Education

Debt-defying futures

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
Debt-defying futures

CAREERS AND ED Student loans are a very special kind of debt. Like an armored car or an airplane’s black box, they are practically indestructible. While a person could sign up for a credit card, max it out on luxury items, and then wriggle off the hook of repayment by filing for bankruptcy, this escape hatch is blocked when it comes to taking out a nondischargeable student loan. Like tattoos, they stick to a borrower for life — or at least, until they are repaid.

“It’s almost impossible to discharge this debt in bankruptcy,” says Edie Irons, communications director for Oakland-based The Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS). “When you make that investment in a home, you have collateral, and you can use that asset. But when you invest in education, it’s not a guarantee. And if you can’t make those payments, the cost of collection can be pretty dear. They can garnish your wages. They can take your Social Security, your tax refunds. For federal loans, they have a lot of pretty scary powers of collection.”

Fortunately for those borrowers facing insurmountable debt, a few options (aside from feigning one’s own death) do exist for reducing, if not eliminating, the burden of student loans.

Volunteer opportunities through AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) provide stipends and money that can be put toward loan repayment in exchange for service. Graduates who serve through AmeriCorps (www.americorps.gov) for one year can receive up to $7,400 in stipends plus $4,725 toward loan repayment. Peace Corps volunteers can apply for deferment of Stafford, Perkins, and consolidation loans, and may receive cancellation of their Perkins Loans at a rate of 15 percent per year. Graduates volunteering with a nonprofit through VISTA can receive $4,725 for 1,700 hours of service.

Students who opt to become teachers in elementary or secondary schools serving students from low-income families can have portions of their Perkins Loan forgiven at increasing rates over the first five years of teaching, and members of the Teach for America corps program are eligible to receive a $5,350 award for each year of teaching plus postponed loan repayment with interest paid.

Two recently created programs also broaden the options for graduates facing insurmountable loan debt. The federal Income-Based Repayment (IBR) program is a new payment option for federal loans for borrowers who have enough debt relative to income to qualify for a reduced payment. Borrowers who earn less than 150 percent of the poverty level (that’s $16,245 for an individual) pay nothing; those who earn more can have loan payments capped at 15 percent of whatever they earn above that amount and forgiven entirely after 25 years of payments.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs offer debt forgiveness for graduates entering certain fields. According to the program website (www.ibrinfo.org), eligible borrowers are people employed in nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organizations and people who work for federal, state, local, or tribal government. The program forgives remaining student loan debt on most federal loans after 10 years of eligible employment and qualifying loan payments. Law students entering public service can learn more about this program and others through Equal Justice Works (www.equaljusticeworks.org).

While these options may offer a boost for borrowers with federal student loans, those with private loan debt may not be as lucky. Irons notes that TICAS is engaged in efforts to encourage legislators in Washington to consider treating private loans “more like other consumer debt rather than this extra harsh treatment.”

“We want to see that changed,” she said. “People who are playing by the rules shouldn’t be punished when things go horribly wrong for them. Right now, there’s almost no way out of private loan debt.”

Revolution 101

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Revolution 101

caitlin@sfbg.com

CAREERS AND ED Of course, you could just stop paying for school all together. Instead of putting their hopes for the future of education behind state reinvestment in university systems, a group of SF radical intellectuals are seeking to revamp the definition of learning by introducing the Free University of San Francisco. The nascent institution holds its first teach-in Feb. 5-6.

“Education is revolution,” says the incubator of the Free University, writer and poet Alan Kaufman. This ain’t Kaufman’s first rodeo. In 2004, while an instructor at SF’s Academy of Art University, he organized a student walk-out to protest the school’s violations of free speech rights. Employed through a temporary contract with the academy, Kaufman was not hired back the next term.

For him, it was a wake-up call that the current university system was teaching for the wrong reasons, not the least of which was the hefty price tag for classes that left his pupils in poverty. One student, he said in a recent phone interview with SFBG, had been “starving before my eyes, surviving on Ramen Noodle Cups” — all she could afford on top of tuition fees. He gave her $60 for food. But it wasn’t enough. Something had to be done.

When asked what he thinks the point of education is, Kaufman barely hesitates. “Liberation, freedom.” The current trends of privatization in public colleges, coupled with soaring school fees that far outpace students’ budgets, is symptomatic of a system that, as he prettily puts it, “funnels hearts and minds into narrowing corridors of survival. Creating profits for the university — that is the end game.”

He’s not the only person who thinks so. Kaufman and other Free University supporters have organized a teach-in next month that will feature college-level lectures from leading Bay Area artists and intellectuals, including Beat poet and SF poet laureate Diane Did Prima, former president of the Board of Supervisors Matt Gonzalez, and Pirate Cat Radio’s Diamond Dave Whitaker. The courses are no-credit, but the event is a symbol that the current educational system isn’t fulfilling some basic student needs. Instructors will teach on subjects that range from 19th-century poetry to natural geography.

Eventually Kaufman he envisions an “actual mobile university” capable of bringing the possibility of a college education to places where such a thing might be considered unattainable. And it wouldn’t just be beneficial to students. Guest faculty could experience “a kind of cleansing,” a temporary return to their original ideal of academia.

Of course, there are a few — ahem — challenges involved in starting a school that has no tuition, teacher salaries, or even monetary donors (Kaufman says the Free University will accept gifts in the form of books or other resources, but no cash). University supporters have decided to eschew accreditation for now, and true to Kaufman’s nomadic vision of the school, no location for classes has been set. First the teach-in, Kaufman says, and based on feedback, the consensus-based, hierarchy-free project will take it from there. The idea of the Free University, it would seem, is the thing for now.

It’s been done before. In the wake of the French Revolution, France established its Grandes Écoles system, a 250-school system that remains for the large part, tuition-free. The East Bay Free Skool is one outlet in the Bay that offers skill training, gratis. So for all the pie-in-the-sky idealism involved, perhaps the true test of the Free University of San Francisco won’t be its creation at all — crazy things have happened, haven’t they? Instead, it may be the extent that humanist students can steel a harsh economic climate that tends to reward monetarily-driven educations.

So why would a student chuck their pursuit of an accredited degree to participate in an uncertain radicalization of education? “Would it have practical application in a corporatized universe? Good question!” Kaufman chuckles. He launches into a torrid Marxist prediction: that our patently unfair education system cannot stand. “The system must be changed. When the pain is bad enough, people start to change.” *

FREE UNIVERSITY TEACH-IN

Feb. 5–6, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., free

Viracocha

998 Valencia, SF

(415) 374-7048

fusf.wordpress.com

In the red

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
In the red

rebeccab@sfbg.com

CAREERS AND ED When the University of California Board of Regents met Nov. 17, 2010 to approve an 8 percent tuition hike, roughly 300 UC students who were furious about the decision converged outside the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) campus at Mission Bay to rally in opposition, some traveling from as far away as Los Angeles.

“We had been organizing with all the campuses to get students to come up because we really wanted to be there to let them know that it’s not what we want, and it’s something they can’t just get away with doing year after year,” said UC Student Association President Claudia Magana. The protests were raucous, and police cracked down by discharging pepper spray and making 13 arrests.

Despite the palpable fury outside and impassioned student opposition delivered to the Regents inside, the 8 percent fee increase was approved. It came on the heels of a 32 percent tuition increase imposed the year before, and the price was ratcheted up by 9 percent and 7 percent in the years prior to that.

The tuition hikes were steep, but hardly new. Indeed, the cost of attending UC schools has been rising steadily for quite a while. According to a study by economist Peter Donohue, student tuition and fees increased 277 percent from 1990-91 to 2008-09, and that was prior to the 40 percent increase that followed. That trend is repeated in rising costs at the California State University and California Community College systems (See “Access Denied,” April 6, 2010).

Student protesters have sought to make it clear that their outrage isn’t rooted in selfish unwillingness to shell out more money, but instead is linked to a broader concern about privatization and the increasingly limited accessibility of public education.

Magana expressed concern that the climbing cost of instruction at UC, though still a relative bargain compared with private institutions, would ultimately start to affect who could and couldn’t attain higher education through the public university system. The question isn’t limited to UC — tuition is increasing at public and private colleges across the board, and as income inequality sharpens, more students seek higher education.

“Students will always pay to be here,” she noted. “The issue is going to be, which students are here? That’s really the big problem — the huge class issue that’s going to come up. Although there are some forms of support for low-income students, it’s not easy.”

 

DEEPER IN DEBT

Rising costs at UC mirror the upward trend at private nonprofit and for-profit postsecondary institutions nationwide, and those higher prices have triggered a dramatic increase in student borrowing. While students from low- or medium-income families can access higher education at any institution they’re admitted to as long as they’re willing to take out significant sums in student loans, many find themselves at a serious disadvantage once they have to start repaying their debt.

