in which voters authorized the school to sell $246.3 million in bonds.

That January 2006 reallocation strongly suggests the office of Chancellor Phil Day knew the school wouldn’t be able to complete the projects described to voters but never corrected the ballot handbook or told the media and the public the truth.

Day agreed to a Guardian interview, then canceled it, citing a schedule conflict. But in board meetings he and his staff have insisted that the transfers were perfectly legal.

The school’s lawyers say reallocations are acceptable under Proposition 39, a state ballot measure passed by voters in 2000 that lowered the threshold in California for passing school and community college bonds.

Other districts have also relied on reallocations as the cost of construction materials has increased globally in recent years due to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing expansion of China’s economy.

But the San Francisco school has argued the logical extreme — that it can transform voter-approved projects in virtually any way it deems necessary.

"What obligation do we have in our reallocation considerations about making sure that those things get delivered — all of those projects we listed in both [the 2001 and 2005] bond measures?" former trustee Johnnie Carter asked during a meeting Jan. 12, 2006.

"You have no obligation to complete any of those projects," Mona Patel, a bond advisor for the school, responded. "You can complete one of those projects. You can complete all of those projects or anything in between…. It’s solely within the board’s discretion."

Despite that explanation, City College’s woefully short budget projections mean the school might have to return to voters a fourth time to secure funding for two projects already promised the last time City College went to the ballot, in November 2005.

One of those planned facilities was supposed to house a stem-cell-technology training program lauded by Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2005 as a way to help locals compete for jobs in the Bay Area’s growing biotech and life-sciences research industries. The school stripped $25 million authorized by voters from that project and directed it mostly to two other projects running a combined $105 million over budget.

Marks and new board member John Rizzo have urged an expansive performance audit of the bond money, which they say is required under Prop. 39 but had never been completed.

Rizzo and Marks both told us that if unforeseen construction costs, a low number of project bidders, and the lethargy of state regulators are all problems contributing to unpredicted costs, school administrators need to come up with a plan to fix the situation. But the performance audit proposed by Rizzo and Marks would first identify which problems are most severe. Not having it, Rizzo said, "is like flying blindly. We’re just writing checks."

Peter Goldstein, vice chancellor for finance and administration, insisted to us that state law, as interpreted by the school, doesn’t require the type of audit called for by Rizzo and Marks. It simply requires that the school prove it isn’t spending money on projects not presented first to voters. He added that the reallocations weren’t simple but said he couldn’t answer from memory specific questions about the 2005 bond election, including why the school chose to pursue tens of millions of dollars in reallocations so soon afterward, in January 2006.

"They’ve been very difficult decisions for both the administration and the board," Goldstein said. "[This has] not been some kind of snap judgment. We’ve really had to search and try to make sure there wasn’t some way to contain costs otherwise."

The trustees often seem just as confused as the voters may be about the cost overruns. The trail is laid out in thousands of pages of bond proposals and ever-changing explanatory documents, all complete with glossy schematics and computer-generated students looking gleeful as they head off to class at one or another of the new facilities.

The section of City College’s Web site dedicated to its bond projects is difficult to follow. A brief summary of the projects appears in voter guides, but the full bond proposals are filed with the San Francisco Department of Elections, and you’d have to go there to copy or read the tomes, which contain a lot of qualifying paragraphs that look like this one, which refers to an academic building planned in conjunction with San Francisco State University:

"The college will aggressively pursue state and federal funding to support the ‘joint-use’ concept with San Francisco State University. If funds are not forthcoming, the ‘local’ funds will be utilized to support the construction of the new Child Care Center and the new Student Health Service Center."

Such fine-print disclaimers enabled Chancellor Day and Vice Chancellor Goldstein to later depict multimillion-dollar transfers away from academic construction as entirely legal, even though the Child Care Center and health clinic never appeared as official stand-alone projects in bond proposals presented to voters.

Between 2001 and 2005 the school asked for a total of $40 million to construct in tandem with SFSU the joint-use facility, which was slated to include new classrooms and laboratories where students could work toward bachelor’s degrees in education, health care, and child development. The project is now $26 million over budget and remains in the design phase. Since 2003 about $20 million that voters were told was going to the project has been reallocated to other projects facing increased costs.

A facilities manager at San Jose–Evergreen Community College District, Robert Dias, was incredulous when we presented our findings to him. He said he’d heard of cost overruns statewide but "not to this extent."

"We have experienced rising costs, but we planned for it," Dias said. "Construction costs were going through the roof, but we did creative things to manage it."

On the other hand, Fred Harris, vice chancellor of the California Community College System, based in Sacramento, said the figures didn’t necessarily surprise him and that the state as a result has adjusted its guidelines for what individual school districts can claim as costs.*

Fighting back

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It was a week of triumph for workers and union activists opposing the conservative agenda of the owner and operators of the Emeryville Woodfin Suites hotel.

The Guardian last week ("Calling in the Feds," 6/13/07) revealed that the hotel called on its owner’s political connections to blow the immigration whistle on housekeepers involved in a campaign to enforce a living-wage law at the Woodfin. That revelation came a day after Emeryville city officials ordered the hotel to pay $125,000 in back wages and $31,500 in fines for failing to show it was paying adequate wages.

The Woodfin chain has fought the living-wage law, Measure C, since even before voters approved it in 2005, originally refusing to comply. Then the Woodfin Suites fired workers who were organizing to enforce the measure, claiming they were undocumented immigrants. After being ordered by the city to reinstate the workers, hotel officials claimed the firings were justified by an April immigration audit by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Guardian found that US Rep. Brian Bilbray (R–San Diego) asked ICE to investigate the hotel after a representative of the Emeryville Woodfin Suites — whose president, Sam Hardage, has close ties to Bilbray — contacted his office for assistance Feb. 1. That revelation was at the center of a June 13 rally at the Oakland Federal Building by members of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), which helped pass Measure C and supports the laid-off workers.

"It is now clearer than ever that [the Woodfin’s] real motive was to get rid of workers who were standing up for their rights," organizer Brooke Anderson said through a loudspeaker.

Among those at the rally were Berkeley City Council member Kriss Worthington, Emeryville City Council member John Fricke, and representatives of California Assembly member Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland) and US Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland).

Lee’s district director, Leslie Littleton, said Lee was "proud to stand strong with the Woodfin workers in support of their continued fight for the back pay that they are owed," and cited Lee’s "strong opposition to the ICE raids that have been terrorizing our community."

Littleton also said Lee was "deeply concerned by the allegations that another member of Congress — acting on behalf of a campaign contributor — may have gotten a federal agency to intervene in that dispute in a way that hurts workers in my district."

Emeryville special counsel Benjamin Stock told the Guardian that letters between Bilbray and ICE located as a result of our article will be cited in a pending lawsuit charging Woodfin officials with retaliating against whistle-blowing workers. It is against the law for an employer to fire workers for organizing for better working conditions, regardless of immigration status.

In a prepared statement, Woodfin officials said they contacted Bilbray’s office "to be certain we were in compliance with all laws governing our business." They claim that Measure C’s regulations "directly contradict federal immigration laws and violate the Constitution’s due-process clause." Both of the Woodfin’s federal lawsuits challenging Measure C’s constitutionality have been rejected; the last was dismissed June 7.

Emeryville has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars litigating these two federal court cases and a pending state court case and processing worker complaints. The Woodfin now says it will appeal the city’s decision regarding back wages. City officials are urging the Woodfin to accept defeat.

"Please," Emeryville City Attorney Mark Biddle said, "let’s move on with life. Measure C is a pretty simple concept, and all the other hotels seem to be on board." The Woodfin, he told us, can "either keep fighting a useless cause and continue ringing up the bill or pay the workers what the law requires."

Calling in the feds

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An upscale Emeryville hotel embroiled in a nasty, yearlong labor dispute appears to have called on the owner’s conservative political connections to bring about an immigration audit of the hotel. Worker advocates say the move was an effort to intimidate immigrant workers involved in a campaign to enforce a living-wage law.

Kurt Bardella, a spokesperson for US Rep. Brian Bilbray (R–San Diego), told the Guardian that a representative of the Emeryville Woodfin Suites contacted Bilbray’s office for assistance Feb. 1.

The request came within weeks of Alameda County Superior Court and Emeryville City Council rulings requiring the Woodfin to rehire the 21 workers it fired just before Christmas, allegedly due to worker Social Security numbers not matching federal records. That injunction was in effect pending an investigation of workers’ claims that the hotel had retaliated against them for organizing to enforce Measure C, a living-wage law passed by Emeryville voters in 2005.

"We were contacted by one of the HR people at the Woodfin Suites," Bardella told us. "They told us about the situation" and explained that they "had no mechanism" to deal with it, he said.

Bilbray, who chairs the House Immigration Reform Caucus and is one of the most vocal opponents of the recent immigration bill, wrote directly to the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in February to request that it investigate the immigration status of Emeryville Woodfin Suites employees in order to "to create a mechanism for the employer to address this issue."

Bilbray represents the suburban San Diego district in which Woodfin Suites president Samuel Hardage lives. "We treated this as a constituent issue," Bardella told us.

Hardage is not only a constituent; he has consistently contributed to Bilbray’s campaigns for at least the past 13 years, donating $4,200 in 2006. A George W. Bush Pioneer, having raised $100,000 for the 2004 election, Hardage is also a major player in California and San Diego Republican politics.

Workers say the ICE audit was an intimidation tactic that should not have been used against them while they were trying to assert their rights, and ICE’s internal policies raise questions about whether the agency should have gotten involved in this labor dispute.

For months the Woodfin Suites has tried to justify firing workers who organized for better labor conditions by alluding to fears of reprisal by ICE. In a May 8 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, General Manager Hugh MacIntosh castigated the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), a labor-affiliated think tank that supports the hotel’s workers, for "resorting to well-worn intimidation schemes to secure workers’ support for their organization drives."

The "fact that our hotel has been asked by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide employment records, coupled with the agency’s raids in the Bay Area, suggests that our actions are anything but voluntary," he wrote.

The Bilbray connection significantly undermines this claim and could be significant in a pending state lawsuit by the workers. It is against the law for an employer to fire workers for organizing for better working conditions, regardless of immigration status. Under current immigration laws, however, it is also common.

"Employers often contact immigration authorities … in order to avoid liability," Monica Guizar, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, told us. "It is a well-known and documented tactic that employers use to stymie union organizing campaigns [and] escape liability for vioutf8g workers’ rights."

In recognition of this abuse, memorandums from the Department of Labor and internal ICE regulations have been established to dissuade worksite interventions when a labor dispute is occurring. Advocates have successfully invoked these guidelines to terminate deportation proceedings and prevent raids in the past, but immigrant workers are still incredibly vulnerable.

ICE Special Agent’s Field Manual section 33.14(h) requires that agents use restraint where a labor dispute is in progress and the complaint about employees’ immigration status "is being provided to interfere with the rights of employees to … be paid minimum wages and overtime; to have safe work places … or to retaliate against employees for seeking to vindicate those rights."

Additionally, a 1998 memorandum of understanding between the Department of Labor and ICE (then known as the INS) directs immigration agents to "avoid inappropriate worksite interventions where it is known or reasonably suspected that a labor dispute is occurring and the intervention may, or may be sought so as to, interfere in the dispute."

Guizar confirmed that these regulations are still in place under ICE. Monica Virginia Kites, a spokesperson for ICE, declined to comment on these internal regulations.

At a noisy Saturday-morning picket in front of the Emeryville Woodfin Suites, Luz, a 42-year-old from Mexico City, told the Guardian that managers never questioned her immigration status during the three years she was a housekeeper at the hotel — until she started working with EBASE to enforce Measure C.

One day, Luz told us, her manager rushed her and other workers into the hotel’s attic, because "ICE was driving around outside and could come." According to Luz, the manager told them that "this could be a result of us supporting Measure C or working with EBASE."

The measure mandates a $9 per hour minimum wage for hotel workers and requires overtime pay for employees who clean more than 5,000 square feet of floor space during a shift. The Woodfin contributed $27,500 to an anti–Measure C campaign committee, filed two unsuccessful lawsuits that challenged its constitutionality, and then simply failed to comply with the law.

"They said we weren’t entitled to rights because we were immigrants," Luz recalled. "They started to say that our Social Security numbers didn’t match and that we would have to leave. This problem never came up until we asked for our rights."

In September 2006, Woodfin workers filed a class-action lawsuit seeking back pay. The Woodfin finally agreed to come into compliance with Measure C the following month, but it also told almost 30 workers that it had found problems with their Social Security numbers. On Dec. 15, the Woodfin suspended 21 workers and gave them two weeks’ notice that they were to be fired.

On the extensive Web site the Woodfin has devoted to the dispute, the hotel claims it was "forced to move to terminate their [workers’] employment" after receiving Social Security Administration "no-match" letters for them. "Today," it claims, "failure to act appropriately on a no-match letter may be considered evidence of an employer’s conscious disregard for the law."

This is false, according to Social Security Administration spokesperson Lowell Kepke. It is in fact "illegal for a company to fire an employee based solely on a no-match letter," he told us.

Because it has been so often abused, the letter itself states that employers "should not use this letter to take any adverse action against an employee…. Doing so could, in fact, violate State or Federal law and subject you to legal consequences."

An emergency ordinance returned workers to the Woodfin while the city investigated their retaliation claims, but on April 27 the hotel defied the ordinance by firing 12 immigrant workers, again citing problems with Social Security numbers.

The city issued a notice of violation; even probusiness city council member Dick Kassis, who opposed Measure C, called the Woodfin’s behavior "morally reprehensible" at a May 1 council meeting. On May 3 police arrested 38 people at a civil disobedience protest supporting the workers in front of the hotel, including Assemblyperson Loni Hancock and Berkeley city council member Kriss Worthington.

The almost maddeningly soft-spoken and reasoned Emeryville city council member John Fricke, who in February was the target of an unsuccessful restraining order filed by the hotel over his alleged "threatening" behavior, posed the following conundrum to us: why would a successful business continue to pursue litigation that is not cost-effective?

"I’m assuming their success is based on their business acumen," he said. Yet as a lawyer, he estimates that attorney fees are well above $100,000, on top of another $100,000 in fees borne by the city and at least that much in worker back pay. "You would think the wise business decision would be to cut one’s losses," he said.

One possible answer: EBASE organizer Brooke Anderson said this is actually an "ideological battle."

The Woodfin’s Hardage has spent more than $230,000 since 2000 to fund conservative politicians and ballot measures, including political committees that have taken antiunion and antitax positions on state and local ballot propositions, according to EBASE. He chaired the San Diego County Republican Party from 1995 to 1997 and has served as a fundraiser in several Republican campaigns.

Hardage cofounded the Project for California’s Future in 2001, which the Heritage Foundation describes as "a multi-year, multi-million dollar project" to prepare Republican candidates for California office and "represents a first-ever program to rebuild the conservative bench from the water board level on up."

The project’s cofounder is Ron Nehring, the passionately antilabor vice chairman of the California Republican Party and senior consultant to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Nehring was also once director of government affairs for the Woodfin Suites.

A 2005 report by the Center on Policy Initiatives, a progressive think tank, names Nehring, Hardage, and Norquist among those who have helped the Republicans target San Diego as a model for their plan to radically cut government funding, permanently weaken labor unions, and privatize public services.

The ideological battle manifested itself at the Saturday-morning picket, which pitted roughly 15 College Republicans from Bay Area schools against 25 laid-off workers and supporters, each group with a bullhorn, separated by barricades and cops.

The Woodfin provided free rooms for the student counterdemonstrators, Ryan Clumpner, a UC Davis senior and chair of the California College Republicans, told us. Surrounded by signs such as "Quit ‘Stalin’: Get Back to Work," and "Respect the Law," Clumpner said he was "here supporting the Woodfin, which is being unfairly targeted by unions."

"I’ve actually done housecleaning," he said. Between semesters one summer, he said, he made $7 an hour cleaning rooms at UC Davis; immigrants supporting families in the Bay Area should also be content with this wage, he said. "If they want to make more, they can move up to supervisor positions," he said. "They’re here for a reason. This country is offering economic opportunities. The economic benefit is the reason they’re here, not the problem."

On the other side of the barricades, Luz said, "My idea is that you have to work hard and give a lot to the company so that they give something back to you in return. We gave them the best service, so they should give us reasonable salaries."

Retaliatory actions against immigrants organizing to improve their work situations have increased across the country in the past few years, just as high-profile raids have resulted in the detentions, arrests, and removals from the United States of thousands of immigrant workers.

The Woodfin is "an example of the need for just and fair immigration reform, coupling the legalization of undocumented workers in this country with strong labor- and employment-law enforcement," Guizar told us.

City Manager Pat O’Keefe told us that in the coming few weeks the city will be announcing a decision about its investigation into worker complaints and the Woodfin’s operating permit. *

From the ashes

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"They may label you, try to classify you, and even call you a crazy bitch — but don’t flinch, just let them," Honey of Radio Phoenix says to the women of New York City after her black feminist–run station gets bombed by government agents, after her comrade in arms is found dead in her jail cell, as the fireworks are about to go off in a certain tall tower in Lower Manhattan.

There’s no denying the evocative weight of that last image these days. But Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames — and in particular, advice like Honey’s — comes to mind every time I watch a film in which grrrls are running riot in the street or on the radio or in the clubs, a slowly but surely growing subgenre as the decades pass (at least in my home video collection).

In the thin line of plot running patchily through Borden’s vérité-style feature, surfacing at the Roxie Film Center on June 22, the War of Liberation has brought about a single-party system run by Socialist Democrats, the postrevolution economy is in the toilet, and working women are bearing the brunt of the mass layoffs that have ensued. Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield) is the leader of the Women’s Army, a loose circle of radical lesbian feminists — or vigilantes, as they’re called on the nightly news — who, among other pursuits, patrol the streets on bicycles with whistles at the ready in search of men behaving badly.

