Election

Lennar drops another million on June election

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They say money talks. So what does Lennar’s latest campaign expenditures tell you?

One day after our latest article about Lennar’s plans to takeover the Bayview came out, the developer’s most recent campaign filings show that between March 18 and April 19, Lennar Homes spent another million dollars to influence the Battle for the Bayview.

To date, this an out-of-state developer has spent a total of $2.23 million to defeat Prop. F (which requires that 50 percent of Lennar’s proposed 10,000 new units of housing be truly affordable to people living in the Bayview)supporting instead an initiative that would allow it to build at least 75 percent of these new units as luxury condos.

Hillary: Just go, go, GO!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I liked the jaunty conclusion to Maureen Dowd’s column summing up the Pennsylvania election in the Wednesday, April 23 New York Times:

“Before they devour themselves once more, perhaps the Democrats will take a cue from Dr. Seuss’s ‘Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now.’ (The writer once mischievously redid it for his friend Art Buchwald as ‘Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now!’ They could sing:

“”The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go…I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis…You can go in an old blue shoe.

“‘Just go, go, GO!'” B3

Ammiano: no balls, but lots of chutzpah

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

No matzo. No matzo balls. No balls but lots of chutzpah.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Tuesday, election day in Pennsylvania,
April 22, 2008.)

The SEIU strikes back

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› jesse@sfbg.com

The Rhode Island Street headquarters for Local 1021 of the giant Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had several surprise visitors April 14. First, International President Andy Stern arrived from Washington DC to speak with the local’s executive board.

Then, after word of Stern’s last minute appearance got out, a group of 20 activists from Oakland–based SEIU affiliate United Healthcare Workers West (UHW) attempted to enter the building and confront Stern about what they perceive to be his anti-democratic administration. They were barred from the meeting. When the Guardian attempted to gain entrance, we were twice escorted to the exit by 1021 staffers. A source inside the union said Stern left through a back door during lunchtime.

Stern’s visit and the dissidents’ foiled attempt to meet him reflect the high level of tension inside SEIU these days. As it prepares to vote on several democratic reform measures at a convention in early June, internal fault lines have split the 1.9 million-member union.

As we reported last week ("Hard Labor," 4/9/08) Stern loyalists have pushed the boundaries of union rules, and perhaps even federal law, to beat back the slate of reforms championed by UHW’s dissident leader, Sal Rosselli.

Now, in response to our reporting and to Rosselli’s movement, leaders inside the labor giant apparently have gone into full damage-control mode.

In fact, an election committee that appears to have been hand-picked by Local 1021’s president already rejected an internal complaint about the election process — and critics are calling foul.

WHO’S A MEMBER?


Two weeks ago, the Guardian reported on a controversial batch of e-mails among SEIU officials. Calling themselves the "salsa team," high-level union staffers — including Damita Davis-Howard, whom Stern appointed as president of 1021, as well as Josie Mooney, a Stern assistant — swapped campaign strategy and exchanged anti-Rosselli talking points during an election to select delegates to the upcoming convention.

On April 4, more than a dozen union members lodged a formal complaint with the organization’s local election committee. The complaint charged that the salsa team’s missives broke union rules against staff involvement in elections. Soon afterward, lawyers representing Rosselli’s union filed suit against Stern and the SEIU — alleging, among other things, that SEIU "officers, employees, and allies" interfered with delegate elections in violation of federal labor law.

While the lawsuit will not see a courtroom for some time, it didn’t take long for the union committee to rule against the members’ complaint. In a memo dated the following Monday, April 7, and obtained by the Guardian, the nine-member body reported to the union’s International Secretary-Treasurer that "the staff (directors and others) named in the challenge are members of Local 1021 and therefore have the same right as all other members" to participate in the election.

The distinction is key: union rules strictly forbid paid staffers from interfering in elections by members. And supporters of union democracy insist that a central tenet of their movement are the notions that staffers work for the membership — and that the members, not the staff, determine union policy (See Opinion, page 7).