A study conducted by the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) noted that hefty debt burdens often dissuade graduates from pursuing careers in teaching, social work, the nonprofit sector, or other low-paying occupations that foster social justice. PIRG found that 23 percent of public four-year college grads and 38 percent of private four-year college grads were saddled with too much debt to manage paying back student loans on a starting teacher’s salary.

For students pursuing careers as social workers, the economic bind looked even worse: 37 percent of public school grads and 55 percent of private school grads with student loans wouldn’t be able to manage repayment with starting salaries in that field, the study concluded.

“Because students with lower incomes are more dependent on student loans than higher income students, students who already face significant challenges to attending college will more strongly feel the effect of loan debt on career choice,” the report points out.

“It’s a serious problem for so many young people to be starting out their working life so deep in debt,” said Edie Irons, spokesperson for The Institute on College Access and Success (TICAS), an Oakland-based research organization. “It really does limit people’s ability to take advantage of the opportunities education is supposed to provide. In concrete terms, it can make it really hard to buy a house, or start a business, or start a family, or go back to grad school, or to save for retirement or your own children’s education. And that’s all assuming you can keep up with the payments.”

Student loan debt has intensified over the past two decades. In 1993, just one third of all four-year college students graduated with debt, owing on average slightly more than $9,000, according to PIRG.

Today, the majority of college students take out loans to finance their education. Around 62 percent of public university students graduate with student loans, as do 72 percent of students attending private nonprofit institutions, and 96 percent of students attending for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix or the Academy of Art University, according to TICAS. Nationally, students graduate owing an average of $24,000, not counting debt associated with advanced degrees.

While young people must invest more than ever before to obtain higher education, the return on investment isn’t showing signs of improvement. The expected median income for UC graduates has stayed the same over the last decade, even as the cost of tuition has ballooned.

What’s more, says Bob Meister, president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations and professor of Political and Social Thought at UC Santa Cruz, is that an estimated 40 percent of public university students entering the workforce will either be unable to find a job, or will land in a lower-paying job that doesn’t require a college degree.

“For college graduates under 25, the unemployment rate is nearly as high as the national unemployment rate,” around 10 percent, Meister notes. “Over the past decade, what’s happened is that the median hasn’t risen. The top has risen very fast, and the bottom has fallen.”

 

IN A DIFFERENT CLASS

There’s no doubt that diminished state funding is affecting California’s public universities.

“A lot of departments are being eliminated, and a lot of professors who are really amazing are leaving to other universities,” Magana says. “And the waiting lists for classes are just ridiculous.” Academic goals are being compromised — for example, students had to abandon their push for an ethnic studies program at UCSC, she added, because the American studies department that would have partially supported it was slashed.

While diminished public funding has been used to explain the need to raise tuition, Meister has published numerous essays suggesting that the root cause of rising tuition costs at UC goes deeper than that, and he has gone so far as to publicly encourage students not to accept higher tuition without first demanding financial information.

Meister previously served on the UC budget committee and has observed the institution’s evolving financial policies for years. He doesn’t seem surprised that tuition is going up, regardless of what condition the economy is in or what amount of public funding is available because, as he puts it, “the universities will cost as much as they can.” UC had long sought to boost revenue by raising tuition, he noted, yet its leaders feared a rollback in state funding in response. But that changed under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who agreed to increase state support only on condition of that UC in turn require students to contribute more.

Around the same time that Schwarzenegger provided this new incentive to raise tuition, UC pooled its various revenue streams into a consolidated general revenue fund, Meister said, a departure from the old way of keeping separate accounts. This new fund, which included all non-state revenue and funding that wasn’t legally required to be used for certain purposes, could be pledged entirely as collateral for bonds for new construction projects, greatly increasing the institution’s borrowing power and boosting its revenue with the addition of new facilities.

To maintain its stellar bond rating, UC had to ensure an increase in revenues, according to Meister’s explanation, and to do that, UC ratcheted up the one source of revenue it had full control over: tuition. Meister laid bare this financial play in a 2009 open letter to students, titled “They Pledged Your Tuition.” Since it was published, a small corps of student activists has become deeply engaged in studying campus finance documents and airing criticism of financial policies.

Just before the Nov. 17 protests at UCSF Mission Bay, Meister published another open letter, this one addressed to UC President Mark Yudof. This one contemplated, “Why they think they can increase revenues regardless of how fast the economy grows … and regardless of whether the income of graduates is stagnant.”

His answer is somewhat surprising: “Their ability to raise tuition is a function of the growth of income inequality,” he told the Guardian. In the letter, Meister charges, “In the 21st century, when almost all income growth has been in the top 1 to 2 percent of California’s population, UC is still marketing income inequality to students as its most important product. It now expects all students to pay more for an ever-shrinking chance of reaping the ever-growing rewards that our economy makes available to the few. Your plan to increase revenue through tuition growth is feasible, of course, only because the federal government still allows students to borrow more for education despite the greater likelihood that they will not be able to repay — student loans may be the last form of subprime credit available in our economy.”

His theory highlights a paradox. “Being in the have-not category is increasingly worse,” he explains, “and so they are willing to take on more debt, which actually dampens their prospects for income growth.”

The question now is what will happen under Gov. Jerry Brown, who is likely to take a different stance toward rising tuition than Schwarzenegger but nonetheless is expected to unveil harsh cuts to education as a way to address a $26 billion budget deficit.

In a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, UC Regent Richard Blum indicated that it probably would not be feasible to raise tuition again, so the message was that students should brace for more cuts to education.

When Brown unveiled his proposed budget on Jan. 10, he announced further cuts to higher education in California to balance the state budget. Brown’s revised 2010-11 budget decreases the state funding for UC, CSU, the community college system, and other higher education programs by $1.7 billion for the 2011-12 budget. The UC system would take a 13.3 percent hit in general fund support; the proposed cut to the CSU system is 12.5 percent; and the community college system would be cut by 6.9 percent.

Brown, who also wants to hold a special election to ask voters to maintain the current level of tax rates for income, sales, and vehicle license taxes for five years rather than let them expire later this year, expressed regret about making cuts to higher education. But he emphasized the need to make tough decisions in the face of a bleak financial outlook, saying, “We need to face the music.”

Editor’s Notes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Editor’s Notes

tredmond@sfbg.com

Former Mayor Willie Brown says that choosing a person of color for a leadership position should be a progressive value. Board of Supervisors President David Chiu says the new mayor, Ed Lee, is a progressive. Several supervisors and other political observers say the six-vote progressive majority on the board is gone.

And nobody really talks about what that word means.

Progressive is a term with a long political vintage, but it’s changed (as has the political context) since the 1920s. (Progressives these days aren’t into Prohibition.) So I’m going to take a few minutes to try to sort this out.

I used to tell John Burton, the former state senator, that a progressive was a liberal who didn’t like real estate developers. But that was in the 1980s, when the Democratic Party in town was funded by Walter Shorenstein and other developers who were happy to be part of the party of Dianne Feinstein, happy to be liberals on some social issues (Shorenstein insisted that the Chamber of Commerce hire and promote more women), and happy to promote liberal candidates like John and Phil Burton for state and national office — as long as they didn’t mess with the gargantuan money machine that was high-rise office development in San Francisco.

But these days it’s not all about real estate; it’s that the level of economic inequality in the United States has risen to levels unseen since the late 1920s. So I sat down on a Saturday night when the kids went to bed(yeah, this is my social life) and made a list of what I think represent the core values of a modern American progressive. It’s a short list, and I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve left off, but it seems like a place to start.

This isn’t a litmus test list (we’ve endorsed plenty of people who don’t agree with everything on it). It’s not a purity test, it’s not a dogma, it’s not the rules of entry into any political party … it’s just a definition. My personal definition.

Because words don’t mean anything if they don’t mean anything, and progressive has become so much of a part of the San Francisco political dialogue that it’s starting to mean nothing.