Norris begins to see their basically peaceful efforts to gain equality going nowhere and becomes convinced that armed struggle is the only way to get the government’s attention and force a change. When she dies in jail, the news sends a charge through the gathering underground, bringing together disconnected feminist forces that have long kept their distance. Borden’s aim, perhaps unrealistic and perhaps naive, is to present an expanding patchwork of radicalized women unified across lines of class and race in the face of overarching sexism.

You couldn’t call the women of Born in Flames riot grrrls with a straight face. The spiky commentators at Radio Regazza — trash-talking, white punk-rock counterparts to Radio Phoenix’s Honey — look familiar, but this is the second wave of feminism personified (evidenced, for one, by an unquestioning opposition to sex work). But if Borden’s point in setting Born in Flames in a future United States run by socialists, of all things, is that nothing much has changed for the second sex postrevolution, there’s a parallel in watching as a new clan of young women is born in flames onscreen every few years.

Such latter-day films — Kristine Peterson’s 1997 Slaves to the Underground, documenting the Portland DIY scene of the early ’90s; Barbara Teufel’s 2003 part-fiction, part-doc Gallant Girls, set amid the direct-action anarchopunks of late-’80s Berlin — regularly surface at the Frameline fest. And this year adds a couple more to the pack: closing night’s Itty Bitty Titty Committee, a tale of teen radicalization by But I’m a Cheerleader‘s Jamie Babbit (who cites Born in Flames as an inspiration), and the Spanish film El Calentito, by Chus Gutiérrez, set in 1981 on the eve of a coup d’état by Fascist vestiges of Francisco Franco’s gang. These, as well as Flames contemporaries Times Square (Allan Moyle, 1980) and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler, 1981), are filled with rude girls hijacking the radio waves or the stage, flinging out slogans and manifestos, and screaming bloody murder. Though only Borden’s future radicals are prepared to cause it. *

BORN IN FLAMES (Lizzie Borden, US, 1983). June 22, 10:30 p.m., Roxie

Pet projects

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"If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who deal likewise with their fellow men."

St. Francis of Assisi

His name is Sylvester. He’s quite handsome and charismatic, for a cat.

Sylvester is believed to be about eight years old, and the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has been his home since last July. He’s a simple domestic shorthair, with a jet-black coat aside from some snow-white blotches on his chest and left arm.

Also doing time at the SPCA is a slightly bashful orange tabby named Jitters, who has awaited a home since April. A long-haired tortie named Minna, with somber green eyes and a splash of umber on her nose, has been at the SPCA for a year and a half.

In many cities Sylvester, Jitters, and Minna would be on death row. In San Francisco they’re guaranteed a chance to live until they find a family, as long as they’re deemed adoptable by the SPCA and don’t develop a life-threatening disease or unmanageable behavior traits. They are the legacy of pioneering former president Richard Avanzino, regarded by most as the originator of the national "no-kill" movement.

Avanzino spent 20 years making the San Francisco SPCA a national leader in saving animals, including forging a pact with the city in 1994 to work toward guaranteeing every adoptable cat and dog a home, a remarkable promise during a time when few places across the nation were willing to make saving the lives of companion animals a priority. Most shelters euthanized tens of thousands of kittens, puppies, dogs, and cats every year to save space and money. Quite a few still do.

But after Avanzino left in 1998 to spread his no-kill philosophy nationally through the Alameda-based nonprofit Maddie’s Fund, the local SPCA has steadily retreated from the cutting edge. Rather than continuing to push toward the goal of saving all the animals, the two presidents who succeeded Avanzino have focused the organization on a private hospital project that has turned into an expensive boondoggle that’s sapped the organization’s energy and resources and angered the local veterinary community.

"San Francisco likes to say it’s the safest city in the United States to be a dog or cat," said Nathan Winograd, a widely recognized proponent of the no-kill philosophy and former director of operations for the SPCA, who left the organization in late 2000. "That is no longer true. There are other cities that are doing much more in terms of lifesaving. That’s one of the reasons I chose to leave San Francisco."

The SPCA’s eighth president, Jan McHugh-Smith, finally arrived in April after the shelter had spent nine months with an interim head, and the question now is whether she can turn this troubled yet still revered organization around.

Only in recent years have cities nationwide begun enacting policies intended to stop — or at least dramatically slow — the senseless slaughter of animals that are the defenseless victims of the public’s love of adorable newborns and specialized breeds. That trend started in San Francisco.

Avanzino calls welfare groups like the SPCA "safety valves" that relieve pressure on animal control officers and traditional municipal shelters. In an editorial last year for Maddie’s Fund he wrote that saving healthy and treatable shelter pets is the "minimum no-kill standard" and that communities today should strive to go beyond no-kill.

"Tompkins County, New York is a case in point," he wrote. "The Tompkins County SPCA maintains a 92 percent live-release rate. It saves all of the county’s healthy and treatable shelter pets and feral cats. Should this be our life-saving goal? I think it should."

Tompkins County, it turns out, is exactly where Winograd went after leaving the San Francisco SPCA in frustration. "When I left, we just had to save 500 or 600 more treatable dogs and cats every year, and we would have been just about there," Winograd said. "We were a whisper away."

Edwin Sayres, who succeeded Avanzino as president, told the shelter’s board of directors that the SPCA could remain in the vanguard of reducing pet overpopulation and saving abandoned animals while at the same time building a prestigious, state-of-the-art veterinary hospital that would rival one of the few other comparable facilities anywhere in the United States, Angell Memorial Hospital in Boston.

The Massachusetts SPCA, however, spends millions of dollars more each year simply running its three Angell facilities than the San Francisco SPCA’s entire budget. Originally expected to cost just $15 million, the price tag of the latter’s Leanne B. Roberts Animal Care Center has now shot to $32 million. The SPCA will finally break ground on the new facility in October.

Critics feared the hospital idea was a potential disaster, and they complained that the nonprofit had become top-heavy under Sayres. They pointed to the shelter’s money trail, detailed in its required annual tax-exempt disclosure forms, to emphasize where they believed the shelter’s priorities now rested.

While earning $200,000 a year in salary and benefits, Sayres created new executive positions that cost the shelter hundreds of thousands of dollars more in compensation than was spent during Avanzino’s tenure. That might not have seemed like such a big deal in 1997, when the nonprofit was taking in several million dollars more in donations from the public than it was spending to cover operational expenses.

But by the end of the 2002 fiscal year, when donations to the SPCA and many nonprofits were lagging, the shelter had fallen $2 million short of covering its $14 million in expenses, which had climbed by the millions annually.

At the same time, the city failed to reach its goal of releasing alive 75 percent of the animals it impounded; 2,075 animals were killed that year for a variety of reasons, according to city records. The SPCA also missed its target that year for the number of animals it would take in from the city’s municipal shelter and make available for new homes through its unique adoption center.

Meanwhile, several cities across the country were embracing the no-kill cause, inspired at least initially by San Francisco’s example. They did so with considerable help from Winograd, who worked briefly as a Marin County prosecutor before traversing the nation to help shelters come as reasonably close to no-kill as they could.

Tompkins County; Charlottesville, Va.; and Reno are all boasting live-release rates of around 90 percent after promising to find homes for adoptable and treatable animals, the latter a key category that includes animals with behavior problems, serious illnesses, and injuries that require extra care.

In other words, as San Francisco struggled to maintain its sense of direction, other communities began to implement and even redefine the meaning of no-kill. San Francisco has averaged a 70 to 80 percent save rate annually for several years — and the difference between this and what Winograd and others have hoped for the city of St. Francis means hundreds of animals being killed each year.

While avoiding any searing critique of the shelter, Avanzino told the Guardian that he perhaps would not have promoted the hospital scheme. However, he said, plenty of his own bold ideas at the SPCA once made him a target of criticism, like the shelter’s posh $7 million adoption center, composed of 86 kitty condos and doggy apartments.

"I know it sounds like I’m ducking the issue, and I am," Avanzino told us. "But the bottom line is that new leadership and the policy makers for the organization believe with everything in their being that this is an important next step for the San Francisco SPCA and [that] it is going to do more to help the animals. They have not kept me in the loop."

Nonetheless, when Sayres led the nonprofit, between 1999 and 2003, it spent at least $1.7 million just on architects and veterinary consultants moving the planned hospital forward. Meanwhile, programs like humane education and law and advocacy, the latter at one time a half-million-dollar program, saw deep cuts in their budgets or simply shriveled up and disappeared altogether, while public relations and promotional expenses retained brisk support to the tune of at least $1 million annually for several years before those expenditures were finally trimmed too.

Further, the shelter’s 17-member board of directors granted Sayres a $400,000 home loan and gave him 30 years to pay it off, although he cleared the debt before leaving for a new job in June 2003 at the American SPCA, which is independent of the San Francisco SPCA.

As the summertime explosion of kittens loomed in the spring of 2003 and Sayres prepared to leave, he sent an e-mail to the SPCA’s nearly 1,000 volunteers blaming the economy’s ongoing downturn and a 10 percent drop in public donations for the shelter’s money woes. The jobs of at least 15 employees were cut, and others were merged into one, including two major volunteer-coordinating positions.

In e-mails circuutf8g at the time, copies of which we’ve obtained, volunteers agonized over whether to inform the press of what was going on internally, nearing the point of insurrection over cuts in shelter services — including a one-of-a-kind dog behavior and training program. The truth, some feared, would turn donors away. Some argued that executive salaries should be trimmed to save money before ground-level staffers were dispatched with pink slips. Others were furious over the planned hospital’s burgeoning costs.

"I certainly think a new center is exciting and overdue," a volunteer wrote to Sayres. "But it annoys me [to] no end to see billboards all over the city about the center and nothing about the situation we’re in."

Sayres never responded to several detailed questions sent to him by e-mail and was unable to make time for a phone interview. But he admitted in a 2002 San Francisco Business Times story that he’d "tried to move forward with my vision too quickly."

"I should have taken more time to listen and absorb the culture," Sayres said in the story. "Now I’m more mindful of the contributions that people have made here over the decades."

New president McHugh-Smith insists the shelter can still balance the hospital plan’s most recent incarnation and a continued focus on the agency’s raison d’être: preventing cruelty to animals.

"One thing I’m really proud of is our hospital provides one and a half million dollars’ worth of charity care to homeless animals and people who can’t afford veterinary care for their pets," McHugh-Smith said. "What a critical service for this city. There are a lot of people here who can’t afford the care their animals need. They shouldn’t have to give up their pets for that."

Recent troubles aside, even the SPCA’s fiercest critics contend that much of the nation still lives deep in the shadows of its extraordinary achievements.

The San Francisco SPCA was officially chartered in 1868 as the first humane society west of the Mississippi River. But more than a century later, in 1978, its leadership had grown tired of the organization’s serving dual roles as a killer and a savior of animals.

Backing out of its long-standing shelter contract with the city meant losing more than a fifth of its annual budget, but then-president Avanzino felt the group’s agenda no longer fit with the city’s mechanized handling of hapless animals. Thousands were still being killed by the city each year.

"For 101 years, the reputation of the SFSPCA was, ‘That’s the place where animals are killed,’" Avanzino said in a 2000 interview he gave to Maddie’s Fund. "That was not the purpose of our organization. You can’t be the animals’ best friends and be their principal killer."

The city was forced to create a separate municipal shelter, known today as the Department of Animal Care and Control, which cites abusers, seizes dangerous dogs, and maintains its own adoption program. The SPCA then proceeded to vastly expand its spaying and neutering services, particularly for juvenile animals, as well as its medical facilities and treatment for animal behavior previously regarded as severe enough to warrant a trip to the death chamber, in which dozens of animals were killed at once. A technician withdrew oxygen from a decompression room until they died.

The SPCA led the way in taking animals waiting for adoption out into the community, and while some early skeptics feared mobilized adoptions would inspire impulse buying and high turnovers, many groups nationwide started to follow Avanzino’s lead after seeing how well it worked here.

On its sweeping Mission property at 16th and Alabama streets, where the SPCA has been located for almost a century, the shelter did away with cell-style kennels, which encourage erratic behavior and reduce the chances that an animal will find a home. In 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, the city found homes for 4,500 dogs and cats, with the SPCA handling three-fourths of those adoptions.

And guaranteeing homes for cats and dogs defined as adoptable, let alone those who are arguably treatable with the right commitment of energy and resources, was almost unheard of in the mid-’90s, when San Francisco made its promise. Under San Francisco’s agreement with the SPCA, animals considered adoptable include cats and dogs eight weeks and older, those without "temperamental defects," and those not suffering from life-threatening diseases or injuries.

However, while a 100 percent adoption rate is probably not possible, Winograd and others worry that the bedrock of the nation’s no-kill movement has failed to reach its full potential since Avanzino left, and they say the San Francisco SPCA could at least aspire to a save rate of more than 70 to 80 percent.

"I think the agency went through some times they weren’t used to, not having a long-term leader that really understood the history of the organization and the goals of the organization," Carl Friedman, director of Animal Care and Control, said of the SPCA. "But that happens everywhere. I think it took a little bit of a toll on the organization."

Friedman worked at the SPCA for several of its most memorable years before moving to the city’s municipal shelter in 1988, after the SPCA relinquished its role as the proverbial dogcatcher. He says that most euthanized animals in San Francisco are cats and dogs struck by automobiles or those suffering from parvovirus and distemper, both preventable with early vaccinations.

It’s worth noting that the agreement between Friedman’s office and the SPCA forbids each of them from speaking critically of the other, and many of the people we talked to balked at speaking on the record.

"People are afraid of getting sued, and they’re afraid of what will happen," Winograd said. "There are people in San Francisco who need these agencies. They’re not willing to be forthright, because they’re afraid. I’m a lawyer, so anybody who wants to sue me, good luck. But the truth is the truth."

The shelter’s problems that started under Sayres continued under his handpicked successor, Daniel Crain. And they reached a zenith in August 2004 when one of the SPCA’s leading veterinarians, Jeffrey Proulx, committed suicide in horrific fashion, delivering a psychic blow to longtime SPCA volunteers and staffers.

The morning Proulx was discovered, a Marin County coroner found an empty box of Nembutal injectable solution on the kitchen counter of his San Rafael home. Nembutal is a barbiturate used in physician-assisted suicides, but it’s also used to euthanize animals, and a bottle of it was missing from the shelter’s medicine cabinet the day Proulx died.

Proulx was the hospital’s chief of staff and was overseeing the expansion project. The task was apparently wearing him down, and on the day of his death, he threatened to resign.

Groundbreaking was supposed to occur in 2004. Then 2005. Then 2006. In the meantime, a private animal hospital providing 24-hour emergency care — San Francisco Veterinary Specialists — moved into the neighborhood, just blocks away, casting doubt on whether the facility’s service load could justify the project.

After Proulx’s death, the SPCA announced that it had chosen another architectural firm to take charge of the hospital: Rauhaus Freedenfeld and Associates. By then the organization had spent nearly $4 million on veterinary consultants and architects, according to tax records, and even today hardly a single wall has been erected.

A previous architecture firm, ARQ Architects, which designed the shelter’s adoption center, has earned more than $2 million from the SPCA since 2000, but there’s no telling what happened to any of the designs the firm crafted. Nonetheless, according to the shelter’s newest tax records, provided at the Guardian‘s request, Rauhaus was paid more than $500,000 last year, and another $330,000 went to a project manager, CMA. A new veterinary consultant was paid $90,000 last year as well, after a previous consultant, Massachusetts-based VHC, was paid at least $925,000 over a three-year period.

After Proulx died, Crain lasted just two more years as president. He left last August, and attempts to reach him at various phone numbers, a fax number, and a last-known San Francisco address in Bernal Heights were unsuccessful.

Crain joined the shelter in 1999 as a human resources director but quickly — despite little evidence of nonprofit management experience and only a brief stint running human resources — became the SPCA’s vice president under Sayres, earning well into six figures. In 2003, after Sayres’s departure, he became the SPCA’s top administrator following a board vote, which brought his compensation to more than $200,000 a year.

Ken White, director of the Peninsula Humane Society, said he never forged the bond with Crain that he did with the leadership of Marin County’s municipal shelter and its major East Bay animal welfare counterpart. White worked for nearly a decade at the SPCA, until 1989, when San Francisco created the separate animal-control entity that exists today.

Although reluctant to speak critically about the SPCA, White explained that the Peninsula shelter treats about 1,000 injured wildlife animals from San Francisco annually under a very modest contract with the city that’s nowhere near enough to cover his costs. The SPCA focuses primarily on cats and dogs, and the Peninsula shelter has more space.

People like Winograd, who now directs a nonprofit in San Clemente called the No Kill Advocacy Center, say the shelter’s campaign to build a modern but almost prohibitively expensive hospital diverted funds away from "God’s work": caring for animals so they may be adopted out.

"I didn’t feel the city needed another specialty hospital," Winograd said, "and my fear was that the energy and dollars and all the effort that would be put into the hospital would pull the agency away from its core mission of patching together the sick and injured dogs and cats."

"They still think that’s the next big thing," said Karin Jaffie, a former public relations coordinator and longtime volunteer. "For the cost of the hospital, you could have trained a lot of people’s dogs or spay-neutered the city’s pit bull population for free."

An early plan for the hospital included 24-hour emergency care and critical services like oncology, cardiology, and neurology — services that shelter execs argued pet owners would never pursue otherwise to help save their animals.

Yet the plan had a significant catch: it called for aligning the hospital’s nonprofit component with a for-profit network of veterinary specialists who would lease space inside the facility and help cover its overhead by paying some of the utility bills. Private specialty veterinary care was among the fastest-growing segments of the industry at the time, and the SPCA’s eager citywide promotional campaign for the hospital raised the ire of private vets working in the Bay Area, including their industry group, the California Veterinary Medical Association.

McHugh-Smith admitted that "after much evaluation" the complex for-profit plan was scratched completely, and the shelter had to more or less start over after spending millions. "It wasn’t going to help our mission, so that project was put to rest," she told us.