The outcome is important not only to the union but to progressive politics in San Francisco. Local 1021 (and Local 790, the San Francisco chapter that predates it) has played a major role in supporting progressive causes and candidates.

The committee’s ruling, and the speed with which it reached its decision, outraged many inside the union. A number of 1021 staffers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisal called the memo "bullshit" when asked to comment.

Union member Maria Guillen, one of the members who signed the complaint, told us that the salsa team’s actions and their exoneration by the election committee "go against the spirit of union democracy." Guillen went on to challenge the assertion that union staff, especially top management like Mooney and Davis-Howard, have the same rights as rank and file members when it comes to campaigning in union elections.

"None of the executive board members I’ve spoken to can recall voting on that. Who had the authority to permit that? … To think that folks with all the resources and all the connections are working against us, it breaks my heart."

The makeup of the committee also raises conflict of interest issues.

According to the provisional bylaws for Local 1021, which were enacted after it was formed in early 2007 by merging 10 separate Northern California locals, 1021’s appointed president Damita Davis-Howard has control "in creating committees and naming members to such committees." Several sources inside the union told us she used this power to select the members of the election committee that apparently ruled on whether she herself broke union rules.

Davis-Howard did not return calls for comment and our attempts to reach committee chair Cassandra Burdick through staff at Local 1021 were unsuccessful.

SEIU international spokesperson Andy McDonald could not confirm whether Davis-Howard had in fact named the election committee members to their positions

ROUGH STUFF


In another indication of just how radioactive SEIU’s internal dissension has become, numerous Democratic politicians and party officials in California recently received a letter signed by five presidents of SEIU locals around the state, including Davis-Howard. The letter, obtained by the Guardian and dated April 2 — the day after we broke the salsa team story — seeks to reassure party members that the union will clean its own house. It also appears to warn the state’s political leaders not to choose sides between Rosselli and Stern.

With millions of dollars in its coffers, SEIU is a prime source of campaign cash for politicians.

"We have a democratic process for resolving our internal differences," the letter reads. "In fact, our members will debate and set the course of our union at our convention in June. We hope that you will respect the right of our members to decide for themselves the direction of their union and avoid involvement in our internal affairs."

SEIU’s alleged hardball tactics have extended beyond its internal conflict in recent weeks. The union has been feuding with the California Nurses Association over allegations that the nurses’ union has been attempting to woo SEIU members into switching to the competing union.

Last week, several CNA board members in Southern California claimed that SEIU staffers showed up at their doors and confronted them. SEIU confirmed that it’s sending people to CNA members’ houses, but said there was no intimidation. And last weekend, a large crowd of SEIU members allegedly stormed a convention in Michigan put on by the magazine Labor Notes. A press release from CNA claimed several people were injured and that numerous CNA officials had to flee "out the back of the hall for their safety."

SEIU’s Lynda Tran confirmed that "things got a little rough" when a group of SEIU members and staff attempted to confront a CNA official. "Folks from both sides got injured," she added.

Labor activist and author Herman Benson, of the Association for Union Democracy in New York, told the Guardian that the divisions within SEIU, and its conflicts with other unions, are nothing new in the labor movement. For nearly as long as unions have existed, he said, power struggles have taken place among union brass. "Any incumbency has enormous weapons at its disposal."

Benson praised Stern for his efforts in recruiting new members for SEIU. As the rest of organized labor has continued to decline in America, Stern’s shop has brought in nearly 1 million new members. But Benson took issue with what he perceived as intolerance for dissent within his ranks.

"Stern has a vision of an almost militarized bureaucratic labor movement … but if you can’t have criticism before your international convention, when can you have it?"

What union democracy means

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OPINION The troubles in the Service Employees International Union, and within SEIU Local 1021 in San Francisco, share a similar theme. How much do individual locals direct their work in the face of the international’s set agenda? And more important, how do union members themselves direct the vision, use of resources, and work of both their local and international union? What is union democracy and how is it made real?