For the record: when I use the word "progressive," I’m talking about people who believe:
1. That civil rights and civil liberties need to be protected for everyone, even the most unpopular people in the world. We’re for same-sex marriage, of course, and for sanctuary city and protections for immigrants who may not have documentation. We’re also in favor of basic rights for prisoners, we’re against the death penalty, and we think that even suspected terrorists should have the right to due process of law.
2. That essential public services — water, electricity, health care, broadband — should be controlled by the public, not by private corporations. That means public power and single-payer government run health insurance.
3. That the most central problem facing the city, the state, and the nation today is the dramatic upward shift of wealth and income and the resulting economic inequality. We believe that government at every level — including local government right here in San Francisco — should do everything possible to reduce that inequality. That means taxing high incomes, redistributing wealth, and using that money for public services (education, for example) that tend to help people achieve a stable middle-class lifestyle. We believe that San Francisco is a rich city, with a lot of rich people, and that if the state and federal government won’t try to tax them to pay for local services, the city should.
4. That private money has no place in elections or public policy. We support a total ban on private campaign contributions, for politicians and ballot measures, and support public financing for all elections. Corruption — even the appearance of corruption — taints the entire public sector and helps the fans of privatization, and progressives especially need to understand that.
5. That the right to private property needs to be tempered by the needs of society. That means you can’t just put up a highrise building anywhere you want in San Francisco, of course, but it also means that the rights of tenants to have stable places for themselves and their families to live is more important than the rights of landlords to maximize return on their property. That’s why we support strict environmental protections, even when they hurt private interests, and why be believe in rent control, including rent control on vacant property, and eviction protections and restrictions on condo conversions. We think community matters more than wealth, and that poor people have a place in San Francisco too — and if the wealthier classes have to have less so the city can have socioeconomic diversity, that’s a small price to pay. We believe that public space belongs to the public and shouldn’t be handed over to private interests. We believe that everyone, including homeless people, has the right to use public space.
6. That there are almost no circumstances where the government should do anything in secret.
7. That progressive elected officials should use their resources and political capital to help elect other progressives — and should recognize that sometimes the movement is more important that personal ambitions.

I don’t know if Ed Lee fits my definition of a progressive. He hasn’t taken a public position on any major issues in 20 years. We won’t know until we see his budget plans and learn whether he thinks the city should follow Gavin Newsom’s approach of avoiding tax increases and simply cutting services again. We won’t know until he decides what to tell the new police chief about enforcing the sit-lie law. We won’t know until we see whether he keeps Newsom’s staff in place or brings in some senior people with progressive values.
I agree that having an Asian mayor in San Francisco is a very big deal, a historic moment — and as Lee takes over, I will be waiting, and hoping, to be surprised.

Appetite: Mixology times two

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Appetite: Mixology times two

BERETTA MIXOLOGY CLASSES — Class is equal parts learning and pleasure at Beretta during their monthly Monday educational cocktail classes led by Bar Manager Ryan Fitzgerald. Ryan is one of our city’s great bartenders and he shares his ability to showcase the essence of a drink with you. Set up with your own station of bar utensils and ingredients, you’ll experience an interactive two hours with a small group in Beretta’s basement. Shake and stir — learning when it’s appropriate to do each — as you sample your creations. Whether you study whiskey on January 24, tequila (Ryan’s particular passion) on February 21, or gin on March 21, you’ll come away with recipes both classic and modern, artisan but not so complicated that you can’t recreate them easily at home. And it’s all in the name of education.

$85 per person for class, cocktails, and nibbles of food (includes tax and gratuity)

$55 + tax for tools used during the class (optional)
*Class does NOT include tools, they must be purchased separately.

Beretta, 1199 Valencia Street
415-695-1199
Whiskey – January 24, 7-9pm
Tequila – February 21, 7-9pm
Gin – March 21, 7-9pm

Doug Williams makes liquid nitrogen cocktails at last year’s Science of Cocktails. Photo by Virginia Miller.

SCIENCE OF COCKTAILS — Science of Cocktails returns for its second year at the Exploratorium. The inaugural year impressed me despite the dozens of cocktail events I attend in any given year. Scientific displays turn drink-making into scientific art exhibit (for example, watch a shell-less egg being ‘cooked’ with alcohol). Sip your way through one interactive display after another. You may witness a liquid nitrogen cocktail being prepared or learn Japanese hard-shake techniques while sampling cocktails like last year’s layered SF Pousse Cafe from The Alembic or 83 Proof’s use of ingredients from jalapeno skin and toasted peppercorn to Darjeeling simple syrup. Price of admission includes unlimited hors d’oeuvres, demos, a number of cocktails, live entertainment and full reign over the Exploratorium. Bartenders (from 15 Romolo to Rye) and spirit sponsors (from Campo de Encanto Pisco to St. George Spirits/Hangar One) are top notch. Science exhibits were never quite this fun when you were a kid.
$120
January 26, 7:30-11pm
Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon Street
415-561-0360
visit.exploratorium.edu/events/science-of-cocktails

–Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot: www.theperfectspotsf.com

What progressive means

Zelda Bronstein
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85
What progressive means

Willie Brown says that choosing a person of color for a leadership position should be a “progressive” value. David Chiu says Ed Lee is a progressive. Several supervisors, and other political observers, say the six-vote progressive majority on the board is gone.

And nobody really talks about what that word means.

Progressive is a term with an excellent political vintage, but it’s changed (as has the political context) since the 1920s. (Progressives these days aren’t into prohibition.) So I’m going to take a few minutes to try to sort this out.

I used to tell John Burton that a progressive was a liberal who didn’t like real estate developers, but that was in the 1980s, when the Democratic Party in town was funded by Walter Shorenstein and other developers, who were happy to be part of the party of Dianne Feinstein, happy to be liberals on some social issues (Shorenstein insisted that the Chamber of Commerce hire and promote more women) and happy to promote liberal candidates like John and his brother Phil for national office – as long as they didn’t mess with the gargantuan money machine that was highrise office development in San Francisco.
Arguing that Shorenstein’s economic agenda was driving up housing prices, destroying low-income neighborhoods and displacing tenants was a waste of time; the liberals like Burton (who also represented real estate developers as a private attorney) weren’t interested.

But these days it’s not all about real estate; it’s about the fact that the level of economic inequality in the United States has risen to levels unseen since the late 1920s, and the impacts are all around us. And it’s about (Democratic) politicians in San Francisco blaming Sacramento, and (Democratic) politicians in Sacramento blaming Washington, and the Democratic Party in the United States abandoning economic equality as a guiding principle.

So I sat down on a Saturday night when the kids went to be (yeah, this is my social life) and made a list of what I think represent the core values of a modern American progressive. It’s a short list, and I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve left off, but it seems like a place to start.

For all the people who are going to blast me in the comments, let me say very clearly: This isn’t a litmus-test list (we’ve endorsed plenty of people who don’t agree with everything on it). It’s not a purity test, it’s not a dogma, it’s not the rules of entry into any political party … it’s just a definition. My personal definition.

Because words don’t mean anything if they don’t mean anything, and progressive has become so much of a part of the San Francisco political dialogue that it’s starting to mean nothing.
For the record: When I use the word “progressive,” I’m talking about people who believe:

1. That civil rights and civil liberties need to be protected for everyone, even the most unpopular people in the world. We’re for same-sex marriage, of course, and for Sanctuary City and protections for immigrants who may not have documentation. We’re also in favor of basic rights for prisoners, we’re against the death penalty, and we think that even suspected terrorists should have the right to due process of law.

2. That essential public services – water, electricity, health care, broadband – should be controlled by the public and not by private corporations. That means public power and single-payer government run health insurance.

3. That the most central problem facing the city, the state and the nation today is the dramatic upward shift of wealth and income and the resulting economic inequality. We believe that government at every level – including local government, right here in San Francisco – should do everything possible to reduce that inequality; that means taxing high incomes, redistributing wealth and using that money for public services (education, for example) that tend to help people achieve a stable middle-class lifestyle. We believe that San Francisco is a rich city, with a lot of rich people, and that if the state and federal government won’t try to tax them to pay for local services, the city should.

4. That private money has no place in elections or public policy. We support a total ban on private campaign contributions, for both politicians and ballot measures, and support public financing for all elections.

5. That the right to private property needs to be tempered by the needs of society. That means you can’t just put up a highrise building anywhere you want in San Francisco, of course, but it also means that the rights of tenants to have stable places for themselves and their families to live is more important than the rights of landlords to maximize return on their property. That’s why we support strict environmental protections, even when they hurt private interests, and why be believe in rent control, including rent control on vacant property, and eviction protections and restrictions on condo conversions. We think community matters more than wealth and that poor people have a place in San Francisco too — and if the wealthier classes have to have less so that the city can have socio-economic diversity, that’s a small price to pay. We believe that public space belongs to the public, and shouldn’t be handed over to private interests; we believe that everyone, including homeless people, has the right to use public space.

6. That there are almost no circumstances where the government should do anything in secret.

7. That progressive elected officials should use their resources and political capital to help elect other progressives – and should recognize that sometimes the movement is more important that their own personal ambitions.

I could add a lot more, but I think those six factors are at the heart of what I mean when I talk about progressives. We support a lot of other things; I put the right of workers to unionize under Number 3, since unions (along with public schools and subsidized higher education) are one of the major forces behind a stable middle class and a more equal society. We think racism and homophobia are never acceptable, and we support affirmative action, but that goes under Number 1.