Not everyone was quick to offer a negative opinion of the shelter’s past leadership. Kelley Filson, a former humane-education director, said that all nonprofits experience periodic lulls in funding and that her program was never short of the resources it genuinely needed to help Bay Area youth understand why it’s necessary to treat animals humanely. Like in K-9 behavior training, she says, SPCA supporters should focus on the shelter’s historic milestones.

"It was not a direct-care program," Filson said of humane education, which endured budget cuts in recent years. "When there are 10 puppies that need medicine and treatment, that’s a very immediate need, so I think that people [misunderstand] when an organization has to look at the immediate needs of suffering animals versus education goals. Until you’re in the position of running that organization, you don’t often understand the decisions that are being made."

Skepticism aside, the shelter’s existing 70-year-old animal care hospital, where it treats injured and abandoned animals, could certainly benefit from a makeover. It still provides a range of services for a relatively minimal fee, including limited emergency care for the pets of some low-income San Franciscans. In 1978 the shelter’s spay-neuter clinic was the first in the nation to provide the service at a reduced cost, and it continues to alter feral cats brought in by a citywide network of caretakers for free.

"The demands on that hospital have grown large over the years," McHugh-Smith said. "Our surgical [unit] is on the second floor, and we have to carry the animals upstairs…. It’s just not very efficient or effective any longer."

The emergency and specialty hospital San Francisco Veterinary Specialists now does what the SPCA originally hoped to. Previously at odds with the SPCA’s for-profit scheme, the private vets will now donate certain specialty services that the SPCA isn’t able to cover under its current plans. Dr. Alan Stewart, a founder of SFVS, told us they’ve already helped several animals.

Construction on the Roberts Center is slated to begin in October. McHugh-Smith promises the new plan will enable San Francisco to expand its definition of a treatable homeless animal by expanding the range of treatment the city can administer. Now the $32 million will go toward simply renovating a massive warehouse on the shelter’s campus and giving its current facility another 40,000 square feet of space. The feral cat project, which today operates out of a former lobby, will get its own designated area, and McHugh-Smith says the shelter will also act as a university hospital where veterinary students can learn to treat the approximately 25,000 animals that pass through annually.

McHugh-Smith, the shelter’s first female president, has worked in animal welfare for more than two decades. She spent 12 years as CEO of the humane society in Boulder, Colo., and built that city’s live-release rate up to 86 percent.

Because of the Bay Area’s supercharged political tendencies, she faces constant and varying obstacles. Wildlife supporters loathe the SPCA’s long history of backing feral cat populations and off-leash dogs on federal parkland such as the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Even the phrase "animal welfare" is politically loaded — it’s often used specifically to separate pet lovers and the wealthy benefactors of big nonprofit shelters from "animal rights" factions perceived as too radical. Plus, there’s the fact that higher save rates translate into greater challenges in dealing with the final 20 or 30 percent of animals, which can require treatment before being adoptable.

"The higher you get, the more difficult it gets, and the more resources you need," McHugh-Smith said of the city’s save rate. "Hence, the hospital is going to be a really critical part of that."

Avanzino says San Francisco could still do a much better job presenting records to the public of which animals are killed and why. Are hyperthyroid or feral cats untreatable? Are otherwise healthy pit bulls made "unhealthy" merely by irresponsible owners? For years, transparency in terms of what constitutes a treatable or healthy animal has been a major tenet Avanzino has advocated.

"If we’re really going to empower the public to be part of the solution and see that the job gets done, we’ve got to give them the data," he told us. "Are the dogs and cats that we call family members getting justice from us? If not, then we have failed them, and in San Francisco that should never happen. It’s the city of St. Francis." *

Hazy recall

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› steve@sfbg.com

They gathered May 30 in the Richmond District’s Lee Hou Restaurant to voice their anger and outrage at Sup. Jake McGoldrick, calling him incompetent, unaccountable, hostile to the will of the voters, and a "born liar." They blamed him for everything from potholes to the state of the economy.

Yet a closer examination of why the Citizens for the Recall of Supervisor Jake McGoldrick say they are trying to get rid of the elected official reveals that this campaign is based on just a few controversial issues that animate these two dozen fairly conservative people.

Primarily, they’re mad at McGoldrick for sponsoring Healthy Saturdays, which sought a second day of closing some Golden Gate Park roads to cars, and for his support for studying a Bus Rapid Transit system on Geary Boulevard, which some merchants fear will disrupt their business.

"The problem with Jake McGoldrick is he does not allow us to have our issues," said David Heller, a Geary Street merchant who has led the charge against BRT and who ran against McGoldrick three years ago but has since moved from the district.

"Jake McGoldrick has not been responsive to our needs. He’s not there when we need him," said Paul Kozakiewicz, the Richmond Review publisher whose inflammatory and misleading front-page commentaries "The Case for Recalling McGoldrick" over the past two months have been the main rallying point for the recall effort.

As he spoke at the press conference kicking off the recall drive, Kozakiewicz was flanked by Heller and Howard Epstein, a member of the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee, the only political group to endorse the recall drive so far. Democratic Party clubs have all opposed the effort, as did the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee on a rare unanimous vote.

McGoldrick and his supporters say this isn’t about accountability but about his policy disagreements with a handful of particularly vocal constituents. "What you have here is some folks who just have to have it their way," McGoldrick told us. "The bottom line is we have a situation where some folks disagree on some issues. But to use this to threaten a politician into backing off these issues is an abuse of the recall."

There’s also an ironic note to all of this: if Kozakiewicz had been more truthful in his high-profile attacks, his readers might know that McGoldrick actually watered down the BRT study to appease the Geary merchants and that he resolved the long-simmering park road closure issue in a way that maintains full auto access to the museums and prevents alternative-transportation advocates from reviving the fight for at least five years, much to the chagrin of many walkers, skaters, and bicyclists.

Recalling McGoldrick would require the valid signatures of 3,573 registered voters from District 1, or 10 percent of the total, according to the city’s campaign services manager, Rachel Gosiengfiao. The campaign has until Sept. 14 to gather signatures, although Gosiengfiao said that if recall supporters want to make the November ballot, they need to submit the signatures for verification by June 22.

If the signature drive is successful and a majority of voters then decide to remove McGoldrick, Mayor Gavin Newsom will appoint a replacement who will stand for reelection at the end of next year, when McGoldrick’s term expires.

"We’re not getting involved with replacing the supervisor," Kozakiewicz said. "We’re going to leave that up to the mayor."

Kozakiewicz’s "The Case for Recalling McGoldrick" started with this description of how the effort began: "In March, a dozen community leaders from a broad cross-section of the community gathered for breakfast at the Video Cafe on Geary Boulevard. The topic of discussion was the district’s supervisor, Jake McGoldrick, and what should be done to limit the perceived damage the supervisor was doing to the City."

He then went through a litany of supposed abuses, presented in a seemingly factual and straightforward way — BRT, Healthy Saturdays, various "Attacks on Families and Property Owners." At least, they might appear objective to those not familiar with the details. The approach sparked more interest in the recall.

"This is a new venture for me, so I’m a little nervous," Richmond resident Margie Hom-Brown said at the event before attacking McGoldrick’s Healthy Saturdays stand. "Two-thirds of San Francisco has voted repeatedly not to close the park. He went on year after year and made it his number one priority…. The actions seem to me rather unethical."

Kozakiewicz used the November 2000 vote against park closure to conclude that McGoldrick "ignores the will of the voters" and used a large, bold pull quote to feature the Measure G question and the fact that 62 percent of the voters rejected it. But what Kozakiewicz doesn’t say is that the measure was placed on the ballot by closure opponents trying to defeat Measure F, which called for immediate closure (before construction of the garage that has since been built) and got 46 percent of the vote (a figure Kozakiewicz conveniently leaves out).

Because of the confusing nature of the two measures, it’s impossible to know how many voters wanted permanent closure at some point, let alone the six-month trial period that Healthy Saturdays called for. But Kozakiewicz has no use for such nuance in his conclusions, remarking at our questions during a phone interview, "Now you’re going into shades of gray."

Similarly, he casts McGoldrick as "forcing BRT on [the] district without notification," despite the fact that the project has been contemplated for decades and that it is now being studied with plenty of future opportunities for public input rather than being a done deal created through some secret McGoldrick plot.

In fact, transit advocate Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, said Kozakiewicz’s commentary is misleading in several ways, most notably in that it fails to say that McGoldrick, as chair of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, actually prevented the BRT study from looking at light rail because of his fears that it would be too disruptive for the Geary merchants.

"The sensitivity of merchant concerns is one reason why the best option isn’t even being studied," Radulovich said. "It’s ironic that he’s being recalled over this. In a way, you could say Jake is kowtowing to the merchants too much and dismissing good transportation options."

Nonetheless, the recall has a decent shot at qualifying, particularly given the fact that the committee has already raised about $24,000, including $5,000 from the Residential Builders Association and $1,500 from the Small Property Owners of San Francisco. It has also hired a firm called JKW Political Consulting, which is not registered with the city as required.

"In reality, the 10 percent threshold is pretty low. Whether you’re paying people or using volunteers, you can get that," McGoldrick campaign consultant Jim Stearns said. "So I told Jake we need to be prepared to fight the recall."

And McGoldrick said he is. "We’re talking here about ultraconservative, right-wing Republicans," McGoldrick said of the recall proponents. "And they’ve said that I vote far more progressively than my district…. But I’m trying to do some things that are good for the entire city." *

Catching the tail of BALLE

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Gazelle Emami checks out Berkeley’s film-oriented BALLE Conference ….

The purpose of educational films—bear with me—are to inform the public. But here’s where they bump into their biggest obstacle. Unless Al Gore is at the helm, they’re probably not going to get wide viewing beyond festivals that are specifically geared toward showing films of their kind. Enter the first ever Business Alliance for Local Living Economies’ (BALLE) Conference Film Festival, a two-day event that was held this past Tuesday and Wednesday at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Auditorium. The festival’s goal was to build positive sentiment for the BALLE Conference this weekend, kind of like a pep rally for the big game. BALLE, which represents 47 local networks and more than 15,000 small businesses and community organizations, holds an annual conference gathering the preeminent leaders in green industries to discuss pressing issues facing the economy.

manufacturedlandscapesfactorya.jpg
Still from Manufactured Landscapes, a film the opened the conference

According to festival organizer Lisa Katovich, she knew they would be preaching to the choir for the most part. Therefore, Katovich and others tailored the festival’s content to approach the subject matter from a difference angle. So it didn’t really matter that only about 30 people were scattered around an auditorium that can hold roughly 700. By the end, at least all 30 left the room a little more enlightened, as opposed to the hundreds that left Spiderman 3 disappointed, if not a little dumber.

Caffe Bella Venezia

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The world traveler might arrive in some strange foreign city eager to find enlightenment at the table — to suss out the city’s most interesting and revealing restaurants and ponder the cultural clues they offer — but first there is the matter of jet lag. The world traveler has an urgent need for a good night’s sleep and perhaps a meal that’s somehow authentically local but not too difficult: not too expensive or far away or served at a place that’s difficult to get into. Tourist cities — of which ours is one — must have plenty of restaurants to provide this service, just as they must have plenty of other places to provide dazzle and memories while charging prices that keep the local tourist economy well watered and in bloom.

We don’t lack for the second, lofty sort of restaurant, of course, but you might be surprised that we have examples of the former too. While stepping into Caffé Bella Venezia one recent mild evening, I noticed a huge youth hostel on the other side of Post Street, and I was glad. For a city that so self-consciously links itself to youth culture, ours is a fearfully — I might even say prohibitively — expensive place for youth to visit. Youth tends to be impecunious, and that won’t get you very far at the Ritz-Carlton or even the Phoenix, no matter how charming and chic your pennilessness. If the concierge is nice, you might be sent down to the hostel on Post Street, not far from Union Square and the theater district, and welcomed there. And if you’re hungry, you might next be sent across the street to Bella Venezia, which isn’t exactly Venetian — except for all the wall art, with its many depictions of gondoliers and canals — but is appealingly pan-Italian, with a rich selection of pastas. If money is one language everybody speaks, pasta is another.

Venice has long been the most eastward-looking of Italian cities. For centuries it was the western terminus of the Silk Road to China, and after the horrendous Fourth Crusade in 1204 — in which Venetian forces sacked the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, instead of carrying on to the Holy Land — it was handsomely decorated with Byzantine gewgaws looted from that ancient city. One associates certain oriental perfumes, of cinnamon and nutmeg, among others, with the cooking of Venice, and while you’re not likely to catch a whiff of these at Bella Venezia, you might catch a latter-day Silk Road echo: the chef is Italian, and his Filipina wife runs the front of the house with the help of their son.

Meanwhile, much of the clientele speaks little or no English. While we did note several solitary, possibly Anglophone, diners roosting forlornly at tables on various evenings, we were more struck by the parade of high-spirited young people moving in packs and speaking, say, French. Of course the French like and serve pasta, even if they’re French Canadian. And just about everyone would like Bella Venezia’s fettuccine arlecchino ($9.95), a lively and colorful mélange of zucchini coins, black olives, and sun-dried tomatoes in a sauce of garlic and goat cheese and a heaping tangle of pasta. Even better is gnocchi ($5 for a small plate that’s not that small), which isn’t really a pasta but is often grouped with the pasta family. Bella Venezia’s house-made lobes are achingly tender, stuffed with gorgonzola, and bathed with a mushroom cream in which we detected, we thought, a hint of brandy breath.

I was surprised to find that I did not quite care for the lasagna ($9.95). So seldom am I disaffected in this way that I can’t recall the last time it happened, if it ever did. But BV’s lasagna, though served in an immense portion, had an unbecoming sweetness; too much minced onion mixed in with the ground beef? We noted a similar problem with the minestrone ($4.50), a run-of-the-mill vegetable soup heavy with carrots, onions, celery, zucchini, potatoes, and shreds of spinach — but no tomatoes, white beans, or pasta. Both lasagna and minestrone responded to salting, the latter more smartly than the former.

A nice feature of the menu is that you can get little versions of pizzas, pastas, and salads for $3 to $6 each. A pair of these makes a nice two-course dinner for someone who isn’t starving or is watching carb intake or feels a little jet-lagged. Pizza regina ($4.75) is a daughter of the full-figured pizza margherita, topped with the same combination of tomatoes, oregano, basil, and mozzarella — plenty of mozzarella. Pizza salsiccia ($8.95) is (to extend our familial imagery) an uncle, a brawny pie of meaty mushrooms and lots of fennel-charged Italian sauces. If the current vogue of thin-crust pizza has left you fatigued, you will appreciate BV’s slightly thicker, breadier crusts.

Two of the restaurant’s best dishes turn up as appetizers. Caprese salad ($6.95) is often routine, a tried-and-true medley of sliced tomatoes and mozzarella cheese, but here it is lightly doused with a pesto vinaigrette that enlivens each constituent while bringing them together. (All salad dressings are supposed to do this, but few do it this well.) And sautéed mussels ($9.95) arrive in a pool of garlicky tomato–white wine sauce that will have you motioning for more of the house-made focaccia to sop it up with, since it is impolite to do so with your fingers, even if you’ve just flown in from Venice and have jet lag. *

CAFFÉ BELLA VENEZIA

Dinner: nightly, 5 p.m.–midnight

720 Post, SF

(415) 775-1156

www.caffebellavenezia.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not loud

Wheelchair accessible

Too quiet in Oaxaca

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By John Ross
OAXACA, OAXACA (May 27th) — On the first anniversary of the beginning of last summer’s feverish uprising here, the city’s jewel-box plaza which had been occupied for seven months by striking teachers and their allies in the Oaxaca Peoples’ Popular Assembly (APPO) from May until October when federal police forced them into retreat, shimmered in the intense spring sunbeams. The only massive police presence on view was the city police department’s orchestra tootling strident martial airs to a shirt-sleeved crowd of gaffers. Here and there, handfuls of burley state cops, sweltering in bulletproof vests and helmets in hand, huddled in the shade quaffing aguas frescas (fruit water) and flirting with the senoritas.

Evidence of last summer’s occupation has been obliterated. Surrounding government buildings have been scrubbed clean of revolutionary slogans and no marches were scheduled to commemorate last May 22nd when the teachers first established their camp in the plaza. Indeed, militant members of Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) were not encamped in the stately old square for the first time since the section’s founding 27 years ago. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO), the object of their fury, was still the despotic governor of Oaxaca.

Despite the relaxation of U.S. State Department travel advisories and the apparent calm, few tourists were strolling the cobblestone streets of Oaxaca’s historic center and the cavernous colonial hotels around the plaza were virtually deserted.

The 2006 uprising has put a serious kibosh on the international tourist trade, the backbone of the local economy. If the experience of San Cristobal de las Casas after the 1994 Zapatista uprising is any lesson, the tourist moguls will take years to recoup.

“Apparent calm” is a euphemism oft utilized to describe the uneasy lulls that mark social upheaval in Mexico. True to the nation’s volcanic political metabolism with its fiery spurts of molten fightback and sullen, brooding silences, the Oaxaca struggle seems to have entered into a period of internal contemplation.

Government repression, which featured death squad killings and the jailing of hundreds of activists, slammed the lid down on the social stew but did not extinguish it. Discontent continues to brew and fester, the bad gas building down below. The structures of the Popular Assembly and the teachers union, which served to catalyze this discontent throughout 2006, remain intact.

To be sure, the social movements that lit up red bulbs as far away as Washington last year are not enjoying their best moments. Section 22, which itself is a loose amalgam of left factions, is wracked with division and dissonance, and its titular leader, Enrique Rueda Pacheco, is held in profound contempt for having forced the strikers back into the classroom last October and abandoning the APPO to savage government repression.

Moreover, in response to the 70,000-strong Section 22’s rebellion against the leadership of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), union czarina Elba Esther Gordillo, a close confidante of President Felipe Calderon, chartered a new Oaxaca local, Section 59, to diminish the control that the militants exert over the state’s classrooms.