Active members in Local 1021 learned a painful lesson recently when we discovered that senior 1021 staff ran a clandestine campaign during a member election to choose delegates to SEIU’s quadrennial convention this June. These same senior staff demanded that their junior staff remain completely neutral and uninvolved in the election.

A key tenet of union democracy is recognition by all parties that the union staffers work for the members, whose dues pay for their salaries and benefits, their offices, and the programs run by the union.

Local 1021’s governing bodies were appointed by Andy Stern, president of the international, at the time of the merger of 10 locals into one. Next year, Local 1021 holds its first officer and executive board elections. It is essential that we lay out bylaws and an election process guaranteeing that the direction of our local union will be led by its members.

We are at a vital juncture. Do we allow the programs and process to be driven by the international, Stern, and his loyalist staff — or do we assert ourselves as members, examine the issues for ourselves, and choose how we prioritize the work to be done?

At stake is not just the true empowerment of our union, but its credibility. We demand a sense of fair play from the employers we bargain with and consistently take a hard line against managerial favoritism.

In practically every contract campaign, there is a battle over the definition of our union and our very identity. We put forth photographs of our members, use their quotes in the press, and otherwise say to the public, the press, and elected officials that “these people are the union — the nurses, transit workers, librarians, road crews and others who serve our community.”

Meanwhile, management — as well as anti-union lobbies, officials, and think tanks — speak in more pejorative terms of “union bosses” and “big labor,” conjuring images of bureaucrats who cut deals, make the real decisions, and are disconnected from their rank-and-file membership.

It is critical that we don’t prove our opponents right. If the boss-like behavior of our leaders and the manner in which they govern this union promotes double standards, favoritism, and a lack of local autonomy, we only make it easier for anti-union forces to drive a wedge between our members and their union.

Nobody has more at stake in SEIU than the members who pay the bills and whose wages, benefits, and working conditions are being negotiated. Without the international showing respect for local autonomy or democratic empowerment at the local and worksite levels, we cannot hope for existing members to feel like stakeholders in their union, or to inspire prospective members to join us in the future.

Mary C. Magee and Roxanne Sanchez

Mary C. Magee, RN, works at San Francisco General Hospital. Roxanne Sanchez works for Bay Area Rapid Transit. They are members of SEIU Local 1021.

 

Leno, Migden, and the Newsom cuts

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EDITORIAL The closure this week of the venerable Haight Ashbury Food Program, which for more than a quarter century has served hot meals to hundreds of people a day, is another bitter reminder of what a rotten time it is to be poor in San Francisco.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s approach to the city’s budget problems is to cut programs that serve the needy: Buster’s Place, the city’s only 24-hour drop-in center for homeless people, is closed. The public health nursing program is shutting down. Frontline city workers are getting laid off, and jobs will go unfilled. And there is no talk in the mayor’s office of any sort of comprehensive plan to raise new revenue to close what has become a structural budget gap of more than $300 million.

Yes, a big part of the fault lies in Washington DC and Sacramento. The federal government has abandoned American cities. The state is wracked with its own paralyzing budget problems (caused in large part by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to eliminate the vehicle license fee). So money that San Francisco used to get without any direct effort — that is, without asking local residents and businesses to pay for it — is gone. And while San Francisco’s representatives in Sacramento have worked hard to win back money for cities and force the governor to moderate his cuts, the fact is that it’s unlikely San Francisco can count on any outside help during the next few years. The ugly budget choices have to be made at home.

That’s why it’s critical that every progressive leader in town be willing to take on the mayor’s brutal budget cuts and push for humane alternatives. That includes the two people running in a highly contested race for state Senate.

Carole Migden and Mark Leno are both seeking progressive support in the June primary. Both have good cases to make based on their records. But we need to see more than just good votes (and good legislation) in the state capital; like a lot of voters, we’re also looking to see which candidate will use the powerful seat and its bully pulpit to promote progressive values in the city.

Both candidates have long connections to the powerful forces that seek to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Migden is close to Don Fisher, the Republican who pours huge gobs of money into regressive local measures and candidates. Leno has been endorsed by Newsom.