This is not a socialist manifesto; I never mentioned worker control of the means of production. Progressives don’t oppose private enterprise; they just think that some things essential for the good of society don’t belong in the private sector, and that the private sector should be regulated for the good of all of us. We trust and support small businesses much more than big corporations – and we think their interests are not the same.

I don’t know if Ed Lee fits my definition of a progressive. We won’t know until we see his budget plans, and learn whether he thinks the city should follow Gavin Newsom’s approach of avoiding tax increases and simply cutting services again. We won’t know until he decides what the tell the new police chief about enforcing the sit-lie law. We won’t know until we see whether he keeps Newsom’s staff in place or brings in some senior people with progressive values. We know that the people who pushed him to take the job aren’t progressives by any definition, but you never know. I agree that having an Asian mayor in San Francisco is a very big deal, an historic moment — and when Lee takes office, I will be waiting, and hoping, to be surprised.

Alerts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

Alerts are compiled by Nicole Dial and Jackie Andrews

alert@sfbg.com

FRIDAY, JAN. 7

 

Noam Chomsky interview

Pick the brain of linguist and author Noam Chomsky as Wild Wild West Radio hosts an interactive cyber-convo with the influential professor and political dissident. Listeners may phone in questions or chat with Chomsky online for a unique, collective experience.

3 p.m., free

Wild Wild Left Radio

www.wildwildleft.com

 

San Francisco Bike Party

The new year brings a new kind of mass bicycle ride, one a bit more civilized than Critical Mass. Join the inaugural San Francisco Bike Party, a new monthly ride that begins at AT&T Park and follows a planned route through the city, obeying most traffic laws along the way. But it will still be a rolling party, complete with a mobile sound system and three party stops for dancing and socializing along the way.

7:30 p.m., free

Giants Stadium, Willie Mays Gate

www.sfbikeparty.org

SATURDAY, JAN 8

 

Board of Supervisors swearing-in

Members of the newly elected Board of Supervisors take their oath of office, followed immediately by the election of a new board president, who could also become acting mayor once Gavin Newsom is sworn in as California’s new lieutenant governor. Or if Newsom resigns by then, the board could also directly select a new interim mayor. It promises to be high political drama under the dome.

Noon, free

Room 250, City Hall

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Dr., SF

www.sfbos.org

 

Writers with Drinks

Writers with Drinks mixes genres and authors and throws in a dash of alcohol. It’s more than just a reading series, it’s also a celebration of performers, intellectuals, and writers from all over. This month it features writers Jane Wiedlin, Ethan Watters, Jesús Ángel García, and Blake Charlton. More good news: proceeds benefit the Center for Sex and Culture. 7:30 p.m.; doors open at 6:30 p.m.

$5 to $10, sliding scale The Make Out Room 3225 22nd St., SF www.writerswithdrinks.com

SUNDAY, JAN. 9

 

Found the Free University of SF

Matt Gonzalez, Alan Kaufman, and others are forming the new Free University of San Francisco, and they want public input. Organizers ranging from political activists to poet laureates will put on a public meeting to discuss plans for the university. The Free U aims to promote free higher level education for anyone who wants it. Future plans include a weekend-long teach-in Feb. 5–-6. Come down and help promote and organize free education. 10 a.m., free Viracocha 998 Valencia, SF 415-573-5766

 

Guantánamo Means Torture

Attend a public planning meeting for the national demonstration scheduled for Jan. 11 against the continuation of Guantánamo Bay’s detention facility. World Can’t Wait hosts the meeting here in San Francisco, and then travels to Washington, D.C., with Witness Against Torture, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and other activists to demand an end to the horrors of Guantánamo. 2:30 p.m., free Mechanics Library 57 Post, 415 864 5153

sf@worldcantwait.org

Joining the journey

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Joining the journey

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Malcolm X once said “Tomorrow is for those who prepare for it today.” And today, Malcolm Shabazz, the eldest grandson of Malcolm X, says he is trying to carry on the storied legacy of the radical advocate for African American civil rights and leading voice for the Nation of Islam.

Shabazz, 26, was recently in San Francisco discussing that legacy, as well as his own spiritual and personal journeys, which included making the pilgrimage to Mecca for the hajj in November, a requirement for Muslims that his grandfather also undertook in 1964, the year before he was assassinated.

It was the latest chapter in a long and complicated story. At the age of 12, Shabazz started a fire in his Yonkers home that left his grandmother (Malcolm X’s wife, Betty) with burns over 80 percent of her body, which led to her death a few days later. Shabazz has spent more of his adolescence and adulthood in prisons and other institutions than in the real world.

After serving four years in juvenile correctional facilities for arson and manslaughter charges for the fire, Shabazz pleaded guilty to attempted robbery in 2002. He served three and a half years in prison for that crime and then went back to prison months after his release for punching a hole in a store window.

Although he is often portrayed in media accounts as disturbed, Shabazz seemed calm and reflective during a two-hour interview with the Guardian. A soft-spoken man with few but well-chosen words, Shabazz is not unafraid to speak his mind about the state of the country and his grandfather’s legacy.

“If you want to know anything, then go back to the source,” he told us, which is what we did, reviewing his long, twisted journey to Mecca.

As the oldest male heir to Malcolm X, Shabazz was born into a fascinating family. Media accounts have documented him as a troubled young man, shuttled back and forth among family members. Like his grandfather, he spent time on the streets and in jail. Like his grandfather, it was behind bars that he finally regained his faith and found himself fully immersed in Islam. Shabazz explains that while he was born into Islam, he finally began to fee its presence in his life during his most recent incarceration period. While quarantined in Attica Correctional Facility in New York, Shabazz explained that he “didn’t have any hygiene supplies, I didn’t have any reading materials.”

But it was during his time in Attica that he met another prisoner — half Mexican, half Iranian — who identified himself as a Shia Muslim. “He asked me ‘Are you in a lie? Or are you a real Muslim?’ ” Shabazz recalled. He answered that he was a real Muslim. “He gave me reading materials to read in my cell.”

According to Shabazz, this was the man who discussed and poured over religious texts with him during their time together, and the one who inspired him to convert from the Sunni sect to Shia.

“I was raised a Sunni, everyone in my family was Sunni,” he said. There is much antagonism between the two sects, so his conversion caused a backlash akin to when his grandfather left the Nation of Islam in 1964 and declared himself a Sunni, which let to his assassination the following year.

When word spread of Shabazz’s conversion, various Sunni leaders and community members expressed their discomfort with what he had done. He explained that many people wrote to him asking him, “How could you become a Shia?”

After his release, Shabazz decided to move to Syria to study at an Islamic institute and then spent the following eight months teaching English to children. “I came home from prison [and] I wanted to get away for a little while,” he explained.

After arriving back from Syria in April, Shabazz went to Miami and worked on his memoirs, which he said are due to come out this May. The book discusses Shabazz’s life and tribulations, noting that “there are misconceptions that I would like to clear up.”

Once he returned to the United States, Shabazz decided to follow his grandfather’s footsteps and make the pilgrimage to Mecca, where, he said “the air felt different.” But he also explained how the people he saw on the pilgrimage seemed less willing to impose their rules on Americans.

“It seems like they have more fear [of] Americans than they do for Allah,” he said. “If they know you’re American, I don’t know what it is, but they leave you alone.”

Shabazz said he had the experience of a lifetime and proved his intense vigor for the Islamic faith. He circled the Kaa’ba, and despite swollen feet and a bad case of the flu, carried on his pilgrimage like a true believer. “I never saw this many people at one place at one time. It was much more of a struggle than I had anticipated,” he said. “But everything was earned.”

Decades before, his grandfather Malcolm X made his mark on American culture, taking a radical approach to demanding equal rights. When asked if his grandfather would admire President Barack Obama if he were alive today, Shabazz replied, “Definitely not. To me, Obama is no different than [George W.] Bush.”

He said that democracy in this country is a sham, an illusion effectively perpetuated by the ruling elite. “The U.S. is a land of smoke and mirrors, and they’re the best at doing what they do,” he said. “My grandfather? Hah. He wouldn’t have supported any of those dudes.”

Although Shabazz doesn’t particularly admire Obama so far, he does hope that the election of the first African-American president will “boost the esteem of the young black youth.” And he said that the messages of Malcolm X are more important today than ever.

“My grandfather once stated that there are only two types of power that are respected within the United States of America — economic power and political power — and he went on to explain how social power derives from these two. Unfortunately, the majority of the people [today] are economically illiterate and politically naive. They believe most of what they see on television and read in the papers. I say believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear.”

For his own personal politics, Shabazz said change begins with education and unity. “[Education] could be done through music, spoken word poetry, art, preaching from the pulpit, or putting in physical work right in the trenches,” Shabazz said.

In terms of unity, he cited the European Union, explaining that it is an organization “where nations that don’t necessarily like each other [but] have at least enough common sense to come together for a cause, to achieve a common goal, or to stand up against a common enemy. When it’s time to put niggers in check, they know how to come together.”