The division has put a dent in the teachers’ usual aggressive stance and instead of walking out this past May 15th, National Teachers Day, when new contracts are negotiated, Section 22 tentatively accepted a 4.8 percent base wage increase (above the 3.7 percent Calderon had conceded to other sectors) and 122 million bonus pesos to “re-zone” Oaxaca for cost of living increases in this tourism-driven state.

Although the “maestros” did participate in a two-day boycott of classes in May to protest the Calderon government’s privatization of government workers pension funds, whether the teachers will take part in an indefinite national walk-out June 1st that has been called by dissident education workers organized in the Coordinating Body of Education Workers or CNTE, remains unresolved at press time.

Nonetheless, the teachers’ disaffection with Ulises remains strong and Section 22 spokesperson Zenen Reyes last week (May 23rd) called upon the teachers and the APPO to push for cancellation of the Guelaguetza, an “indigenous” dance festival in July that has become Oaxaca’s premier tourist attraction. Last year, the strikers and the APPO destroyed scenery and denied access to the spectacle, forcing URO to suspend the gala event. In its place, activists reclaimed this millennial tradition of Indian cultural interchange by staging a “popular” Guelaguetza in the part of the city they were occupying, and plans are afoot to repeat that celebration this year.

The Oaxaca Popular Peoples Assembly, which came together after the governor sent a thousand police to drive the maestros out of the plaza last June 14th and which at one time included representatives of the state’s 17 distinct Indian peoples and many of the 400 majority indigenous municipalities plus hundreds of grassroots organizations, is equally fractured. Having borne the brunt of the repression – 26 killed, 30 disappeared, hundreds imprisoned – the Popular Assembly has been reduced to a defensive posture when only months ago it was an aggressive lightning rod for social discontent.

Even more debilitating than the government crackdown has been the prospect of upcoming local elections August 7th to choose 42 members of the Oaxaca legislature and October 5th balloting for 157 non-Indian municipal presidents (majority indigenous municipalities elect their presidents via traditional assemblies.) While the APPO considers that its goals transcend the electoral process and rejects alliance with the political parties, some Popular Assembly leaders engage in a quirky dance with the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) which last July almost catapulted Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) into the presidency.

Prominent APPO mouthpiece Flavio Sosa, jailed by Calderon as his first political prisoner, is a former Oaxaca party leader and the PRD has mobilized to achieve his release.

Perhaps the cruelest blow the APPO and the striking teachers struck against Ulises came during July 2nd 2006 presidential elections. Although URO had promised the long-ruling (77 years – at least in Oaxaca) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) a million votes for his political godfather Roberto Madrazo, the popular movement inflicted the voto del castigo (punishment vote) against the PRI, handing the state to AMLO’s presidential bid in addition to electing both PRD senators and nine out of 11 federal representatives to the new congress for the first time ever.

The left party seemed positioned to bump Ruiz again in 2007 by taking the state legislature and neutralizing the tyrannical governor’s clout. But instead of rewarding the APPO and Section 22 for having dumped the PRI in 2006, the party has responded by excluding activists from its candidate lists.

“If, at one time, there was hope that elections could provide a solution to the conflict, exclusion of the APPO has canceled them,” writes Luis Hernandez Navarro who follows Oaxaca closely for the national daily La Jornada.

One Oaxaca-based PRD insider who preferred not to be named confides that APPO activists were vetoed by the left party’s national leadership least front-page photos of the candidates hurling rocks during last summer’s altercations lend credence to the perpetual allegations of the PRI and Calderon’s right-wing PAN that the PRD is “the part of violence.” Most local candidacies were distributed in accordance with the laws of PRD nepotism and amongst the party’s myriad “tribes.”

The exclusion of the APPO activists so infuriated 50 members of grassroots organizations led by Zapotec Indian spokesperson Aldo Gonzalez that they stormed the PRD’s Oaxaca city headquarters May 18th, leaving its façade a swirl of spray-painted anguish. The failure to select candidates from the popular movement, Gonzalez and others charge, throws the elections to URO, suggesting that the PRD has cut a deal with the APPO’s arch enemy.

Given the hostilities the upcoming elections have sparked so far, the August and October balloting could well signal another “voto del castigo” – this time against the PRD.

The election season was in full swing by mid-Spring in Oaxaca. PRD leader Felix Cruz, who had just coordinated Lopez Obrador’s third tour of the Mixteca mountains (AMLO was conspicuously absent during last summer’s struggle), was gunned down in Ejutla de Crespo on May 21st. Juan Antonio Robles, a direction of the Unified Triqui Liberation Movement (MULT), a participating organization in the APPO, met a similar fate the next day. That same week, a car carrying a local candidate for Elba Esther Gordillo’s New Alliance Party was riddled with gunfire along the coast. Drug gang killings have also jacked up the homicide rate in the state – under Ulises’ governance, drugs and drug gangs have flourished.

Meanwhile, in classic “cacique” (political boss) style, the PRI governor is out and about dishing up the pork to buy votes, passing out cardboard roofing and kilos of beans, building roads to nowhere and bridges where there are no rivers to cross, to pump up his electoral clientele. Gifting opposition leaders with pick-up trucks to enlist their allegiances is a favorite URO gambit, notes Navarro Hernandez.

Despite the ambitions of some of its members, the APPO is not enthusiastic about participating in the electoral process. At a statewide congress in February, APPO members were allowed to run for public office as individuals and only if they resign from any organizational function.

Miguel Cruz, an APPO activist and member of the directive of the CIPO-RFM or Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca – Ricardo Flores Magon (Flores Magon was a Oaxaca-born anarchist leader during the Mexican revolution) is not a partisan of the electoral process. Seated in the CIPO’s open-air kitchen out in Santa Lucia del Camino, a rural suburb of Oaxaca city where police gunned down U.S. journalist Brad Will last October, Miguel explains his disdain for how the elections have split the APPO “when they were supposed to bring us together.

“Everyone is working on their own agendas now and the so-called leaders are all looking for a ‘hueso” (literally ‘bone’ – political appointment.) This is a crying shame. The APPO is a mass movement, not a political party. Our consciences are not for sale.”

June 14th, the day last year Ulises sent a thousand heavily armed police to unsuccessfully take the plaza back from the striking teachers, is a crucial date. The APPO and Section 22 are planning one of their famous mega-marches which last summer sometimes turned out hundreds of thousands of citizens. Will June 14th signal a resurgence of massive resistance and if it does, will the popular leadership be able to restrain hotter heads and government provocateurs that last November gave the federal police the pretext to beat and round up hundreds? Miguel Cruz is hopeful the APPO will persevere. “Whatever the ‘leaders’ do and say, the APPO lives down at the bases.”

Up the steep, windy hill in San Pablo Etla, where the cognoscenti live above the hurly-burly on the streets of Oaxaca, political guru Gustavo Esteva views the popular struggle down below geologically. “The popular movement in Oaxaca is like an active volcano” he writes in La Jornada, “last year when it erupted, the movement left its mark in the form of molten lava trails. Now the lava has cooled and formed a cap of porous rock that marks the point through which the internal pressure will find its way to break through to the surface again.”

John Ross is in Mexico City hot on the trail of Brad Will’s killers and re-immersing himself in the real world. Write him at johnross@igc.org if you have further information.

Czech, please!

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A faltering economy is the biggest threat to most national film industries, but Czechoslovakia’s had a more distinct misfortune: it was shut down by occupation forces not once but twice. Most famously, the 1960s Czech new wave, in which talents like Jirí Menzel, Ivan Passer, Vera Chytilová, and Milos Forman first flourished, was abruptly dammed by the 1968 Soviet invasion. The type of widespread film-buff culture that brought attention to those directors scarcely existed when — before the Nazis commandeered local studios and permitted only a handful of strictly escapist films to be made for the home market — the country’s cinema had its first golden age.

Before World War II, Czechoslovakia boasted one of the most adventurous and lively — if not widely exported — movie industries in the world. Of course, this meant there was room for a lot of populist fluff. But the 12 features in the Pacific Film Archive’s new series "Czech Modernism, 1926–1949" show why Nazi invaders sensed a celluloid threat: these films are full of playful social critique as well as imaginative stylistic leaps. They assume that an audience is intelligent and that it will enjoy the subversion of authority. These films don’t provide pacification, let alone propaganda.

As playwright and Velvet Underground fan turned president Václav Havel would suggest some decades later, Czech life — at least the urban variety — has long appreciated the intersection of the avant-garde and leftist politics. The region’s geographic location, between the sophisticated capitalist West and the stylistically impoverished Communist USSR, at times seems directly reflected in these films’ colliding influences, from German expressionism to Soviet formalism to an Erich von Stroheim–esque attitude decadence.

The series’ two movies by director Vladislav Vancura apply a mad stylistic energy to subjects that might easily have been played for simple melodrama or pathos. In 1933’s On the Sunny Side, a pair of city children whose friendship bridges the class divide end up dumped in an orphanage when their parents are deemed unfit: first it’s fatherless, accordion-playing Honza, then pigtailed Babula, whose womanizing dad has just bankrupted the family. Frenetic montages contrast the adult worlds of poor and rich, cutting between breadlines and champagne-guzzling flappers. At the progressive home for foundlings, by contrast, equality is ensured by self-government — as a collective, the kids are better able to look after their own welfare than the grown-ups who’ve failed them.

Vancura’s Faithless Marijka, from the next year, is set in the Carpathian Mountains, with local nonprofessional actors as the leads. But it’s no sylvan idyll. The supposedly central tale of a lumberjack’s cheating spouse is nearly lost amid the struggles of laborers to triumph over their greedy oppressors (whose ranks include a disturbing anti-Semitic caricature).

A similar mix of poetic naturalism and Eisensteinian montage marks Karl Junghans’s 1929 silent Such Is Life. Its titular shrug downplays a vigorous look at some ordinary Prague residents, notably a put-upon laundry worker (Vera Baranovskaya, who played the title character of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 Mother), her loutish husband, and a manicurist daughter pretty enough to attract major trouble. Similar perils await two office girls lured into a lecherous nightlife in 1931’s From Saturday to Sunday, by Gustav Machatý, who would create an international sensation with Hedy Lamarr’s nude swim in Ecstasy two years later. This time romance rather than lust prevails as the more innocent secretary flees a grabby grandpa and winds up meeting her pure-hearted lower-class match.

Mistrust toward the rich and powerful was also a frequent theme in the era’s Hollywood films, in an attempt to please American audiences suffering though the Great Depression, which in turn triggered Czechoslovakia’s economic hardship. But the criticism in such films was usually glib, the solutions fanciful. Not so here. It’s eye-opening to watch a popular hit like Martin Fric’s 1934 Heave Ho!, widely regarded as the best effort from local comedy team Jirí Voskovec and Jan Werich.

Werich plays a dissolute multimillionaire informed one day that his stocks are worthless and he’s broke. Teaming with an unemployed laborer (Voskovec) who’d ranted against factory-shutting fat cats on the radio (before being dragged off), he discovers — after making a mess of various odd jobs — that he’s inherited a huge building. Unfortunately, it’s just a bunch of steel girders, so the penniless duo hit on the scheme of collectivizing construction with other indigent workers, who’ll have a home when it’s finished. Naturally, corporate types try to thwart this truly free enterprise, but they are treated to the ol’ titular gesture. A socialist semimusical with sight gags and assorted silliness, this sure ain’t Gold Diggers of 1933. *

CZECH MODERNISM, 1926–1949

Through June 24; see Rep Clock for schedule; $4–$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Ends meet

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m married to the woman of my dreams and the love of my life. My problem is that with women in the past I’ve always really enjoyed doing it doggy-style. I find it a total visual-animal turn-on, and of course there’s the physical pleasure of the position itself … need I say more? My problem is that my wife and I have never been able to get into the position because of our configuration (I’m tall; she’s short). And though it doesn’t bother her, I definitely miss being able to do it that way. I wonder if other couples have this problem and if you have any suggestions.

Love,

Mismatched

Dear Mis:

Yes, they do (of course!), and yes, I do (likewise). Size-discordant couples are common enough — just look around you — that people make products for precisely this problem. Do your part for the economy and go buy something.

I don’t know what happened to the people who made me accept samples of the quite nicely made but incredibly bulky foam wedges and blocks (about the size of my apartment’s closet) meant to enhance one’s sex life by better aligning tab A with slot B, but there are other such products out there. I could never really get into the set I had, anyway, after we used them to prop up a massively wounded leg we happened to have in the family at the time, so I gave them away.

A search on "sex pillows" or "sex position pillows" brings up a number of products, some of them inflatable, which would solve the storage problem. Most sites advertise by draping a pneumatic blond upside down over the product so her hair responds to gravity but her breasts do not, but that can’t be helped. Well, it can, actually: the other place to get wedges, blocks, and bolsters meant to prop up body parts at particular angles is the medical supply warehouse, which is depressing in quite a different way. Your call. Either source should get you something you can work with. Good doggie! I mean, good luck.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend isn’t circumcised, and we can’t get a condom to stay on. It’s not for lack of trying: we went through a whole box and even consulted Internet diagrams, with no success. They just wouldn’t go or stay on. So we both got tested, and I went on the pill. While I was there, my doctor lectured me on why I should use condoms, and I explained my situation. He said any condom should fit on any penis at anytime. Are we stupid? Is there a trick?

Love,

Misfit

Dear Mis:

Does "find a new doctor" count as a trick? Anyone who’s ever been a child can remember how it felt to be lectured without being listened to and how one either tuned out ("wah wah wah," went the grown-ups in the Peanuts specials) or made sure to do whatever was exactly opposite the ordered behavior. It’s kind of funny when doctors act this way harmlessly (for example, insisting that my lesbian friend use a condom every time and take a pregnancy test before getting a new prescription), but what about when someone really might be at risk and doesn’t want to tell the doctor because he or she hates getting lectured? How about that, huh?

Anyway. Your question didn’t end up where I thought it was going, considering where it started. Most uncirc’d men who have problems with condoms either can’t get the thing on to begin with or complain of getting bits of themselves caught in a fold of the rubber and going thwap like a window shade in a Warner Bros. cartoon. I’m not even sure how, exactly, a condom is supposed to fall off of something as essentially beflanged as an uncut penis, unless … unless … it’s just too big all round.

You’ve obviously tried long and hard, as it were, and I hate not to give you credit for your efforts, but if all the condoms came from the same box, it doesn’t count. He needs to order a sampler and start trying things on. We women have to do that every time we want to buy a stupid T-shirt, and the guys have it easy with their small, medium, and large. Think of it as his turn having to mess with sizes and styles. Start with something labeled "snugger fit," which on the condom sites is always carefully couched as a matter of preference and not brute biological necessity, so it shouldn’t be too dispiriting.

Then again, counterintuitive but not out of the question: they’re not too big; they’re too tight, like a pair of ill-fitting panty hose that can’t quite make it past your hips to snug in at your waist, so they keep rolling down, and you have to spend the entire day semisurreptitiously yanking them back up. Not that such a thing would ever happen to me or, I hope, you.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Nuts about wine!

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› paulr@sfbg.com


What sort of birthday present do you get for the wine fancier who already has everything: a cellar full of rare and prized bottles, a kitchen drawer with a full complement of cork pulls, a special refrigerator for chilling wine? You might tell yourself that not every wine fancier has everything — yet — but because oenophilia has become such a conspicuous component of lifestyle pornography, of status-consumption culture, the gap between aspiration and acquisition narrows a little every day. If wine in these parts is now a sort of wampum, constantly traded in an informal barter economy, it is still one thing to show up for dinner at somebody else’s house with a bottle of midrange chardonnay or pinot noir and quite another to present the same wine as a gift that’s supposed to signify in its own right.

The situation isn’t hopeless, however, at least for the moment, because at the Ross Valley Winery in San Anselmo, owner and winemaker Paul Kreider has begun turning out half bottles of vin de noix ("wine of nuts," specifically walnuts), a Provencal-style digestif little known in this country. The walnut-infused wine has a portlike presence, with a low center of gravity and some restrained though deep sweetness, but it is a different color and has an extra dimension in the mouth. The color is the easier of the two differences to describe; whereas port is typically a deep ruby hue, the vin de noix looks like a blend of well-aged balsamic vinegar and some kind of winter ale. As for the additional flavor: it is nutty. If there were a dessert version of Kürbiskernöl (the Austrian pumpkinseed oil), it would be something like the vin de noix.

Best of all, for the gift-minded shopper, is the price — $20. That’s not nothing, but it’s a pretty good deal for what you get. The smallness of the bottle, incidentally, adds to the aura by suggesting that the elixir within is potent and concentrated, a drink to be not quaffed but sipped, thought about, discussed, sipped some more.

And in other news, a reader wrote to remind me (apropos of my recent piece on Portuguese wine) that there is indeed a Portuguese restaurant in the Bay Area other than the Grubstake (if the latter even fully counts). That would be La Salette, on Sonoma’s town square. Obrigado.

On point

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> sarah@sfbg.com

April has been an exceptionally busy month for the artists at the Hunters Point Shipyard. In addition to dusting off work spaces in preparation for the upcoming Spring Open Studio, the 300-member colony is scrambling to track the implications of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s ever-shifting effort to keep the 49ers in town, particularly as it affects the artists who have rented space at the base for 30 years.

Newsom’s latest proposal involves building a football stadium in the shipyard rather than at Candlestick Point. That’s likely to displace a group that claims to be the largest colony of artists in the nation – unless the mayor can find a place for them in his hasty plans.

"Hellzapoppin’" is how shipyard artist Marc Ellen Hamel described the recent flurry of redevelopment-related meetings. Newsom says he needs to fast-track the transfer of the shipyard from the Navy to the city if he is to meet the 49ers’ deadline for being in a new stadium by 2012.