Almost 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, Shabazz sees growing potential for Islam to exert an influence in the U.S. “After 9/11, a lot of people did not know too much [about Islam]. But they started to investigate and learn more.”

Although many people’s first reaction was to turn away from the religion of jihad, Shabazz feels that many people also felt the need to educate themselves on the matter — and found that there is much more to Islam than the mainstream media portrays. And for a young man who has already led a turbulent life, Shabazz is seeking something basic from his newfound faith: “I want a peace of mind.”

Rate irate

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Rate irate

arts@sfbg.com

YEAR IN FILM “Bloody bugger to you, you … beastly bastard. Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit. F-fornication. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck and fuck. Fuck, fuck, and bugger. Bugger, bugger, buggety buggety buggety fuck. Fuck ass. Balls! Balls! Fuckety shit. Shit, fuck and willy. Willy, shit and fuck, and … tits.”

The above is, in toto, the reason why The King’s Speech — a movie that might very well turn out Oscar’s idea of this year’s Best Picture next February — is rated R. This childish explosion of potty-mouth is coaxed from England’s future king (Colin Firth) by his speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) to demonstrate that the former’s crippling stammer flies away whenever he’s unself-consciousness enough to cuss a bit. It’s a comic moment (one of few, and perhaps the film’s highlight in general) that, by reducing the words to sniggering playground naughtiness — this king is, after all, in a state of arrested development — robs them of any genuine scatology or shock value. They’re just words.

But those words (give or take a few fucks and shits — only the MPAA can or would bother to count every rapid-fire cuss) were still enough to get this otherwise very chaste, polite Masterpiece Theatre exercise classified with Saw 3D and The Human Centipede as viewable by minors only with parental accompaniment. Not that many teens are likely to be lining up for The King’s Speech — certainly far fewer than saw Saw 3D with or without adult chaperoning. But really, this is what they need protecting from?

This was a year in which the usual grousing undercurrent about arbitrary ratings-board standards started to seep overground. There were small hubbubs about two excellent documentaries, The Tillman Story and A Film Unfinished, getting R’s due to cursing on one hand and nudity (among Nazi concentration camp inmates) on the other. In both cases prudishness means these searing indictments of historical wrongs probably can’t be used for classroom educational purposes.

A larger controversy surrounded Blue Valentine, the acclaimed indie feature slapped with an NC-17 for a sex scene so subversive that no one who saw the film at Sundance could recall it; the MPAA rating mystified many. Turns out the scene in question is a happy flashback in this slow-agonizing-death-of-a marriage portrait, with Michelle Williams’ thrusty body language expressing clear enjoyment of Ryan Gosling’s mouthy activities downtown. Nonetheless, there’s nothing more explicit displayed than the outside of her thighs — as one colleague put it, “I’ve seen more of Britney Spears on the Internet.” The drama’s sobriety and its awards momentum finally won a rare MPAA reversal on appeal, reducing its rating to R.

But the case still underlines the injustice of our current system. As Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated pointed out in 2006, as a tool of the Hollywood mainstream the MPAA routinely judges independent films more harshly than major studio releases. It also exercises double standards when it comes to gender nudity and gender-preference sexuality, and most crucially continues to heighten the American morality gap between depictions of sex and violence.

These complaints have prompted some vague hints of change afoot, albeit more toward hitting torture-porn horror harder than lightening up on the birds ‘n’ bees. In any case, it’s difficult to be very hopeful: for every progressive cultural step forward these days, there seem to be two Tea Party dance-steps back. It was announced earlier this month that Christian pastor and cable honcho Robert H. Schuller had contracted to broadcast G-rated versions of movies like the original Alien (1979) and Predator (1987). OK, so they’ll have bad language and explicit violence removed; but even these eviscerated edits will still offer entertainment predicated on the horrific (if now nongraphically suggested) murders of humans by icky monsters. Giving kids nightmares is more godly (and provides a more “positive message,” per the Rev. Schuller) than showing them (God forbid) a nipple.

Such hypocrisies run rampant in U.S. entertainment and society in general. Media outlets generally refuse to advertise NC-17 films, giving them and their modicum of sexual explicitness the commercial kiss of death while most kids freely access porn online. Screen violence grows ever more desensitizing; explosions of cars, buildings, entire cities, or planets are viewed as harmless while anything truly unpleasant enough to act as a deterrent sparks outrage. (By now the escapist Saw and Hostel movies get shrugged at, whereas the recent Killer Inside Me remake offended many because its protracted scenes of domestic violence were realistically painful to watch.)

Penises are now OK in small doses, albeit only in the clownish contexts of Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), Observe and Report (2009), etc. Ironically, any time sex is taken seriously, sans juvenile humor or lurid “erotic-thriller” type judgment, it becomes unfit for allegedly innocent eyes. Blue Valentine‘s good sex, and subsequent bad breakup sex, disturbs the MPAA because it is all too real-world relatable in both its pleasure and fallibility, something you won’t often find in porn, either.

The logic gap grows ever more ridiculous even as our culture wars’ battle lines harden. Imagine a Palin White House two years hence, presiding over a land in which sex education is nonexistent, abstinence clubs are the new Honor Society, and teenage pregnancy rates skyrocket. When in doubt as to the nation’s course, say grace, then settle down to dinner with the kids as you watch a “clean” tube edit of something like 1995’s Braveheart, its medieval spears through the chest trimmed but that humorous throwing of a prince’s homosexual BFF from the castle tower left intact. Then drift off to slumberland, family values affirmed.

Alerts

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WEDNESDAY, DEC. 22

Floyd Westerman Retrospective

You may remember him for his role in “Dances with Wolves” as Chief Ten Bears and as a country western singer/songwriter. But Floyd Westerman, a.k.a. Red Crow, was also an outspoken activist for Native Americans and the environment. A new documentary by Steve Jacobson explores his later life and activism. Along with the film, there will also be a social hour at 6:30 and a discussion following the film.

7:30–9:30 p.m., $5 suggested donation

Humanist Hall

390 27th St., Oakl.

510-681-8699

Real Mercantile Holiday Bazaar

If you still have some holiday shopping to do and just can’t summon the will to hit the stores or feed the machine, you can get some great stuff while supporting the local arts community and underground economy at the Real Mercantile Holiday Bazaar. held at arts impresario Chicken John spacious home and performance space. Homemade gifts and food are all available in a festive and very San Francisco atmosphere.

5–9 p.m., free

Chez Poulet

3359 Cesar Chavez, SF

www.therealmerchantile.com

THURSDAY, DEC. 23

Festivus 2010

San Francisco’s legendary Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and pot activist Ed Rosenthal’s Green Aid unite to present a night of fundraising for the Medical Marijuana Legal Defense and Education Fund. The bash features an airing of grievances, feats of strength, the annual meeting of Dessert First Club, and live music and entertainment including The Phat Fly Girls and burlesque. Creative dress and cross-dressing encouraged.

7:30–11:30 p.m., $50 presale, $60 at door

SomArts

925 Brannan, SF

415-515-7483

SUNDAY, DEC 26

Get Your Spawn On

Join Brent Plater on a stroll through Muir Woods National Monument to learn more about coho and steelhead salmon and how to help them survive. The walk also features a search for endangered salmon in Redwood Creek. Make sure to wear something warm and bring your hiking boots.

10–12 p.m., free with RSVP

Meet at the Dipsea Trail trailhead

Muir Woods National Monument, Mill Valley

www.wildequity.org/events/3166

TUESDAY, DEC 28

Castro Queer-in

Join concerned local resident ins protesting the recently passed sit/lie ordinance more formally known as Proposition L. Bring out any and all musical instruments, games, food to share, face-painting kits, and any items to barter. Everyone will gather outside of Harvey Milk’s former camera store.

Noon–2 p.m., Free

575 Castro

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Fight club

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Fight club

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Late in Boxing Gym, a pungent documentary even for Frederick Wiseman, an old-timer says something wise to his friend while lacing up. The friend doesn’t see the point of analogies. Our man admits that some only work on an intellectual level, but insists that others make intuitive sense of abstraction — the right metaphor can make all the difference in getting a particular movement. It’s hard to imagine that Wiseman would still be making his films if he didn’t think the same held true for a motion picture sequence.

Good thing, since boxing has been made to shoulder an awful lot of Hollywood hooey. Not much has changed since Manny Farber, writing in 1949, decried fight pictures for being “tightly humorless and supersaturated with worn-out morality … pure fantasy in so far as capturing the pulse of the beak-busting trade.” Wiseman isn’t interested in the trade so much as the discipline — though the big time’s spectacular images are plastered around the old-school Texas club. And yet even if Boxing Gym shrugs at the competitive elements of the sport, Wiseman’s squat compositions tune in the unglamorous business of keeping your dukes up when tired — the kind of matter-of-fact physical truth professional actors howl for.

By releasing Boxing Gym immediately after La Danse (2009), Wiseman ensures his own comparisons. The choreographer-dancer and trainer-boxer tandems are aligned not only in fancy footwork (Wiseman’s too), but also in their mirror-stretched studios. There are differences, of course — one can’t help but think of the Paris Ballet’s fundraising efforts when Richard Lord, the dexterous trainer-manager of the gym, explains membership dues. Perhaps because Wiseman is not beholden to an institutional cycle of rehearsals and performances in Boxing Gym, it’s the purer distillation of a kinetic education.

Watch Wiseman’s films together, and you’ll realize that different spaces register silence differently. The filmmaker’s musical ear is richly apparent in Boxing Gym‘s gloved rhythms and concrete echoes, to say nothing of the entrancing pendulum swings of side-by-side workouts. As in La Danse, Wiseman emulates the concentration of his subjects, but here he also picks up on their loose camaraderie in conversations about joblessness, the joy of getting hit and, closest to the bone, the Virginia Tech killings. The gym is still a masculine space, but one in which women (and children) are a significant presence. For more on the evolution of gender and “training,” one might well consult the filmmaker’s own catalog: Basic Training (1971), Manoeuvre (1979), and Missile (1987). Wiseman’s gym is finally a gathering place, one with atmosphere and history (and hardly any headphones) — all the more reason to see it in a movie theater.

BOXING GYM opens Wed/22 at the Roxie.

 

The politics of the last great depression

Zelda Bronstein
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The politics of the last great depression

The American economy’s worse now than at any time since the Great Depression — and whatever the Republicans say in Congress (and the president signs on to) the private sector alone can’t possible pull us out. The only reason we’re not at 1930s levels of unemployment is that we’ve had some modest federal stimulus money over the past two years.


But we’ve got this dilemma: Although every smart economist agrees that it will take more massive federal spending to turn things around, all we’re getting out of Washington is the worst kind of spending — tax cuts for the rich, which will cost $900 billion and do very little to help the economy.


Part of what’s going on — and Jerry Brown talked about it at his education summit — is that the public doesn’t trust government to spend their money wisely. Brown cited a poll saying that nearly half of Californians still think we can solve most of the budget problems in the state by getting rid of government waste.


The Pew Research Center has put together a couple of fascinating papers on attitudes toward the public sector, and they’re worth a rad. (Thanks, Gabriel Metcalf at SPUR for tipping me off about this.) The first one is called “How a different America responded to the Great Depression.” Researcher Jodie Allen’s conclusion:


Quite unlike today’s public, what Depression-era Americans wanted from their government was, on many counts, more not less. And despite their far more dire economic straits, they remained more optimistic than today’s public. Nor did average Americans then turn their ire upon their Groton-Harvard-educated president — this despite his failure, over his first term in office, to bring a swift end to their hardship. FDR had his detractors but these tended to be fellow members of the social and economic elite.


More:


The most striking difference between the 1930s and the present day is that, by the standards of today’s political parlance, average Americans of the mid-1930s revealed downright “socialistic” tendencies in many of their views about the proper role of government.


True, when asked to describe their political position, fewer than 2% of those surveyed were ready to describe themselves as “socialist” rather than as Republican, Democratic or independent. But by a lopsided margin of 54% to 34%, they expressed the opinion that if there were another depression (and fears of one were mounting), the government should follow the same spending pattern as FDR’s administration had followed before.


And, those surveyed said they supported Roosevelt, the architect of the New Deal’s expansive programs, over his 1936 Republican opponent, Alfred Landon by more than two-to-one (62%-30%).


The charts are fascinating. A full 73 percent of Americans polled in 1936 thought government should provide free medical care to the poor. Sixty-four percent thought government should regulate and control war-time profits. In fact, 59 percent thought the government should take over the electric power industry and 69 percent favored nationalizing the wartime munitions industry.


And the people who were polled in these early surveys were overwhelmingly white, male and relatively well off. They were also socially conservative — 60 percent favored the death penalty and 67 percent wanted to deport all immigrants who were on public relief. Allen:


Is there a message in this for today’s America? Two possible lessons: First, it’s worth remembering that the social programs and banking controls that the New Deal era produced stood the nation in good stead over many decades of unprecedented prosperity. Second, Depression-era Americans’ faith in the country and its guiding institutions steeled them against the challenges of a double-dip recession and, years later, World War II. They had it worse, but they also expected it to get better, faster.


Compare that to a 1983 poll taken in the depth of the Reagan Recession, when 65 percent said that government had gone too far in regulating business, 62 percent rarely trusted the government in Washington and 78 percent opposed raising income taxes.


Fifty years, two generations, and the entire attitude of the American public toward government was turned on its head. It’s one of the fundamental dilemmas of American life, and one of the central reasons we’re in this mess.

80 billionaires — and California’s broke?

Zelda Bronstein
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67
80 billionaires — and California’s broke?

Jerry Brown’s message to educators was framed as bleak — but as I pointed out, there were some bright spots. At least the new gov mentioned that this is a rich state that ought to be able to afford education. Robert Cruickshank at Calitics has a nice post on the point:


A tax increase of about $20 billion would secure our public services for years to come with a very tiny impact on our economic activity. Surely 1% of our GDP can be harnessed to fund the services that we must have for broadly shared prosperity in this state.


Let me take it a step further. I just went through the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans and started counting, and guess what? A full 80 of the 400 live in California. That’s one out of every five billionaires in America, living right here in a state that can’t afford to educate its kids.


Then I took out my calculator and added up a long row of numbers and got a big one: The total net worth of the billionaires in California is $231.8 billion. Ten percent of that wipes out the budget deficit. And that doesn’t even count the folks worth $900 million or less; they didn’t make the list.


Folks: This is a very, very rich state. A very modest tax increase on a very tiny number of people could solve our budget problems not just today but into the foreseeable future.


This is the message Brown needs to deliver to the people of the state — and if the antitax people (or my trolls) want to argue that all the rich people would leave if we taxed them just a little bit, let me say: That’s ridiculous. David Geffen is going to move out of Malibu because he has to pay a teeny bit more of his income, money he won’t miss, in taxes? Ain’t happening.


That’s it, Jerry. That’s your answer. Now get to work.

Let’s get budget priorities straight

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Let’s get budget priorities straight

OPINION Who will pay for California’s budget woes? For the last three years, Californians have put up with cuts to programs that are critical to our state’s future and our social safety net. Public education, HIV and AIDS programs, state universities, and CalWORKs have all come under the knife. The elephant in the room, as state and federal governments try to balance budgets on the backs of the working and middle class, is the billions of dollars we are wasting on a misguided war in Afghanistan.

Fresh evidence that the war in Afghanistan is failing rolls in on a daily basis. While the administration justifies the cost in lives and dollars as necessary to fight Al Qaeda, it also acknowledges that there are only 50 to 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. Every soldier in Afghanistan costs U.S. taxpayers $1 million per year. With 100,000 soldiers on the ground, that means we’re spending as much as $2 billion a year on each Al Qaeda fighter.

Would we dream of spending $2 billion on every needy child in California? Or even $1 million? As U.S. and Afghan casualties rise along with the dollar amounts, with little success to show for it, we need to get our priorities in check.

At Governor-elect Jerry Brown’s budget forum this week, we were staring down a $28.1 billion budget deficit over the next 18 months. Compare that to the $46.4 billion Californians have already spent on the war in Afghanistan — $1.2 billion of that right out of San Franciscans’ pockets.

The Obama administration is conducting a strategy review this month that is expected to rubber stamp an approach that keeps soldiers in harm’s way — when doing so is not likely to make Americans or Afghans safer. At the same time, the president’s deficit commission chairs are also passing down recommendations to save money by cutting benefits for our most vulnerable citizens.

I would like to tell the taxpayers in my district who are shelling out these dollars that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but the president is now proposing ending the “combat mission” in 2014, which could mean there will be tens of thousands of troops on the ground even after four more years have passed.

I will continue to fight for our real needs in Sacramento. But it’s time for our representatives in Washington to put an end to this disastrous war and bring our troops home as quickly and responsibly as possible. Our tax dollars should be making life in California sustainable and safe for all. We can’t afford any other way.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano represents the 13th District.

Brown’s education summit gives me hope

Zelda Bronstein
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0
Brown’s education summit gives me hope

Most of what’s going on is just really, really disturbing — Brown is doing a good job of explaining just how bad the economy is, just how awful things are for education — and what that means for students. But he made one comment that struck me as critical (and that might, maybe, make Brown a great governor) came about an hour into the presentation.