The blitz was triggered by the 49ers’ announcement in December 2006 that they were considering a move to Santa Clara – which team officials in part blamed on Newsom’s inattention – leading some Bayview-Hunters Point residents to complain that they’re paying the price for the administration’s fumble. Newsom has proposed folding Candlestick Point and the shipyard into a giant 2,000-acre redevelopment project – to be managed by the Lennar Corp., whose profits are nose-diving and which is being sued for alleged whistle-blower retaliation in connection with its failure to control toxic asbestos dust at the site.

"Newsom’s latest plan confirms his critics’ worst fears that this is a bait and switch," said builder Brian O’Flynn, who was part of last year’s referendum drive to put the city’s previous Bayview-Hunters Point redevelopment plan on the ballot and this year’s lawsuit to force a vote. "This latest plan is about political coverage for the mayor in an election year."

His group, Defend BVHP Committee, was already concerned about Newsom’s role in thwarting a vote on the old plan and has even more concerns about the new plan. "If the 49ers leave and the stadium plan is off the table, then Newsom’s latest proposal will make way for more condos for Lennar," O’Flynn told the Guardian.

Matt Dorsey of the City Attorney’s Office said that regardless of whether the city was right to strike down the referendum – as he maintains state case law required – the new plan will get more scrutiny. The Board of Supervisors voted in February to support Newsom’s approach to the shipyard but stipulated that the terms of any such transfer "require approval by the Recreation and Park Commission, the Board of Supervisors, and such other possible approvals, including voter approval."

The artists’ colony is waiting to learn the specifics of Lennar’s redevelopment proposal, which talks of creating "permanent space for the artists at Hunters Point Shipyard," along with new waterfront parks, 8,500 units of housing, and job-generating development. So far, Michael Cohen of the Mayor’s Office and Lennar’s Kofi Bonner are only shopping around what they call a "conceptual framework," which vaguely describes the parameters for merging the yard and Candlestick Point.

The city has promised to replace all existing low-income housing at the Alice Griffith projects and to phase in new units carefully so as not to displace current residents. The artists have not received such promises. They don’t know if they’ll end up paying double the price for half the space they currently occupy, which amounts to 248,400 square feet, according to building 101 artist David Trachtenberg.

But with Lennar announcing a two-year planning goal and talking about an arts-themed development, the colony is formuutf8g its own ideas about how such a plan could work.

"The shipyard is almost like an artists’ retreat," Estelle Akamine told us, as five colleagues spoke passionately about the light, desolation, and poppies that attract artists to the base.

"But it didn’t always feel like a retreat," recalled Akamine, who has rented at the shipyard for 18 years. "There was a lot of trauma in the 1980s when we thought that the USS Missouri was going to be home-ported here. So we’re very skeptical of plans. We were born out of politics."

The Mayor’s Office claims the city is working to expedite the cleanup and transfer of the shipyard not only to adhere to the 49ers’ timeline but also to "allow us to move forward with community benefits like parks, affordable housing, and jobs for the Bayview." Trachtenberg believes the mayor has a strong interest in keeping artists at the yard too.

Newsom promotes his proposal as a way to create jobs and revitalize the BVHP economy. Akamine said, "Artists are the tip of the iceberg. We’re the visible part of a huge, largely hidden industry." Recalling how artists in SoMa fell victim to the dot-com boom at the end of the ’90s, Akamine hopes such displaced organizations will be able to relocate to the shipyard.

"Why can’t we have galleries and suppliers down here too?" she asked.

April Hankins, who rents a studio in building 117, wants to see "performance space for productions, community theater and music, and touring groups. We are discussing space for classes. Ideally, it could make San Francisco a destination for the arts."

Dimitri Kourouniotis, who rents in building 116, is stoic about the inconvenience he’s already endured, thanks to the Navy’s radiological remediation on Parcel B, where his studio is situated.

"We have already had to leave temporarily," said Kourouniotis, explaining how a three-week project to remove radiological contamination from sewers and pipes ended up taking five months and left six buildings without running water or plumbing.

Hamel, who’s rented a studio in building 101 for 15 years, wants people to know that there’s "nothing wrong" with the artists at the shipyard. "We’re not contaminated, and none of the artists have had problems with illness from possible toxic elements," she says, while Hankins compares artists to the athletes that Newsom is apparently scrambling so hard to keep.

"Both need an arena in which to exhibit increasing skill," Hankins says. "An artist’s work and an athlete’s performance is their gift to their audience. In showing patronage, ball games with high ticket prices are attended; art is collected. In communities and teams, both nourish the culture of the city for which they perform. It would be a great loss to the Bay Area to have the shipyard artist community become a redevelopment casualty." *

Spring Open Studio runs April 28-29, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., at the Hunters Point Shipyard. For more information, go to www.springopenstudio.com.

Take 50

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TAKE 50: SF INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

THURS/26

*Golden Door (Emanuele Crialese, Italy/France, 2006). Epic in scope, playful in its stylistic shifts and tonal splices, and sumptuous in its painterly framing and use of light, Golden Door looks on an age-old American saga – an immigrant family’s crossing from the Old World to the new – with startlingly fresh, impassioned eyes. Director Emanuele Crialese (Respiro) turns his sometimes wry, sometimes tender focus on a band of illiterate Sicilian peasants drawn from their dirt-poor village by pre-Photoshop pictures of giant chickens and trees laden with enormous gold coins. Led by an intrepid yet ignorant patriarch (Respiro‘s Vincenzo Amato) and a comical spiritual fixer of a grandmother (Aurora Quattrocchi), the group is joined in steerage by a cryptic gentlewoman (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Ellis Island and its proto-eugenic experiments await – along with dream sequences that fluidly transmit the otherworldly magic of the villagers’ forthcoming American mystery tour. (Kimberly Chun)

7 p.m., Castro. Opening night film and party at City Hall, $85-$125

FRI/27

Black Sheep (Jonathan King, New Zealand, 2006). Something is going baaaaaad in Lord of the Rings country. The usual science experiment-gone-wrong results in the usual creature rampage, as sheep go George Romero on humans at a rural New Zealand ranch. This jolly, diverting, ultimately too-silly horror comedy from neophyte writer-director Jonathan King is duly funny. Still, it overstays its one-joke welcome by a bleat or three. (Dennis Harvey)

10:45 p.m., Kabuki

*A Few Days Later … (Niki Karimi, Iran, 2006). Already a star from her appearances in Tahmineh Milani’s overwrought – but much beloved – melodramas, Iranian actress Niki Karimi looked to the grand master, Abbas Kiarostami, for directing inspiration. In this, her second feature, she beautifully captures a specific brand of avoidance and understatement. She plays Shahrzad, a mousy graphic designer who becomes distracted at work. At home her answering machine constantly squawks about her family’s health and well-being, and her annoying neighbor (Behzad Dorani, from Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us) keeps parking his giant SUV in her space. To her credit, Karimi never shows the expected hospital scenes, tearful good-byes, or tense confrontations that seem to be looming. Instead, she retreats inside the character’s head and brings the film to a stunningly private conclusion. (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

7:15 p.m., PFA. Also Sun/29, 12:15 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/30, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki

Murch (David and Edie Ichioka, England/US, 2006). Codirector Edie Ichioka is a disciple of legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), so you know this doc will be nothing less than a glowing portrait. But instead of a simple glorification, it is more an embellished interview (complete with jump cuts during the talking head portions), with Murch using an astounding array of metaphors – besides the obvious "editing is like putting together a puzzle," he also works in painters, sock puppets, kidney transplants, and dream therapy, among others – to explain his approach to his craft. As Murch proves, a talented editor can make a good film great and a great film a masterpiece; it all comes down to an intangible combination of technical skill, sense of rhythm, and artistic instinct. (Cheryl Eddy)

9 p.m., SFMOMA. Also Sun/29, 4:15 p.m., Castro; Tues/1, 1 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 3:30 p.m., PFA

*Slumming (Michael Glawogger, Austria/Switzerland, 2006). Two arrogant yuppie pranksters (August Diehl and Michael Ostrowski) cruise around verbally pigeonholing others, making playthings of them. Meanwhile, a drunken, derelict poet (Paulus Manker) wanders the streets alternately cajoling and ranting at people. When the pranksters find the poet passed out on a bus station bench, they decide to transport him to a similar spot across the border, without a passport. Director Michael Glawogger (Workingman’s Death) and cowriter Barbara Albert achieve a pleasurable quirky quality with their black comedy, carefully guiding it between the precious and the preachy; they sometimes amusingly present a joke’s payoff before the setup. The film passes easily between immaculate cafes and slush-covered highways, but at its center is Manker’s wonderfully cantankerous performance. (Anderson)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/28, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 8:30 p.m., SFMOMA; May 7, 6:30 p.m., Aquarius

SAT/28

*All in This Tea (Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht, US, 2006). Tea still has an effete connotation in this country, but David Lee Hoffman is an adventurer of the old order. An unabashed partisan of the fair drink, he regularly travels to China to ferret out farmers and distributors, sampling and savoring the Old World leaves. His dedication is total; we’re hardly surprised when Werner Herzog drops by Hoffman’s Marin home for a spot of tea, because the director is a connoisseur of aficionados, explorers, and cranks. Hoffman is capably eccentric but also unassuming, making All in This Tea a friendly primer. Codirectors Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht bring their usual ethnographic grace to this 10-years-in-the-making project. (Goldberg)

1:30 p.m., PFA. Also Sun/29, 4:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 4 p.m., Kabuki

*At the Edge: New Experimental Cinema (various). Experimental showcases are always an Achilles heel for film festivals big on narrative. They’re often shoehorned with tepid concessions to so-called innovation, although sometimes they yield moments of genuine surprise. This showcase has a bit of both. Paul Clipson’s Super 8 trip of blurred urban lightscapes looks through Stan Brakhage’s kaleidoscope but can’t see beyond it. On the other hand, the sleep of reason produces monsters (slavery, social Darwinism) and some beautiful animation in Atlantis Unbound, in which Lori Hiris morphs her black-and-white charcoal sketches – evoking the mystical art of William Blake or Austin Osman Spare – of 19th-century scientists into slaves, merfolk, and other beings from beyond the pale of the Enlightenment. The banality of evil is also evoked in Xavier Lukomski’s static shots of the serene Drina River Bridge, where, as the voice-over informs us, Bosnians dredged up the victims of genocide. When viewed through a long shot, the horrors of history become more pronounced, given their calm surroundings. (Matt Sussman)

8:30 p.m., PFA. Also Tues/1, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki

*Carved Out of Pavement: The Work of Rob Nilsson On the brink of 70, longtime SF filmmaker Rob Nilsson is astonishingly prolific. No less than four work-in-progress features will be excerpted in this tribute program, including some from the nearly completed "9@Night" series of interwoven fictions made with the Tenderloin Action Group. For all his invention and industry in production, Nilsson hasn’t exactly worked overtime getting his movies seen – except at the Mill Valley Film Festival, where you can count on one or two premiering each fall. The MVFF is copresenting this special show, which will have the filmmaker reviewing a career that stretches back to the mid-’70s SF CineAction collective and 1979’s Cannes Camera d’Or-winning Northern Lights, as well as discussing latter-day digital projects with numerous current collaborators, also present. Excerpts from "9@Night" will also be projected on the SFIFF’s Justin Herman Plaza outdoor screen May 1 to 3. (Harvey)

7 p.m., Kabuki

Fabricating Tom Ze (Decio Matos Jr., Brazil, 2006). Though typically grouped with the explosive Brazilian Tropicalismo movement, Tom Ze has always been too much of an eccentric to fall properly into line. It’s a point made abundantly clear in Fabricating Tom Ze (I still haven’t figured out the title), a generally awestruck doc that makes up for its thin content with plenty of Ze’s indefatigable, abundant speech. Between the interruptions, self-mythologizing, and creative suggestions for the film’s director (all of which Decio Matos Jr. takes), Ze spills over with quixotic, brilliant epigrams on creativity and authenticity. "I have to make a small invention every time I have an idea worthy of becoming music," he reports – as if there were any doubting his inventiveness. (Goldberg)

1 p.m., SFMOMA. Also Tues/1, 8;30 p.m., El Rio; May 6, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 9, 6:30 p.m., Aquarius

*Hana (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2006). Hirokazu Kore-eda’s gentle deconstruction of that venerable institution of Japanese film the samurai movie isn’t too much of a departure from his previous features. Hana also focuses on the small, unexpected sense of community that arises out of idiosyncratic responses to tragedy or, in this case, the public’s hunger for it. It’s 1702, and like other underemployed samurai during peacetime, Sozaemon Aoki (Okada Junichi) is restless, as is the general population, which gorges itself on violent revenge plays and romanticized notions of honor. The pensive Sozaemon is bent on carrying out his duty to avenge his father’s death, even if he seems more at home tutoring the kids in the hardscrabble but lively tenement where he lives. His neighbors, who initially tease him about his lack of guts, eventually rally round his failures – and their own lowly status – and celebrate the humble resolve. To paraphrase resident dimwit Mago (Kimura Yuichi), when life gives you shit, make rice cakes. (Sussman)

4:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 6:45 p.m.; and May 5, 5:45 p.m., PFA

*The Island (Pavel Lounguine, Russia, 2006). Not to be confused with Michael Bay’s jiggly, blow-’em-up, organ-harvesting gesture toward Logan’s Run. If Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies were lit by God, then The Island sets God to work creating an austere black-and-white landscape of unforgiving snow, rocky shores, hills of coal, and blighted driftwood. By all appearances a mad monk but in this reality a truth-talking, faith-healing saint of sorts, Father Anatoly is doing penance on the island for a wartime act that most reasonable deities would excuse. No such luck for this Russian Orthodox overseer – wearisome monastery politics and the teary negotiations of the sick and injured occupy the sooty savant in this elegantly wrought parable, which puts cheesy stateside Biblesploitation big-budgeters such as The Reckoning to shame. (Chun)

4:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki

Once (John Carney, Ireland, 2006). A genuine sleeper at Sundance, this small Irish indie charmer will be spoiled only if you swallow all advance hype about its purported brilliance. Sometimes nice is quite enough. Real-life singer-songwriters Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova play struggling Dublin musicians, one a native busker still living above Da’s vacuum repair shop, the other a Czech emigre supporting her family by selling flowers on the street. Their slow-burning romance is more musical than carnal, climaxing in a studio recording session. Writer-director John Carney’s film manages to play like a full-blown musical without anyone ever bursting into song. Instead, the appealing original folk rock tunes played and sound-tracked here come off as vivid commentary on a platonic (yet frissony) central relationship. (Harvey)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 6, 9:30 p.m., Clay

Protagonist (Jessica Yu, US, 2006). Jessica Yu, the Oscar-winning director of the 1996 short documentary Breathing Lessons (she also made 2004’s In the Realms of the Unreal, a haunting look at outsider artist Henry Darger), returns with Protagonist, an initially confusing but ultimately fascinating doc about four men who couldn’t be more dissimilar on the surface. How can the themes of classical Greek tragedy link a Mexican bank robber, a German terrorist, a reluctantly gay Christian, and an aggro martial artist? Yu uses puppet interludes, revealing interviews, and a keen eye for detail as she traces their shared stages of provocation, rage, doubt, catharsis, and so on – proving the journey of an antihero has little to do with setting, be it ancient or modern. (Eddy)

6:15 p.m., SFMOMA. Also Mon/30, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/1, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki

*Strange Culture (Lynn Hershman Leeson, US, 2006). The duly strange, as yet unresolved case of SUNY Buffalo art professor Steve Kurtz has spurred local filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s best feature to date, a documentary-dramatization hybrid. With the man himself still legally restrained from discussing his circumstances, Thomas Jay Ryan plays Kurtz, who as a founding member of the multimedia Critical Art Ensemble had long made work focusing on social justice issues and the intersection between science and government. To create an exhibition on biotechnology, he acquired for carefully safety-measured display some bacteria samples readily available online. When wife of 27 years Hope (played by Tilda Swinton) unexpectedly died of heart failure in her sleep, emergency medical personnel grew suspicious of these unusual art supplies. Soon FBI personnel evicted the distraught widower from his home, quarantined the entire block, and accused him of possessing bioterrorist weapons of mass destruction during an incredibly cloddish investigation. Kurtz’s real-life colleagues and friends were interviewed in a free-ranging yet pointed feature whose actors also step out of character to articulate their concern about the government’s post-9/11 crackdown on dissent, even the rarefied gallery kind. (Harvey)

6 p.m., Castro. Also May 4, 8: 45 p.m., SFMOMA; May 8, 7 p.m., PFA

SUN/29

The End and the Beginning (Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil, 2006). Picking a small town at random and making a film about its residents can be brave filmmaking. It can also be plain lazy, as is the case with Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho’s directionless profile of rural Aracas, in the state of Paraiba. Unsurprisingly, people being people, he finds great interview subjects, but he doesn’t bother to connect them to one another or to the town. Only their highly region-specific Catholicism provides any unifying thread. And though Coutinho’s not exactly condescending (beyond some slight Kids Say the Darndest Things baiting of his loonier interviewees), there’s an unspoken mandate to keep things simple: his response to one woman’s enticing hint at her failed law practice is to ask about her sewing. (Jason Shamai)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Tues/1, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 4 p.m., Kabuki

*Singapore Dreaming (Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh, Singapore, 2006). With their second feature, Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh have their hearts in the right place while their eyes are on the prize of capturing a postcolonial city-state clutching at the global economy. The gently humorous, humanist realism of Edward Yang comes to mind while watching this husband-and-wife directorial team’s warm, witty depiction of the everyday lives of a working-class Singapore family who live, dream, bicker in pidgin English and Mandarin, and inhale vast quantities of herbal tea in their high-rise project. Pops buys lottery tickets, hoping to move into a slick new condo. Back from his studies in the States, the pampered son is discovering that in go-go Singapore his degree isn’t quite as covetable as it once was, and the beleaguered daughter is in her final trimester, coping with a demanding yuppie boss and a slacker hubby who yearns to be in a carefree rock band and pees in his father-in-law’s elevator. When disaster strikes, no one is thinking about the matriarch, whose only seeming desire is to properly feed and water her brood, but she ends up providing some unexpected feminist substance, rather than sustenance, under the movie’s wise gaze. (Chun)

8:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 4, 1 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 3 p.m., Kabuki

12 Labors (Ricardo Elias, Brazil, 2006). Part Black Orpheus, part 400 Blows, 12 Labors is a Brazilian feature that revisits the myth of Hercules through the story of a motorcycle messenger’s rehabilitation. A kid from a rough part of Sao Paulo, Heracles gets out of juvie and tries to start a new life. To land a job as a motorcycle messenger, he has a trial day with (you guessed it) a dozen jobs to complete. An artist who never knew his father, he also writes origin stories in comic book form, which mystify his coworkers. Though Heracles’s experiences seem tinted with divinity, he inspires worry on the part of the viewer. Since all good myths have moral purpose, this one finally addresses the very current social issue of juvenile delinquency and rehabilitation in urban Brazil. (Sara Schieron)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/30, 7 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 9:15 p.m., Aquarius

MON/30

*Broken English (Zoe Cassavetes, USA, 2006). "I don’t think Hollywood knows what to do with me," Parker Posey recently opined, despite having a prominent role in Superman Returns. Fortunately for us, Amerindie cinema does still know what to do with her. The SFIFF is hosting a double bill of the pushing-40 actor’s latest, reprising the title figure in Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool sequel Fay Grim and starring in Zoe Cassavetes’s feature debut. Posey is perfect as director-scenarist Cassavetes’s superficially cheery but highly insecure NYC hotelier. Some may think this low-key seriocomedy paces pat single-gal-searching paths – from Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City – but in its thoughtful nature and serious treatment of a clinical-depression interlude it roams well outside stock terrain. Even if the fade-out waxes a tad improbably happily-ever-after, Posey’s nuanced performance will make you root for it. (Harvey)

6:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 2 p.m., Kabuki

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, USA/Germany, 2006). A decade ago Hal Hartley made his best movie, the practically epic – by this miniaturist’s standards – Henry Fool. By most estimates it’s been downhill ever since. They love him in France – but perhaps he should never have left Long Island. So it was heartening news to hear he was returning to the world of Henry Fool, better still to know the sequel would revolve around the title character’s scrappy, vulnerable abandoned wife, Fay, who provided one of Parker Posey’s finest hours. She’s still good here, natch, but Fay Grim is all over the map – literally. The convoluted story line journeys from a mild farcical take on espionage thrillers to a murkily serious commentary on world politics. It’s watchable, but once again one gets the sense that with Hartley, the wider his focus, the blurrier it gets. (Harvey)

9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 3, 9:10 p.m., PFA

TUES/1

Congorama (Philippe Falardeau, Canada/Belgium/France, 2006). Quebec writer-director Philippe Falardeau’s story of a revolutionary electric car and a sticky-fingered inventor is part of that ever-widening army of films that plant fairly obvious and poorly integrated details into the first act so that later, when the story is retold from another perspective, they reappear with more context to click Aha!-ingly into place. Though some of the big, unwieldy reveals are a lot of fun in a Lost sort of way, they distract from the more prosaic but more satisfying concerns of the film’s smartly drawn characters. The inventor, for instance, is a not particularly likable person who still has a believably loving, humor-filled relationship with his family. Now talk about a novel concept! (Shamai)

6 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 9:15 p.m., PFA; May 6, 6:30 p.m., Aquarius

Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais, France/Italy, 2006). Alain Resnais’s 17th feature is dreamy and sometimes enchanting, though it doesn’t warrant comparison to the knife-sharp moral plays made during his prime, such as Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. Adapted from a play by Alain Ayckbourn (the two previously collaborated on Smoking and No Smoking), Private Fears in Public Places weaves the love(less) stories of a half dozen Parisians; plotlines intersect, but in light brushes rather than the solemn collisions of Babel and Crash). The artifice Resnais imposes on his film is poetic in miniature – the camera, for example, periodically floats above the set, filming actors as if they were in a dollhouse – but the sum total is stultifying, unhinging an already-adrift narration and making Private Fears in Public Places seem needlessly opaque. (Goldberg)

7 p.m., PFA. Also May 3, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 4 p.m., Kabuki

*Rocket Science (Jeffrey Blitz, USA, 2006). Promising to be the next best coming-of-age cultie with its sure-handed, sharp performances and Freaks and Geeks-like sobriety, Rocket Science finds new agony and indie rock-laced ecstasy in one miserable adolescent’s progress. Or to be specific, one stuttering, 98-pound weakling’s marked, often laugh-out-loud funny lack of progress. The high school years for Hal Hefner (compulsively watchable frail cutie-pie Reece Thompson) seem to be going from bad to sexy once he gets recruited for the school debate team by scarily driven, Tracy Flick-esque champ Ginny (Anna Kendrick). But his travails never quite end even as he attempts to extract nerd revenge and literally find his voice, accompanied by vintage Violent Femmes and hand-clapping quirk pop by Eef Barzelay of Clem Snide. Tapping memories connected to a speech impediment, Spellbound codirector Jeffrey Blitz turns tongue-tied prince Hal’s articulation struggles into the perfect metaphor for every awkward teen’s gropes toward individuation. (Chun)

4 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 4, 6:15 p.m., Clay

Go green!

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PARTIES, EVENTS, AND BENEFITS

"Arcadia: 2007" California Modern Gallery, 1035 Market; 821-9693, www.fuf.net. Mon/23, 6pm, $125-$350. This soiree and art auction — featuring work by more than 100 artists and hosted by Jeffrey Fraenkel, Gretchen Bergruen, and Thomas Reynolds — will benefit Friends of the Urban Forest, a nonprofit organization that provides financial, technical, and practical assistance to individuals and neighborhood groups that want to plant and care for trees.

"Away Ride Celebrating Earth Day" Meet at McLaren Lodge, Golden Gate Park; (510) 849-4663, www.borp.org. Sun/22, 1:30pm, free with preregistration. The SF Bike Coalition and the Bay Area Outdoor Recreation Program join forces to host this moderately paced ride open to all levels of riders. They provide a helmet and a handcycle or tandem bike. You bring a sack lunch and water. Kids also get to decorate their wheels — bike, wheelchair, or skate.

"Biomimicry: The 2007 Digital Be-In" Mezzanine, 444 Jessie; www.be-in.com. Sat/22, 7pm-3am, $15 presale, $20 door, $100 VIP. Turn on, tune in, log out. In the spirit of the 1967 human be-in that epitomized San Francisco’s hippie generation and made Haight Ashbury famous, counterculture artists and activists have been hosting "The Digital Be-In" for 15 years. This year’s combination symposium-exhibition-multimedia-entertainment extravaganza focuses on Biomimicry as it relates to technology, urban development, and sustainability. There’ll be no Timothy Leary here, but the event will feature live music, DJs, projections, and appearances by modern hippie celebs such as Free Will astrologer Rob Brezsny and Burning Man founder Larry Harvey. Or join in the simultaneous virtual be-in in the Second Life online world. The revolution will be digitized.

"Earth Day Fair" Ram Plaza, City College of San Francisco, 50 Phelan; 239-3580, www.ccsf.edu. Thurs/19, 11am-1:30pm, free. View information tables set up by the CCSF and citywide environmental organizations, as well as a display of alternative fuel vehicles.

"EarthFest" Aquarium of the Bay, 39 Pier; 623-5300, www.aquariumofthebay.com. Sun/22, 12-4pm, free. View presentations and engage in activities provided by 20 organizations all dedicated to conservation and environmental protection, with activities including live children’s music, a scavenger hunt, and giveaways.

"McLaren Park Earth Day" John McLaren Park’s Jerry Garcia Amphitheater, 40 John F. Shelley; www.natureinthecity.org. Sun/22, 11am-7pm, free. What would Jerry do? Commemorate the park’s 80th anniversary with an all-day festival featuring birding hikes, habitat restoration projects, wildflower walks, tree planting, an ecostewardship fair, food booths, a live reptile classroom, puppetry, performance, music, storytelling, and chances to make art.

"$1 Makes the World a Greener Place" Buffalo Exchange local stores; 1-866-235-8255, www.buffaloexchange.com. Sat/21, all day, free. Buy something, change the world. During this special sale at all Buffalo Exchange stores, proceeds will benefit the Center for Environmental Health, which promotes greener practices in major industries. Many sale items will be offered for $1.

"People’s Earth Day" India Basin, Shoreline Park, Hunters Point Boulevard at Hawes, SF. Sat/21,10am-3pm. What better place to celebrate Earth Day than with a community of victorious ecowarriors? Help sound the death knell for the PG&E Hunters Point power plant with events and activities including a community restoration project at Heron’s Head Park, the presentation of the East Side Story Literacy for Environmental Justice theater production, and a display about Living Classroom, an educational and all-green facility expected to break ground this year. Want to get there the green way? Take the no. 19 Muni bus or the T-Third Street line.

BAY AREA

"Berkeley Earth Day" Civic Center Park, Berk; www.hesternet.net. Sat/21, 12-5pm, free. Earth Day may not have been born in Berkeley (it was actually the idea of a senator from Wisconsin), but it sure lives here happily. Celebrate at this community-sponsored event, which features a climbing wall, vegetarian food, craft and community booths, valet bike parking, and performances by Friends of Shawl-Anderson Youth Ensemble, Alice DiMicele Band, and Amandla Poets.

"Earth Day Celebration" Bay Area Discovery Museum, 557 McReynolds, Sausalito; 339-3900, www.baykidsmuseum.org. Sat/21, 10am-5pm, free with museum admission. Happy birthday, dear planet. This Earth Day connect your family to the wonders of &ldots; well &ldots; you know, with a variety of special activities, including seed planting and worm composting, birdhouse building, a bay walk and cleanup, and presentations about insects from around the planet. For a small fee, also enjoy a birthday party for Mother Earth with games, face painting, crafts, and cake.

"Earth Day on the Bay" Marine Science Institute, 500 Discovery Parkway, Redwood City; (650) 364-2760, sfbayvirtualvoyage.com/earthday.html. Sat/21, 8am-4pm, $5 suggested donation. This is the one time of year the institute opens its doors to the public, so don’t miss your chance for music, mud, and sea creatures — the Banana Slug String Band, the Sippy Cups, fish and shark feeding, and programs with tide pool animals, to be exact. You can also take a two-hour trip aboard an MSI ship for an additional $10.

"Earth Day Restoration and Cleanup Program" California State Parks; 258-9975 for one near you, www.calparks.org. Sat/21, times vary, free. The best way to celebrate Earth Day is to get involved. Volunteers are needed at California State Parks throughout the area for everything from planting trees and community gardens to restoring trails and wildlife habitats, and from installing recycling bins to removing trash and debris. All ages welcome.

"E-Waste Recycling Event" Alameda County Fairgrounds, 4501 Pleasanton, Pleasanton; 1-866-335-3373, www.noewaste.com. Fri/20-Sun/22, 9am-3pm, free. The city of Pleasanton teams up with Electronic Waste Management to collect TVs, computers, monitors, computer components, power supplies, telephone equipment, scrap metal, wire, and much more. There is no limit to how much you can donate, and everything will be recycled.

"The Oceans Festival" UC Berkeley, Upper Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft and Telegraph), Berk; Fri/20, 5pm-7pm, donations accepted. This event, sponsored by CALPIRG, Bright Antenna Entertainment, and West Coast Performer magazine, is meant to bring awareness to the problem of plastic in our oceans and to raise money, through donations and food sales, for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. Featuring music and dance performances, as well as presentations by a variety of environmental organizations.

"People’s Park 38th Anniversary Celebration" People’s Park, Berk; www.peoplespark.org. Sun/22, 12-6pm, free. Celebrate the park with poetry, speakers, music, art and revolution theater, political tables, a Food Not Bombs lunch, clowns, puppets, and activities for children.

LECTURES, DISCUSSIONS, AND WORKSHOPS

"Green Capital: Profit and the Planet?" Club Office, 595 Market; 597-6705. Wed/18, 6:30pm, $8-15. Can sustainable business renew our economy and save the planet? Can activists ethically exploit market systems? Environmental pioneers, from corporate reps to conservationists, will bust the myths and reveal realities of profitable environmental solutions at this panel discussion cosponsored by INFORUM; featuring Peter Liu of the National Resource Bank, author Hunter Lovins (Natural Capitalism), Steven Pinetti of Kimpton Hotels, and Will Rogers of the Trust for Public Land; and moderated by Christie Dames.

"An Inconvenient Truth 2.0 — A Call to Action" California State Bldg, 455 Golden Gate. Thurs/19, 6:30-9pm, $5 suggested donation. An updated version of Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation will be screened by Sierra Club director Rafael Reyes, then followed by a discussion of the impact of global warming and a progress report on national legislation by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

"The Physics of Toys: Green Gadgets for a Blue Planet" Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon; 561-0399, www.exploratorium.edu. Sat/21,11am-3pm, free with admission. The monthly event focuses on the earth this time around, giving children and adults an opportunity to build pinwheel turbines and other green gadgets. Materials provided.

BAY AREA

"Agroecology in Latin America: Social Movements and the Struggle for a Sustainable Environment" La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 847-1262, www.mstbrazil.org. Wed/18, 7:30pm, donations accepted. Get an update on Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, the alliance between environmental and social justice movements in the Americas, struggles for Food Sovereignty, organized peasant response to global agribusiness, opposition to genetically engineered crops, and more. Featuring guest speaker Eric Holt-Gimernez, executive director of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy.

ART, MUSIC, AND PERFORMANCE

"Bio-Mapping" Southern Exposure Gallery, 2901 Mission, SF; (415) 863-2141, www.sf.biomapping.net. Sat/21, 6:30pm, $8-15. Everyone says going green feels good — here’s the chance to prove it. Participate in Christian Nold’s social-art project by strapping into a GPS device and skin censors. Then take a walk or a bike ride while the sensors record your feelings and location. Nold uses the data to make an "Emotion Map" of the city, which you can check out online. (Can’t make Saturday? Nold’s also there Thursdays and Fridays through April 28).

"ReCycle Ryoanji" San Francisco Civic Center Plaza; blog.greenmuseum.org/recycle-ryoanji. Thurs/19, 4-6pm, free. Judith Selby Lang, local students, and visitors to the Asian Art Museum have sewn together thousands of white shopping bags to make their own version of Japan’s most famous and celebrated garden as both an art exhibition and community education project. The 18-foot-by-48-foot scale replica of the raked sand and rock garden can be seen at this reception for the project and on display across from City Hall until Tues/24. (Take that, American Beauty.)

"Green Apple Music and Arts Festival" Venues vary; www.greenapplefestival.com. Fri/20-Sun/22, prices vary. Green Apple combines fun and education with a three-day, ecofriendly music festival in cities across the country. San Francisco’s festival includes shows by Yonder Mountain String Band, New Mastersounds, Electric Six, Trans Am, and others at venues across the city, as well as a free concert at Golden Gate Park. Green Apple provides venues with environmentally friendly cups, straws, napkins, paper towels, and compostable garbage bags, as well as doing its best to make the entire festival carbon neutral.

UPCOMING EVENTS

"San Francisco New Living Expo" Concourse Exhibition Center, Eighth Street at Brannan; 382-8300, www.newlivingexpo.com. April 27-29, admission varies according to day and event. Touting 275 exhibitors and 150 speakers (including Starhawk, Marianne Williamson, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and ganja-guru Ed Rosenthal), the sixth annual version of this event promises to energize, educate, awaken, and expand consciousness. You won’t want to miss the environmental activism panel discussion April 28 at 3pm — or the exhibition hall’s special crystal area.

BAY AREA

"Harmony Festival" Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Santa Rosa; www.harmonyfestival.com. June 8-10, $125 plus $50 per car camping pass. This festival is so green it’s almost blue — in fact, its tagline is "promoting global cooling." There’s a waste diversion effort, a whole Green Team monitoring the EcoStation, compost cans, and tips on how to be an ecofriendly attendee. Plus, it just looks like fun. With Brian Wilson, the Roots, and Common performing and Amy Goodman and Ariana Huffington speaking, how can you miss it?

"Lightning in a Bottle" Live Oak Campground, Santa Barbara; 1-866-55-TICKET, www.lightninginabottle.org. May 11-13. $95-120. It ain’t just a party. It’s a green-minded, art-and-music-focused campout in a forest wonderland. Organized by Los Angeles’s the Do Lab with participation from tons of SF artists, this three-day event is powered by alternative energy, offers ecoworkshops in everything from permaculture to raw foods, and encourages rideshares — including a participant-organized bus trip from San Francisco. Also featuring performances by Freq Nasty, Bassnectar, Vau de Vire Society, El Circo, and other DJs and artists from San Francisco and elsewhere, LIB attempts to change the precedent that festival fun has to be ecologically disastrous.

"Sierra Nevada World Music Festival" Mendocino County Fairgrounds, Boonville; www.snwmf.com. June 22-24, $125 plus $50 per car camping pass. Peace is green, right? I mean, what about Greenpeace? And peace is what this festival, which promotes "conscious" music, is all about. Plus, a range of representatives of environmental and social issues will be tabling at the festival — and registering voters.

BEYOND

"Burning Man" Black Rock City, Nev.; (415) TO-FLAME, www.burningman.com. Aug 27-Sept 3, $250-$280. With its Leave No Trace philosophy and its hippie roots, Burning Man has always been greener than most. But this year it’s getting even more explicitly so with the theme the Green Man, focusing on humanity’s relationship to nature (even though there is no nature on the dry lakebed surface). A pessimist might suggest this year’s theme is just another excuse to waste resources on leaf-themed art cars and that "Leave No Trace" usually translates to "Leave Your Trash in Reno." But an optimist might say this is Burning Man acknowledging and trying to address such issues. Either way, air out your dust-filled tent and pack some chartreuse body paint — it’s going to be an interesting year in Black Rock. *

Free Muni: You read it here first

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Tim Redmond

I’m glad to see the Mayor Newsom is looking into free bus service. It’s a great idea, even if, as Leftinsfnotes, it’s probably just a political ploy in an election year. And even if the Chron is already already trying to shoot it down.