Brown was talking about how the nation got into this crisis — about how people were forced to live on borrowing, and when the real estate market collapsed America became de-leveraged — when he took a slight sidetrack to say:


“Income redistribution upward from the middle class is comparable to the 1920s … it’s a societal crisis. We have to exercise discipline, but also fairness.”


A few points on this:


1. The incoming governor of California actually mentioned the words “income redistribution.” That’s a term almost entirely missing from the current debate. And he made it clear that part of the budget problem — part of the reason the state and the nation are in this crisis — is that the rich have gotten a larger and larger share of the pie.


2. Brown seems to think this is actually a problem, a “societal crisis.” Again: Obama doesn’t talk about that. Other than Bernie Sanders, most politicians in Washington are afraid of it. Just talking about wealth and income inequality (particularly in the context of education funding) is a huge step.


3. Brown talked about “fairness and discipline” together. Yes, we have to understand that resources right now are limited; but we also have to understand that part of the budget debate ought to be about the larger social issue of unfair distribution of wealth.


I know none of this seems like such a huge deal — it’s basic reality. But it’s so unusual that it’s refreshing.


 

SFBG Radio: What will Jerry do?

Zelda Bronstein
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SFBG Radio: What will Jerry do?

When Jerry Brown goes to UCLA to talk about education, what’s he going to say? How’s he going to promote the UC system when he’s facing a $25 billion budget crisis? Johnny and Tim talk abou that (and the Obama health care law and a few other things) after the jump.

sfbgradio12132010 by endorsements2010

Live Shots: Roger Waters’ epic “The Wall,” HP Pavilion, 12/08/2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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In the minutes before Pink Floyd mastermind Roger Waters took to the stage at HP Pavilion earlier this week to perform the band’s epic 1979 double album The Wall, the playlist coming through the house speakers gave way to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” a song that seemed well-matched for the impending performance. For an artist that is commonly known for romantic jazz ballads, Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” was a defining moment in her career, a point in which she ascended beyond the simplest manifestations of her identity and delved into the  darkest corners of her times.

In a similar sense, there is no easy way around The Wall. Pink Floyd’s last album during their monumental run in the ’70s — Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals — was not only their most artistically ambitious, but a lingering challenge to the nature of the band’s legacy. Longview attempts to define Pink Floyd in the realm of blacklight posters, spacey sounds, or a Dazed and Confused mindset, will inevitably get stuck at The Wall: a dark and confrontational album that is ultimately the most emblematic of Pink Floyd’s greatest characteristics.

So, with Waters (at age 67) suggesting that this will be his last tour, it is appropriate that he would finish with his masterpiece. And make no mistake – this was a concert for the ages.

Playing before an enthralled sold-out crowd, Waters put on a spectacle of acid-casualty-inflicting-potential that seemed peerless on numerous fronts. Musically, the material was as dynamic as it was seamless, deftly rendered by a world-class band of musicians over a juggernaut of a sound system. Visually, the staging seemed calibrated past “entertain” and set on “assault”, showcasing a sensory barrage of giant puppets, crashing airplanes, and flying pigs all amidst the construction (and eventual toppling) of a 40ft wall that also served as a towering projection screen for a dizzying array of images and video.

Yet the most notable aspect of the performance was the sheer relevance of the material. This was really an amazing feature, considering that Waters wrote The Wall in the run up to the Reagan-Thatcher era and was now performing it in the aftermath of Bush-Cheney. In this regard, Waters delved deeply into the confrontational aspect of the album’s material, challenging the audience with all-too-timely themes of war, ideology, government surveillance, and the general estrangement of modern human relations. During “Run Like Hell” the projections on the wall at one point showed the Wikileaks-released video of the 2007 Apache Helicopter massacre in Baghdad; not exactly light viewing material to accompany one of Floyd’s classic radio hits.

Waters looked and sounded formidable throughout the concert, stalking the stage with good-humored authority as the wall was erected in front of the band throughout the beginning half of the album. This first set was packed with striking moments, such as the ominous acoustic beauty of “Goodbye Blue Sky” beset by visuals of bomber planes dropping their payloads of -isms  (dollar signs, religious symbols, and corporate logos) on those below. “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” with its re-occurring mantra – “We Don’t Need No Education” – was already a staggering spectacle as a three-story marionette school teacher with laser eyes dwarfed the musicians below, only to then be embellished by a choir of  local school kids filling the stage to sing the later verses.

However, the most poignant moment of the show came during the second set as Waters – who had lost his father as a boy during World War II – performed “Vera” and “Bring the Boys Back Home” beneath video spots of children reuniting with their fathers returning home from war. The final clip – of a young girl going from surprise to gut-wrenching emotion as she first sees her father – left audience members wiping back tears as Water’s sang the line, “Does anybody else in here/feel the way I do?”

The wall came toppling down after the more theatrical rock-opera moments of the second album, culminating with “The Trial” performed  beneath Gerald Scarfe’s hallucinatory animation from the 1982 film adaptation of the album. Waters and company finished the concert amongst the rubble, playing a wonderfully serene and hopeful version of “Outside the Wall.”

Much has been made of the fact that the original staging of this album was a logistical debacle when it was performed in only four cities some 30 years ago, and that the evolution of technology has now made it feasible. Yet, in a similar sense, the album’s material has matured in its own way in this time. Writing during a time of personal crisis in the late 70s, Waters conceived the album as an exploration of human relationships and the many obstacles that hinder them. The timeliness of these themes then — especially after a decade marred by war and a divided population – makes this tour less of a nostalgic throwback and more of manifested vision. Pink Floyd had always been far ahead their time, so there is a fitting logic that it would take three decades for The Wall to be properly realized in concert.

Of course, it’ll be interesting to see if this tour is in fact the last call on an original Pink Floyd experience. Altough the surviving band members are getting on in years (keyboardist Richard Wright died in 2008), they have made some steps at amends recently, and even expressed interest in collaborating again. Perhaps then, there is still time for those walls to come down. After all….when it comes to Pink Floyd, it’s well known that pigs will fly

Pass the DREAM Act, now

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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11
Pass the DREAM Act, now

by Eric Mar and Eric Quezada

news@sfbg.com

OPINION Imagine for a moment that you are 14 years old. Your parents, stuck in perpetual poverty and unemployment (or perhaps worse), move your family to a foreign country to begin a new life.

You work hard, struggle to fit in, study constantly, and fill your spare time with school activities. Maybe you even work a little on the side to chip in. You are a parent’s dream, and a model of young citizenship.

Except that you’re not a citizen. And one day, even as you’ve mastered English and flourished in school and in the community, you are stopped like a criminal by federal authorities.

This is what happened to Steve Li, an engaging and industrious 20-year-old student at City College of San Francisco and a graduate from George Washington High School. He always thought he was an average San Franciscan until the morning of Sept. 15, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents suddenly raided his home and arrested him and his parents. Steve was incarcerated in Arizona for more than 60 days, far from his friends and family. Through a full-court legal and legislative press, and a groundswell of immigrant community organizing leading to a private emergency bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Li has temporarily staved off deportation. But Li and thousands of other hard-working young immigrant Americans could soon be summarily tossed out of the country if Congress doesn’t act now to pass the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act.

The DREAM Act is a common-sense, bipartisan measure that is urgently needed to avoid countless other Steve Li cases. Despite congressional wavering on comprehensive immigration reform (which a consistent majority of Americans support), everyone should be able to agree on the basic right of undocumented immigrant minors, who are moved here by their parents, to gain steps toward obtaining citizenship.

In brief, the DREAM Act would enable some immigrant students who have grown up in the U.S. to apply for temporary legal status and to eventually obtain permanent status and become eligible for U.S. citizenship if they go to college or serve in the U.S. military.

According to the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), about 65,000 U.S.-raised high school students could qualify for the DREAM Act’s benefits each year. As NICL puts it, “These include honor roll students, star athletes, talented artists, homecoming queens, and aspiring teachers, doctors, and U.S. soldiers. They are young people who have lived in the U.S. for most of their lives and desire only to call this country their home … they face unique barriers to higher education, are unable to work legally in the U.S., and often live in constant fear of detection by immigration authorities.”

It makes no moral, economic, or social good sense to continue tearing apart families and communities and disrupting young people’s lives — all at great expense to the American public and taxpayers.

The time to act is now: please call your congressional representatives today and urge them to vote yes on the DREAM Act — without any amendments that might undermine its effectiveness. Although Nancy Pelosi and most Bay Area Democrats support the bill, Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Stockton) and the Republicans are either on the fence or opposed. There’s no time to waste in giving hard-working young immigrant students this most American ideal — the opportunity to make their dreams a reality.

Eric Mar is a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Eric Quezada is executive director of Dolores Street Community Services in San Francisco.

Class of 2010: Jane Kim

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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7
Class of 2010: Jane Kim

steve@sfbg.com

Despite fears that a candidate backed by downtown could replace firebrand progressive leader Sup. Chris Daly in District 6, in the end it was the two progressive candidates — Jane Kim and Debra Walker — who finished far in front of the large pack of candidates, with Kim winning the race. And she thinks that says something about how the progressive movement has matured.

“To have the two leading candidates be progressives says a lot about the progressive political community,” Kim said. “The race was really between Debra and me in end.”

Kim, a 33-year-old attorney and the outgoing president of the San Francisco Board of Education, has been active in progressive politics in San Francisco for many years, from doing community organizing with the Chinatown Community Development Center to running the short-lived San Francisco People’s Organization, which Daly helped create.

Yet part of her campaign strategy, and the message that she’s sending in the wake of an election that divided the progressive community, focuses on issues and themes that are more common to political moderates: job creation, clean streets, public safety, and neighborhood services.

“I think it’s important for progressives to cross over, and I don’t think it should be viewed as selling out,” Kim told us. “Progressives need to do a good job at maintaining voters’ faith in the progressives’ ability to lead.”

In addition to courting progressive groups and voters, Kim’s campaign aggressively targeted residents of the residential condo towers in Rincon Hill and Eastern SoMa, voters who are generally more affluent and newer to San Francisco than the typical progressive constituencies.

“It’s a lot of new residents who don’t feel like they’re a part of any political faction and they’re really open,” Kim said. “People just want to see that things are better. They want the streets to be clean and safe.”

With a new mayor and new blood on the Board of Supervisors, Kim said this is an important political moment for San Francisco, “a huge opportunity” to redefine San Francisco politics in the wake of Mayor Gavin Newsom and progressive supervisors such as Aaron Peskin, Matt Gonzalez, Tom Ammiano, and Daly.

“The Class of 2000 was able to show how progressive we can be with policy. They really pushed the envelope,” Kim said, citing new worker and tenant protections and programs such as Healthy San Francisco. Now, she said, the challenge for progressives in the Classes of 2010 and 2008 is to show that they can provide effective leadership in realms like public safety and economic development. “If we’re able to lead on those two issues, it would really firm up our leadership of the city,” Kim said, noting that it would also affect the dynamics of next year’s mayor’s race.

While Kim didn’t go into detail about how she intends to deal with what she says is the biggest challenge facing the new board — a budget deficit of $700 million over two years, coming at a time when all the easy cuts have already been made in recent years — she said the city needs to be aggressive in boosting the local economy and ensuring San Franciscans get most city contracts.

“We need to figure out how we can partner with small business to create a diversity of jobs in San Francisco,” she said, noting that the average San Franciscan has more faith in the moderates’ ability to create jobs, something that progressives need to address. But how can she help break the grip that the conservative San Francisco Chamber of Commerce has on small businesses?

“Part of the problem is that small businesses aren’t organized,” Kim said, noting how that hurt Sup. David Chiu’s ability to win support this year for his business tax reform measure that would have helped most small businesses and made some large corporations pay more taxes. “They’re busy running their businesses and they don’t have the time to look at the details, so they just read the briefing of the Chamber of Commerce.”

Kim said she respects the leadership role Daly has played in progressive politics and that she’d “like to be part of the moral compass of the Board of Supervisors.” But she also said that Daly’s sometimes abrasive style unnecessarily hardened the opposition of moderates to important progressive issues.

“He made it harder to talk about affordable housing,” Kim said, noting that the city’s dearth of affordable housing should be an issue that’s important to middle class voters, noting that it includes housing for people who earn up to 120 percent of the median income for the region. But after Daly hammered on the issue, “It was like a bad word coming out, and people would turn off to the issue.”

But she thinks it’s a fixable problem if she and her allies do the hard work, an ability they demonstrated this year by defeating Walker, who had been running for the seat for years and lining up all the key endorsements. “Voters do respond to campaigns that work really hard, and that bodes well for progressives,” Kim said, noting that she intends to reach out to Walker’s supporters. “I don’t think I can be successful as a supervisor if I don’t work with all the camps in the progressive community.”

Is your food fair?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Is your food fair?

caitlin@sfbg.com

FAIR FOOD We’ve all worked in a restaurant, haven’t we? I know I have — many — and gosh if they aren’t tricky little employment situations. Overtime, what? Breaks, really? And health care — well who the hell gets health care at a restaurant?

But this being San Francisco, restaurant workers are entitled to all these things courtesy of our hard-won labor laws. Which of course doesn’t mean that workers get them all the time, but that they should. And the bars and eateries that provide these benies — along with job safety, respect, and other luxuries — should be the ones that get the business of the conscientious diner.

Until recently the identity of these decent restaurants was only obtainable by sneaking back into the kitchen to chat. But the advocacy group Young Workers United (www.youngworkersunited.org) is changing that. Its guide to SF restaurants, Dining With Justice, is now in its second year of publication, teaching those who want to know where they can get a nice meal served by someone who is happy and secure in their job.

“It’s kind of a counter to Zagat and Yelp,” YWU organizer Edwin Escobar tells me. Escobar just got done talking about his group’s campaign to a room full of City College of San Francisco students at the school’s “Turn the Tables” teach-in last week. The event was sponsored by CCSF’s labor and community studies program and featured presentations from community groups and SF’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement.

To research the guide, YWU members interviewed 250 employees at 32 restaurants. The 58-question survey ranked businesses in five fields: compliance with wage and working hours laws, job mobility, job satisfaction, health and safety, and job security. Only nine businesses received stars in three or more the categories; none received five out of five.

“People think, oh, it’s San Francisco, all the workers get treated well. But that’s not the case. Restaurants and retail businesses get away with murder,” Escobar says. His organization provides labor law education and advocacy for low-wage workers around the city in an attempt to stem workplace violations.

Recently, YWU shed some light on some of the troubles faced by workers in a struggle with one of the city’s most beloved type of snack stop: the taqueria. The group helped the Latino staff of the Taqueria Azteca chain (which has locations in the Castro and Noe Valley) recoup more than $2 million in back pay from owners who had cheated them of overtime compensation and even minimal control over their schedules. Escobar says one mother involved in the legal proceedings had been given a choice by management: return to work one week after giving birth or lose her job.

“The workers who get cheated the most in San Francisco are Asian immigrants,” says Shaw San Liu, another speaker at “Turn the Tables.” Liu is a lead organizer with the Chinese Progressive Association (www.cpasf.org), which since 1970 has worked to empower the Chinatown community to deal head on with social inequities. Earlier this year, the association released a report on the state of employment in Chinatown restaurants based on one-on-one interviews with 435 workers. The results were disheartening: 50 percent had worked under-minimum wage jobs; 80 percent had been cheated out of overtime; 64 percent had received no on-the-job training; a majority had been injured on the job; and more than half were paying all medical costs out of pocket.

That’s just not cool in a town that nominally protects workers against all these things by law. Liu says CPA would like to publish a guide similar to Dining With Justice to reward responsible restaurants but has run into cultural stumbling blocks. Law-abiding businesses didn’t want to be singled out as such because, owners said, it would make their neighbors look bad. “Everyone knows minimum wage in Chinatown is $1,000 a month,” says Liu. “They didn’t want to be known as the goody two-shoes.”

There are clear challenges to improving the lot of the person serving you your brunch, burritos, and dim sum. But everyone has a part to play in making it happen. “At this point, we’re just asking consumers to be aware,” Liu says.

Efforts like Dining With Justice are a real step in the right direction. YWU plans to expand its scope next year into other city neighborhoods. “Surely there are more than just nine restaurants treating their workers right in this city. We want to know about them,” YWU organizer Tiffany Crain tells the room of students assembled before her. Crain added that if anyone in attendance works for a good employer, they should call her — just as they should call her if they are getting cheated out of wages or a healthy working environment.

“You want to make money?” Liu asked SF restaurant owners. “You’re going to make money if people think you’re a good employer.” In San Francisco, diners like to think they’re eating sustainably: organic, local, and fair to workers. Also, a chef who is happy in his or her job makes for a better dining experience.

Here are restaurants that scored four stars in Dining With Justice.

Arizmendi Bakery

1331 Ninth Ave.; (415) 566-3117, www.arizmendibakery.com

Arlequin

384 Hayes; (415) 626-1211

The Corner

2199 Mission; (415) 875-9258, www.thecornersf.com

Frjtz

590 Valencia; (415) 863-8272 and 581 Hayes; (415) 864-7654, www.frjtzfries.com

Mission Pie

2901 Mission; (415) 282-1500, www.missionpie.com

Poesia

4072 18th St.; (415) 252-9325, www.poesiasf.com

Zazie

941 Cole; (415) 564-5332, www.zaziesf.com

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