When I first saw the headlines, I had one of those flashback moments; I realized that we’d already done this story, a long time ago. In fact, it was December, 1993 when the Guardian ran a cover story on the case for Free Muni. I dug it up from our archives; you can read it here.

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Back then, the local economy was kind of a wreck, and beyond the environmental arguments, we wanted to make the case that eliminating bus fares would give the mostly working-class folks who ride the buses more moneny in their pockets, which would be a nice economic boost. The way to pay for it, of course, would be to tax downtown (making this a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor, one of my favorite things in the world).

I don’t think Newsom is even looking at the economic arguments, but he should.

He also isn’t calling for a downtown transit tax increase to pay for this, either — but that’s the way to do it. Put the whole thing on the ballot — free Muni, paid for by, say, a $150 million annual assessment on downtown buildings. That might even win. Would Newsom support it?

Worth a shot

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Sam Small (Jud Williford) is an unemployed man in a fraying bathrobe with a limp Jimmy Dean sausage in his pocket, living off the bacon brought (literally snuck) home by his wife, Mary (Beth Wilmurt), a waitress. Sam’s situation, aggravated by his well-thumbed copy of Hamlet, has led him to contemplate suicide.

Albert (Marty Pistone) — right across the hall from Sam and Mary’s apartment 86 in number 69 — is sympathetic. He’s on the rebound from a dot-bomb himself (not to mention a dead wife) but is rebuilding his future by recycling the detritus of a lavish consumer society on eBay and shooting Web-ready video with a well-worn vixen named Margaret (Denise Balthrop Cassidy). Joblessness need be no impediment, Albert proclaims. "Nobody has to hire you, Sam. It’s the 21st century!"

And then the brainstorm: Albert’s entrepreneurial instincts latch on to Sam’s suicidal tendencies to conjure a Web-based raffle for the right to Sam’s martyrdom. Soon various people-cum-causes come calling, and Sam and Mary’s fortunes are on the rise. This is the story of American Suicide, presented by Z Plays and the Encore Theatre Company.

It is also the story of American can-do despair in its most contemporary form: breathing the Internet ether of a post-postindustrial economy and the giddy dreams of the self-unemployed. That the play feels so effortlessly precise makes one appreciate even more the achievement of writer-director Mark Jackson, whose brilliantly staged adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide turns the Soviet playwright’s banned 1929 tragifarce into a piercingly funny satire on the American way of death.

For every individual fantasy in this country rests on the bones of some victim or other. In this case, it’s Sam, the classic American little guy, whose iconic aspects Williford expertly underscores to comic but also telling effect with a Depression-era clip to his speech. Sam’s gotta die, or no dice. But the deal is so sweet even he gets caught up in it.

Our hapless hero even finds himself pursuing a lifelong dream of becoming an actor (lifelong — ay, there’s the rub), which pitches him into the middle of another squalid little tale of diminished lives and desperate schemes. This one involves a washed-up film director (Michael Patrick Gaffney) and a 22-year-old Norma Desmond named Chloe Banks (Jody Flader), who’s bent on a comeback via a torrid suicide note from a leading man–slash–lover. Both are played, like all the characters in American Suicide, as delightfully precise caricatures by a very fine cast. This includes Delia MacDougall, whose larger-than-life turn as major thespian Gigi Bolt, a representative of the embattled American theater living down the street from Sam’s apartment building in her car, effortlessly projects to the back rows and back several times over.

The histrionic theme is one of the more self-referential of Jackson’s many original contributions to Erdman’s story line, and he clearly has fun with it. So bright is the suicide scheme’s promise to all involved that not even the scandal-starved Chloe’s willful intrusion into the conjugal poverty of Sam and Mary’s water-stained studio apartment (a principle component of James Faerron’s slick and versatile set design) throws a wrench into the works. Indeed, the hard-bitten note in Mary’s natural sweetness at the outset of the play drops away completely by the time worldly fortune and a life of leisure appear on the horizon. Wilmurt’s excellent and endearing play on the supportive wifey adopts something of the wide-eyed, guileless, endlessly grateful manner of a game show contestant.

Liam Vincent rounds out the terrific cast in the roles of two mysterious men who together push the play’s social critique a notch higher, or lower, into the realm of politics and an ever-encroaching state power.

The issue of martyrdom naturally calls forth from among the other eager suicide opportunists a certain bearded fellow (played with wonderfully dignified comic assurance by Vincent) in Middle Eastern garb. Jackson eschews cheap shots here, instead going for the jugular with some of the play’s funniest dialogue as Sam’s political ignorance (a classic American virtue never too far from an equally classic rapaciousness) before the jihadist prompts the latter to narrate a kind of preschool allegory of anti-imperialism — a story later used for cross-purposes by a shadowy government trench coat (Vincent again) who’d like to use Sam to do something about the dearth of Americans willing to die for ideas. *

AMERICAN SUICIDE

Through March 11

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; $25–$30

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

(415) 437-6775

www.zspace.org

>

Chasing my stolen bicycle

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› news@sfbg.com

I stalked across the parking lot of the Mission District’s Best Buy. Like the hordes of people that streamed into the store, I was there to do a little shopping, but it wasn’t for a flat-screen TV or an iPod. I was in the market for a stolen bike.

I bypassed the aisles of buzzing electronics and headed around the back of the store to a trash-strewn alley. It was empty except for a beat-up white van with its side door ajar. I took a nervous breath and knocked on the side.

A blond man in a sweat-stained undershirt threw open the door to reveal what looked like an upended Tour de France chase car: piles of tire rims, gears, and bike frames were scattered everywhere. The powerful stink of unwashed bodies stung my nostrils. A man in a tracksuit slumbered on a seat. The blond man looked sleepy and annoyed but waited for me to speak.

My $600 bike was stolen — the third in five years — from my Mission garage the night before, and it’s here I was told by a bike messenger that I might find it. These guys were rumored to be bike thieves operating in the Mission.

"Hey man, have you seen a black and gray Fuji Touring?" I asked, employing a euphemism.

"No, we don’t steal bikes," the man said, catching my drift. "We collect bikes off the street, repair them, and then sell them. We’re like independent businessmen."

Interesting way of putting it, I thought, as I glanced at the "businessman" slumbering on a van seat. I glanced around the van half expecting to see my Fuji, but it wasn’t there, so I left.

As I trudged home I stewed. I had lost more than $1,000 worth of bikes in San Francisco. Bike theft is a virtual right of passage for most cyclists in the city, and the city’s thieves seem to operate with ninjalike stealth and efficiency. One cyclist told me how a thief stole his locked ride while he picked up a burrito from a taquería. He wasn’t away from the bike for more than five minutes.

The city’s thieves have even won a silver medal for their efforts: in 2006 the lockmaker Kryptonite ranked San Francisco as the nation’s second worst city for bike theft, behind New York.

Gradually, my anger hardened into resolve, or more precisely, a mission. It would be virtually impossible, but I would set out to find my bike. The thought that my life would mirror the plot of a Pee-wee Herman movie was more than a little amusing, but I had a job to do.

In my months-long quest I crisscrossed the city, chasing down Dickensian thieves, exploring the city’s largest open-air market for stolen goods, and finally landing in the surprising place where hundreds of stolen bikes — perhaps yours — end up. Unwittingly, I pedaled right into San Francisco’s underworld.

THE GURUS OF GREASE


Bike theft may seem like petty street crime, but it’s actually a humming illegal industry. Consider this: thieves steal nearly $50 million worth of bikes each year in the United States, far outstripping the take of bank robbers, according to the FBI. And in San Francisco’s rich bicycling culture, thieves have found a gold mine. About 1,000 bikes are reported stolen in the city each year, but the police say the actual number is probably closer to 2,000 or 3,000, since most people don’t file reports.

"It’s rampant," Sgt. Joe McCloskey of the San Francisco Police Department told the Guardian.

I sought out McCloskey, the SFPD’s resident expert on bike theft, and another man, Victor Veysey, to give me a wider view of San Francisco’s world of bike thieves and possibly a lead on where I might find my bike. Several cyclists had recommended Veysey, saying he could provide a "street level" view of bike theft.

Veysey is the Yoda of San Francisco’s bike world. For more than a decade, the 39-year-old has worked on and off as a bike messenger, mechanic, and member of the city’s Bike Advisory Committee. He also ran the Bike Hut, which teaches at-risk youth how to repair bikes. And he’s in a band that plays a tune called "Schwinn Cruiser."

Despite their different perspectives (the city’s police and biking communities are not the best of friends), McCloskey and Veysey painted remarkably similar pictures of San Francisco’s black market for bikes.

In the wide world of illegal activity, bike thievery seems to occupy a criminal sweet spot. It is a relatively painless crime to commit, and city officials do little to stop it. As McCloskey readily admitted, bike theft is not a priority for law enforcement, which he said has its hands full with more serious crimes.

"We make it easy for them," McCloskey said of bike thieves. "The DA doesn’t do tough prosecutions. All the thieves we’ve busted have got probation. They treat it like a petty crime."

Debbie Mesloh, a spokesperson for District Attorney Kamala Harris, said most bike thieves are not prosecuted, but that’s because they are juveniles or they qualify for the city’s pretrial diversion program. The diversion program offers counseling in lieu of prosecution for first-time nonviolent offenders. Bike thieves qualify for it if they steal a bike worth $400 or less. Mesloh said the District Attorney’s Office prosecutes felony bike thefts, but it doesn’t get very many of those cases.

"The DA takes all cases of theft seriously," Mesloh wrote in an e-mail.

As for the police, McCloskey was equally blunt. "You can’t take six people off a murder to investigate a bike theft. [Bike theft investigations] are not an everyday thing. No one is full-time on bike theft. As far as going out on stings and operations, I haven’t heard of one in the last year. Bike theft has gone to the bottom of the list."

McCloskey’s comments were particularly interesting in light of the conversation I had with Veysey, whom I met at the Bike Hut, an off-kilter wood shack near AT&T Park that appears as if it might collapse under the weight of the bicycle parts hanging on its walls. Veysey has a loose blond ponytail and greasy hands. He wields a wrench and apocalyptic environmental rhetoric equally well.

"Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes," Veysey told me. "You can virtually exchange one for another."

Veysey believes bike thefts are helping prop up the local drug market. It sounds far-fetched, but it’s a notion McCloskey and other bike theft experts echoed. The National Bike Registry, a company that runs the nation’s largest database for stolen bikes, says on its Web site, "Within the drug trade, stolen bicycles are so common they can almost be used as currency." Veysey believes the police could actually take a bite out of crime in general by making bike theft a bigger priority in the city.

Perhaps bikes are so ubiquitous in the drug trade because they are so easy to steal. McCloskey and Veysey said thieves often employ bolt cutters to snap cable locks or a certain brand of foreign car jack to defeat some U-locks. The jack slips between the arms of the U-lock and, as it is cranked open, pushes the arms apart until the lock breaks. A bike-lock maker later showed me a video demonstrating the technique. It took a man posing as a thief less than six seconds to do in the U-lock.

As with any other trade, McCloskey and Veysey said there is a hierarchy in the world of San Francisco bike thieves. At the bottom, drug addicts (like the one Veysey believes stole my bike) engage in crimes of opportunity: snatching single bikes. At a more sophisticated level, McCloskey said, a small number of thieves target high-end bikes, which can top $5,000 apiece. In 2005 police busted a bike thief who was specifically targeting Pacific Heights because of its expensive bikes. The thief said he wore natty golf shirts and khaki pants to blend into the neighborhood.

The Internet has revolutionized bike theft, just as it has done for dating, porn, and cat videos. McCloskey said thieves regularly fence bikes on eBay and Craigslist. In August 2004 police busted a thief after a Richmond District man discovered his bike for sale on eBay. Police discovered more than 20 auctions for stolen bikes in the man’s eBay account and an additional 20 stolen bikes in a storage space and at his residence.

When bikes aren’t sold outright, they are stripped, or in street vernacular, chopped, and sold piece by piece or combined with the parts of other bikes, Veysey said. He said people occasionally showed up at the Bike Hut trying to sell him these Frankenstein bikes. But by and large, McCloskey and Veysey said, bike stores are not involved in fencing stolen bikes. However, McCloskey said bikes stolen in the city often are recovered at flea markets around the Bay Area. He believes thieves ship them out of the city to decrease the chance of being caught. The National Bike Registry reports bikes are often moved to other cities or even other states for sale.

The idea of Frankenstein bikes was intriguing, so I told Veysey I was going to look into it. He suggested I make a stop first: Carl’s Jr. near the Civic Center. I was slightly perplexed by his suggestion, but I agreed to check it out.

FAST FOOD, HOT BIKES


"Welcome to the San Francisco Zoo — the human version," said Dalibor Lawrence, a homeless man whose last two teeth acted as goalposts for his flitting tongue. His description of the place was brutally apt: a homeless man banged on one of those green public toilets, shouting obscenities; a woman washed her clothes in a fountain; and several crackheads lounged on a wall with vacant stares.

I was at the corner of Seventh and Market streets. City Hall’s stately gold dome rose a short distance away, but here a whole different San Francisco thrived. Men slowly circulated around the stretch of concrete that abuts UN Plaza. Every so often one would furtively pull out a laptop, a brand new pair of sneakers, or even — improbably enough — bagged collard greens to try to sell to someone hustling by.

Seventh and Market is where the city’s underground economy bubbles to the surface. It’s a Wal-Mart of stolen goods — nearly anything can be bought or, as I would soon find out, stolen to order. McCloskey estimated as many as three in seven bikes stolen in San Francisco end up here. The police periodically conduct stings in the area, but the scene seemed to continue unabated.

I made my way to the front of the Carl’s Jr. that overlooks an entrance to the Civic Center BART station. I didn’t know what to expect or do, so I apprehensively approached three men who were lounging against the side of the restaurant — they clearly weren’t there for lunch. I asked them if they knew where I could get a bike. To my surprise, the man in the center rattled off a menu.

"I’ve got a really nice $5,300 road bike I will sell you for $1,000. I’ve got another for $500 and two Bianchis for $150 each," he said.

I told him the prices he listed seemed too good to be true and asked him if the bikes were stolen. People gave them to him, he explained dubiously, because they owed him money. I asked him about my Fuji, but he said he didn’t have it.

I walked around until I bumped into a woman who called herself Marina. She had a hollow look in her eyes, but I told her my story, and she seemed sympathetic. She sealed a hand-rolled cigarette with a lick, lit it, and made the following proposition: "I have a couple of friends that will steal to order — bicycles, cosmetics, whatever — give me a couple of days, and I will set something up."

I politely declined. McCloskey said steal-to-order rings are a common criminal racket in the city. Police have busted thieves with shopping lists for everything from Victoria’s Secret underwear to the antiallergy drug Claritin. In one case, McCloskey said, police traced a ring smuggling goods to Mexico.

A short time later a man rode through the plaza on a beat-up yellow Schwinn. He tried to sell the 12-speed to another man, so I approached him and asked how much he wanted for it. He told me $20. With a modest amount of bargaining, I got him down to $5 before telling him I wasn’t interested.

Just before I left, two police officers on a beat patrol walked through the plaza. Sales stopped briefly. As soon as the officers passed out of earshot, a man came up to me. "Flashlights," he said, "real cheap."

INSIDE A CHOP SHOP


After striking out at Seventh and Market, I figured it was time to investigate the chop shops Veysey mentioned. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) reports bicycle chop shops operate all over the city. Thieves strip bikes because the parts (unlike the frames) don’t have serial numbers and can’t be traced as stolen once they are removed from a bike. The parts can be sold individually or put on another stolen bike to disguise it, hence the Frankenstein bikes that show up at the Bike Hut.

When Veysey told me about bicycle chop shops, I pictured something from a ’70s cop movie — a warehouse in an industrial district populated with burly men wielding blowtorches. But the trail led me somewhere else entirely: Golden Gate Park.

SFBC officials said they had received reports from a gardener about chop shops in the park. When I called Maggie Cleveland, a Recreation and Park Department employee responsible for cleaning up the park, she said they do exist and would show me what she thought was one if I threw on a pair of gloves, grabbed a trash bag, and joined one of her cleanup crews. I agreed.

Shortly before 8 a.m. on a foggy, chilly morning, the crew and I picked up mechanical grabbers and industrial-size trash bags and then climbed a steep hill near 25th Avenue and Fulton Street on the Richmond District side of the park. We plunged into a large camp in the middle of a hollowed-out grove of acacia bushes.

The camp looked like a sidewalk after an eviction. Books and papers vomited from the mouth of a tent. Rain-soaked junk littered the camp, including a golf bag filled with oars, an algebra textbook, a telescope, and a portable toilet. A hypodermic needle stuck in a stump like a dart and a gaudy brass chandelier swung from a branch. Amid the clutter was one constant: bicycles and their parts.

A half dozen bikes leaned against bushes in various states of repair. There were piles of tires and gears scattered around. The noise of the crew had awoken the residents of the camp. A man and two women sprung up and immediately tried to grab things as the crew stuffed the contents of the camp into trash bags. They grew more and more agitated as two dozen bags were filled.

Cleveland said the group may have been operating a chop shop, but she didn’t have definitive proof, so they were let go with camping citations. I asked one of the campers if their bikes were stolen.

"We find this stuff in the trash. There’s an economy here. We exchange stuff for other stuff," he said.

Cleveland said the camp was typical of what the crews find around the park. One of the most notorious campers goes by the name Bicycle Robert. Cleveland said park officials have found a handful of his camps over the past couple years. One contained more than two dozen bikes, but Robert himself has never turned up.

Occasionally, cyclists will get lucky and find their bikes at a chop shop. Max Chen was eating dinner in North Beach one night when his Xtracycle, a bicycle with an elongated back for supporting saddlebags, was stolen. Chen didn’t hold out much hope of getting it back, but he put up flyers around the neighborhood anyway.

The next day Chen got a call from a friend who said he saw a portion of the distinctive bike behind the Safeway at Potrero and 16th streets. Chen went down to the spot and found a group of guys with an RV, a handful of bicycles, and a pile of bike parts. His bike was there — sort of.

"The frame was in one place, and the pedals were on another bike. Other parts were on other bikes. I pointed to all the stuff that was mine and had them strip it. My frame had already been painted silver," Chen told me.

Not surprisingly, one of the men said he had bought Chen’s bike from someone in the Civic Center. Chen just wanted his bike back, so he forked over $60. The guys handed him a pile of parts in return.

WHERE BIKES GO TO DIE


A few days after the trip to Golden Gate Park, I finally got around to doing what I should have done when my bike was stolen: file a police report. Frankly, I waited because I held out little hope the police would be of any help.

It’s true few people get their bikes back through the police, but that’s in part because most people don’t try. In fact, the police are sitting on a cache of stolen bikes so big that it dwarfs the stock of any bike store in the city.

SFPD Lt. Tom Feney agreed to show it to me, so I trekked out to Hunters Point. The police stolen property room is located in an anonymous-looking warehouse in the Naval Shipyard. Feney ushered me through a metal door to the warehouse and then swept his hand through the air as if pointing out a beautiful panorama.

"There it is," he said.

Behind a 10-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire, row upon row of bikes stretched along the floor of the warehouse. There were children’s bikes with hot pink paint, $2,000 road bikes, and everything in between. In all, the police had about 500 stolen bikes in the warehouse. The bikes are found abandoned on the street, recovered from stings on drug houses, and removed from bike thieves when they are busted. Many of the bikes aren’t stolen — they’ve been confiscated during arrests or are evidence in various cases. The department can’t return the stolen bikes because the owners haven’t reported them stolen. After holding them for 18 months, the police donate the bikes to charity.

I intently scanned up and down the rows looking for my bike. I didn’t see it. My last, best chance for finding it had disappeared. My heart dropped knowing my Fuji Touring was gone. Feney ushered me out the door, and I began the long, slow walk back to the bus stop.

The most frustrating part is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Police and bicycle groups said there are some simple steps city officials could take to cut down on bike theft, but the issue has long slipped through the cracks.

Officer Romeo de la Vega, who works the SFPD’s Fencing Unit, said he proposed a bike registration system a few months ago, but it was shot down by the police brass. De la Vega said he was told there simply weren’t enough officers available to staff the system. Under his plan cyclists would register their bike serial numbers with police. In return the cyclists would get a permanent decal to place on their bikes. De la Vega said this would discourage thieves from stealing bikes since it would be clear they were registered, and it would speed bike returns.

With police officials claiming there are few resources to combat bike theft, it seems logical they might reach out to the community for help. But officials with the SFBC report just the opposite.

"In the past we’ve tried to connect with the police to jointly tackle the problem, but we haven’t had much luck. We don’t even know who is handling bike thefts," Andy Thornley, the SFBC program director, said.

Thornley said the coalition is willing to use its membership to help police identify chop shops and fencing rings around the city. He said the police need to do a better job of going after the larger players in the bike theft world and the District Attorney’s Office needs to take a tougher stance on prosecution.

Ultimately, Thornley said, enforcement is not the key to reducing bike theft. He said the city must make it easier for cyclists to park their bikes safely. The coalition is crafting legislation that would require all commercial buildings to allow cyclists to bring their bikes inside — something many currently prohibit. The coalition would also like to see bike parking lots spring up around the city, with attendants to monitor them.

Supervisor Chris Daly, who is an avid cyclist and has had six bikes stolen, said he is willing to help.

"It’s clear we are not doing very much," Daly said. "I think if there were a push from bicyclists to do a better job, I would certainly work toward making theft more of a priority." *

The benefits of fiber

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Amsterdam is building a citywide fiber-to-the-premises system. So are Hong Kong, Milan, and Zurich. If San Francisco follows suit, it would be making a far-sighted, multifaceted investment: FTTP would boost our economy, attracting software companies, video production houses, and digital media shops. It would enhance public health, allowing surgeons to review the same materials from different locations. Municipal fiber would improve public safety, facilitating the mirroring and backup of vital data at remote, earthquake-safe locations. It would enable unlimited and open communications — breaking ongoing communication monopolies — and save buckets of cash within a couple of decades.

These futuristic findings are laid out in the fiber feasibility report Sup. Tom Ammiano commissioned two years ago, but the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services didn’t green-light it until last fall. As a result of this delay, the city’s Maryland-based consultant, Columbia Telecommunications Corp. (CTC), couldn’t complete its fiber study until after Mayor Gavin Newsom said he’d struck a wi-fi deal with the Google-EarthLink partnership that still requires the Board of Supervisors’ approval.

Newsom’s plan was threatened even before his recent scandals. City budget analyst Harvey Rose’s report on municipal wi-fi offered a scathing assessment of the Google-EarthLink deal. Board members will now weigh the two new reports — and the opinions of a growing number of critics of the deal — before deciding on the mayor’s wi-fi proposal.

"So far I have more questions than answers," Sup. Aaron Peskin said of trying to digest the budget analyst’s report. "Questions about free service and quality of service. Questions about the environmental and aesthetic impacts of installing antennas citywide. I’ve got questions about Google’s cooperation with a totalitarian government overseas. I’ve got questions reutf8g to the shitty service I’ve personally gotten from EarthLink. Questions about the municipalization of services and questions about other technologies, including fiber."

Peskin admitted he’s yet to read the fiber report, which lauds FTTP as "the holy grail of broadband" while explaining that wi-fi isn’t a competitor but a complement to fiber, since wi-fi’s key advantage is its "mobility and connectivity during movement."

That said, the report recommends building citywide fiber, which it describes as a "fat pipe all the way into the home or business." In the face of the public sector’s lack of interest in building fiber networks that would meet growing demands for bandwidth and speed in an equitable and affordable manner, the CTC report concludes that municipal fiber would rank San Francisco among the world’s most far-sighted cities "by creating an infrastructure asset with a lifetime of decades that is almost endlessly upgradeable and capable of supporting any number of public or private sector communications initiatives."

With fiber allowing numerous competitors to quickly and inexpensively enter the market and offer competing, differentiated broadband services and access, the report recommends a wholesale open-access model to facilitate "democratic and free market values" and enhance the city’s reputation "for visionary and pioneering projects."

The report estimates a citywide open-access wholesale model will cost $563 million but predicts it will spark economic investment and jobs. It recommends building a pilot network in a 12-square-mile economic development area that includes Bayview, Hunters Point, South Bayshore, Chinatown, the Mission District, Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, SoMa, the Tenderloin, and the Western Addition.

The study also observes that aside from supporting safety and communications systems (thereby saving the city huge and unending costs of leasing circuits from telephone companies) and providing higher quality, higher capacity, more reliable, securer service, fiber is the best backbone for wi-fi systems.

Or as communications activist Bruce Wolfe recently told the Guardian, "Wi-fi is a parasite looking for a wire."

Speaking to us, along with United Layer’s Tim Pozar, SFLan’s Ralf Muehlen, and Our City’s Eric Brooks, Wolfe stated that far from being "the naysayers, as we were accused after critiquing the Google-EarthLink deal, we’re actually the truthsayers."

The foursome, who are supporters and providers of current wi-fi services in San Francisco, said although wi-fi rocks when you’re at an outdoor café or checking bus schedules with a cell phone, fiber rules when you’re in a basement, on a fourth floor, or in need of reliable and efficient service or massive capacity.

"That’s why it makes more sense to roll out a joint fiber-cable-wi-fi system, because all the interference and bog downs would be solved by hooking antennas into fiber," Pozar says. "Putting a bunch of antennas up as a cloud over the city supposedly gives free users speeds of 300 kbps, but anyone making a phone call or downloading a video will drain everyone else’s speeds, and blanketing the city with transmitters will make the spectrum unusable by others."

Muehlen expects the wi-fi service his business provides to get "blown out of the ether, technically, or be severely compromised," by the proposed Google-EarthLink deal. "But I wouldn’t mind if I got a network that didn’t suck," he says. "I just want something that works."

Brooks said many people who can’t afford the Internet are "compartmentalized in lower-income areas. Why not begin by addressing those areas instead of giving away the whole 49 square miles to Google-EarthLink?"

He noted that it will cost Google-EarthLink an estimated $300,000 to pay into the city-run Digital Inclusionary Fund. "That’s a drop in the bucket in terms of providing residents with gear, training, and support that truly bridge the digital divide." *

The war on trial

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› news@sfbg.com

It is a sad day in American jurisprudence when a soldier of conscience is court-martialed — not for lying, but for telling the truth; not for breaking a covenant with the military, but for upholding the rule of law in wartime.

The court-martial of First Lt. Ehren Watada is set for Feb. 5 in Fort Lewis, Wash. The 28-year-old soldier from Hawaii is the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq. He is charged with "missing movement" and "conduct unbecoming an officer" including the "use of contemptuous words for the President."

The story has received a fair amount of media attention, in part because the Pentagon is trying to force three journalists to testify against Watada (see "A Reporter Stands Up to the Army," 1/10/07).

But the soldier’s story is significant on its own.

A year ago, when Watada was on leave and out of uniform, he delivered a moving address to a Veterans for Peace convention. Watada is not a conscientious objector. He even offered to serve in Afghanistan.

But he questioned the legality of the war in Iraq, and he denounced the known lies of the George W. Bush administration. He said nothing more than what the world already knows, and he did not encourage any other soldiers to follow his example.

All the major issues of the Iraq fiasco — the fraudulent basis for the war, the absence of a formal declaration from Congress (which has no constitutional authority to transfer its war-declaring power to another branch), the war crimes, the flagrant violations of international treaties such as the United Nations Charter — are coming to a head in this historic battle between a junior officer and an army whose Abu Ghraib torture scandals shocked the world.

Ordinarily, the truth of a claim is a strong defense against any charge of defamation. Not in the Army, however. Army prosecutors do not intend to allow Watada any opportunity to prove in court that everything he said about the president is true. Prosecutors told the presiding judge, Lt. Col. John Head, that the truthfulness of Watada’s speech is irrelevant to the case.

THE WAR OF CHOICE


On the charge of refusing deployment, Watada’s case may seem weak — he is, after all, an officer in the military, and he has failed to obey a direct order to go to Iraq. But his defense actually has legal merit: his actions are based on hard evidence about military conduct in Iraq and a clear understanding of the law.

Watada is raising matters of principle that concern the right of all soldiers to full protection of the law. Under the Constitution and the standard enlistment contract, every soldier has a right, even a duty, to disobey illegal orders. The legality of Watada’s orders pursuant to a "war of choice" is the central issue of the trial.

"The war in Iraq is in fact illegal," Watada told TruthOut.org. "It is my obligation and my duty to refuse any orders to participate in this war. An order to take part in an illegal war is unlawful in itself. So my obligation is not to follow the order to go to Iraq."

No American soldier has any obligation to participate in military aggression, "crimes against peace," or any operation that violates the Geneva Conventions. Under constitutional government, the authority of military command derives not from one person alone but from the rule of law itself.

There are only two conditions in which a war is legal under international law: when force is authorized by the United Nations Security Council or when the use of force is an act of national self-defense and survival. The UN Charter, based on the Nuremberg Principles, prohibits war "as an instrument of policy." And the war in Iraq is just that — a war of choice.

There is a common tendency among lawyers and military commanders to sneer at international law. But the Constitution is unambiguous: Article VI states, "All Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby."

In a celebrated case in 1900 (United States v. Paquete Habana), the Supreme Court ruled, "International law is part of the law of the United States and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for determination."

There is no exception for the military, no wall between domestic and international law.

In his speech to the veterans Watada noted that the US Army Field Manual states, "Treaties reutf8g to the law of war have a force equal to that of laws enacted by Congress. Their provisions must be observed by both military and civilian personnel with the same strict regard for both the letter and spirit of the law which is required with respect to the Constitution and statutes…."

THE POLITICAL QUESTION


In the end, though, none of that may matter.

The strength of Watada’s legal case will make little difference if Army prosecutors succeed in preventing him from presenting evidence in his own defense in court, especially if judges adhere to the Machiavellian view that "in war, the laws are silent."

The American judiciary has a long, sorry record of ignoring the right of American soldiers to due process and the treaty clause and war-power clause in the Constitution. Too often, judges and prosecutors, both military and civilian, claim war is a political question, a foreign policy matter, something beyond judicial review. Hence, commanders can do as they please, and those who disagree can be imprisoned.

The political question doctrine, as it is known among lawyers, is the primary way by which judges circumvent international law. It is a way by which prowar judges and commanders foreclose any substantive discussion of the legalities of a war.

Few Americans remember the dark days of wartime jurisprudence four decades ago, when US courts refused to hear GI challenges to the Vietnam War. The full implications of the Watada trial can be understood in that context.

In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, American soldiers and marines were imprisoned for refusing to commit war crimes. For example, Dr. Howard Levy, a Green Beret dermatologist, spent two years in prison after he refused to train special forces in dermatology. He argued that to do so would violate the Hippocratic Oath; the Green Berets, he insisted, used medicine as a political tactic in Vietnam, and for him to assist them would cause increased suffering.

In 1965, David Henry Mitchell II, who was eventually convicted of willful failure to report for induction, challenged the legality of Lyndon Johnson’s war. He raised basic constitutional issues: the absence of a formal declaration, broken treaties, a pattern of war crimes on the battlefield. No soldier, Mitchell argued, should be forced to participate in criminal policies, to choose between near-sedition and the commission of war crimes.

Federal Judge William Timbers refused to hear the evidence. When Mitchell’s attorneys argued that under the Nuremberg Principles soldiers have a duty to disassociate themselves from war crimes, the judge freaked out. It is, he said, "a sickening spectacle for a 22-year-old citizen to assert such tommyrot." The judge argued that treaties and conventions are "utterly irrelevant as a defense on the charge of willful refusal to report for induction." The message was clear, and a deadly precedent was set: even if war is manifestly illegal, soldiers are still expected to participate. United States v. Mitchell was the first in a series of infamous cases through which courts placed presidential war beyond the arm of the law.

In a 1966 ruling against Army Private Robert Luftig, Federal Judge Alexander Holtzoff ruled that the war "is obviously a political question that is outside the judicial function." With "no discussion or citation to authority," the Federal Appeals Court concurred. In the most celebrated trial of the period, that of the Fort Hood Three — soldiers who demanded the protection of the Constitution and international law — District Judge Edward Curran refused to hear any evidence of systematic war crimes. He called the war a political issue beyond judicial cognizance.

Taken together, the Vietnam War rulings contradict the landmark precedent Marbury v. Madison. In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall captured the essence of judicial abdication: "It cannot be presumed that any clause in the Constitution is intended to be without effect…. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?… It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

In this case the argument is particularly clear: Watada is not taking a political position as part of his defense. The United States may be overextended; the invasion may create blowback; unilateral actions may alienate allies; war debts may boomerang on the economy; anarchy in Iraq may be unavoidable. These are political questions, but they aren’t what the first lieutenant is talking about. Watada is challenging the legality, not the political wisdom, of the war.

The president, he argues, is the final arbiter of foreign policy — but only so long as policies are carried out in accordance with the rule of law.

SAME OLD STORY


History has long since vindicated the soldiers of conscience who spoke out against the Vietnam War — soldiers who tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to uphold the Constitution and international law; soldiers who warned their beloved nation long before the My Lai massacre of America’s impending descent into barbarism. How many Vietnamese lives could have been saved? How many American soldiers might be home today with their grandchildren had American judges as well as presiding military commanders confronted the legal monstrosities of the war against Vietnam?

The cost of judicial abdication in the Vietnam War years, when American judges averted their eyes from the emerging holocaust in Indochina, is incalculable. Without judicial immunity, many of the horrendous deeds of the Johnson-Nixon years might never have occurred.

There were more than a dozen opportunities for American judges to confront the constitutional issues evoked by that undeclared war. When Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who publicly acknowledged the illegality of US invasions in Indochina, offered to hear a war-challenge appeal, his colleagues on the court overruled him.

So today we ask: How many more Iraqis and Americans will die before American judges fulfill their current obligation to uphold and enforce the rule of law? How long will it be before the infamous Vietnam War rulings are reversed, before the blood-drenched political question doctrine is buried for good?

Lt. Col. Head, presiding at Watada’s court-martial, is already preparing to repeat the follies of the past. At a pretrial hearing Jan. 17, he denied all defense motions to present hard evidence of systematic war crimes in Iraq. He rejected the Nuremberg defense. He also upheld a pivotal government motion "to prevent the defense from presenting any evidence on the illegality of the war." Like past accomplices, he claimed that Watada’s case is a "political issue" beyond the jurisdiction of the court.

Capt. Daniel Kuecker, the prosecutor in the pretrial hearings, could not be reached for comment, but Watada’s civilian attorney, Eric Seitz, expressed outrage at Head’s judicial abdication. These rulings, he told the press after the hearing, "are extraordinarily broad and subjective, which I find reprehensible. They are essentially saying there is no right to criticize, which we all know is not true." He added, "These rulings are about as horrible and inept as I could have imagined."

The question can no longer be avoided. Do American soldiers have any rights that their commanders and judges are bound to respect? As civilians, do we not have an obligation to provide our troops full protection of the laws for which they risk their lives? *

Paul Rockwell, who taught constitutional law at Midwestern University in Texas, is the author, with Cindy Sheehan, of Ten Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military, published by New Press in 2006.

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