But with the election less than two months away, we’d like to hear both of them say, loudly and publicly, that the Newsom cuts are wrong and unacceptable, that the budget pain should be shared by the wealthy, and that the city needs to look at new taxes before it eliminates any more programs for the needy.

A less perfect union

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› jesse@sfbg.com

By nearly every measure, the Service Employees International Union has become a juggernaut. As the rest of organized labor has seen its share of the American workforce continue to dwindle, SEIU has brought in some 800,000 new dues-paying members in recent years. With the Democratic Party taking over Congress in 2006, the 1.9 million-member organization, rich with campaign funds, wields enormous political clout, and it will only become more formidable if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama wins the White House in November.

But all is not well inside the labor giant. Andy Stern, the union’s president, has pushed hard for merging and consolidating local chapters into larger operations — and many SEIU members, especially here on the West Coast, say that’s turning the union into a top-down autocracy in which Stern loyalists wield undue influence and meddling officials from Washington, DC squelch dissent.

And now, the Guardian has learned, Stern operatives are using their money and organizing clout in a hard-hitting campaign — not to force an employer to the table or to toss out an anti-union politician, but to discredit another labor leader.

The campaign is part of a bruising power struggle between Stern and dissident local leader Sal Rosselli, who runs the Oakland-based SEIU affiliate United Health Care Workers West. In the past few months, union insiders say, SEIU officials, including a senior assistant to Stern, set up what one leader called a "skunk team" to undermine Rosselli’s efforts at winning key union delegate elections. At one point, the team — which involved a political consulting firm linked to big downtown businesses — discussed an opposition research file compiled on Rosselli by a health-care giant his union was fighting

And leading up to the delegate elections last month, SEIU staffers worked to promote Stern-supporting candidates, possibly in violation of union rules, while actively discouraging other union employees from campaigning. That’s led to a formal complaint alleging improper involvement by Stern’s staff in a local union election.

EMERGING TENSIONS


In 2005, Thomas Dewar went to work as a press secretary at Local 790, formerly SEIU’s biggest San Francisco outlet, which represented approximately 30,000 workers, most of them public employees. Local 790 was among the most politically progressive union shops in the country, supporting left-leaning candidates for office and progressive causes like public power. In early 2007, Andy Stern initiated a merger of 790 with nine other regional locals. The move was part of a larger consolidation in the state that saw the number of California union affiliates reduced by nearly half.

The new Northern California superlocal was dubbed 1021, as in "10 to one." Local 1021 has continued 790’s liberal activism. But right after the merger was finalized, Dewar and other sources told the Guardian, the atmosphere around the union changed for the worse.

"A lot of members had anxiety," Dewar recounted. Most troubling, he said, was the insertion of Stern appointees into leadership positions, including current president Damita Davis-Howard. "Members were upset. They saw co-workers whom they had elected unilaterally removed by a guy in DC and replaced by his handpicked appointments."

Ed Kinchley, a Local 1021 member who was appointed by Stern to the local’s executive board after the consolidation, shared Dewar’s memory of the tensions. "You had 10 different locals with 10 different ways of doing things. It’s difficult to merge all of that. A lot of people who had been elected to leadership positions were removed."

Dewar told us he struggled to adjust to his new working environment. But after his initial misgivings, he said he devoted himself to backing Stern’s vision for the combined local: "We were told over and over that change is hard. So I decided to give it an honest shot." Dewar said he worked to get good press for 1021 and to build Davis-Howard’s profile.

But early this year, tensions between Rosselli and Stern flared — and according to Dewar, top staffers at 1021 began to focus more and more of their attention on the feud.

"They were freaking out about Sal," he said.

Enraged at what he considered International meddling in the affairs of his Oakland-based local, United Healthcare Workers West, Rosselli resigned from SEIU’s executive committee in early February. He also began championing a "Platform for Change" to be voted on at the upcoming SEIU convention in June. Among other things, the Rosselli-backed slate of reforms would give local union outlets more say in proposed mergers and collective bargaining agreements. The platform, if approved, would also scrap the current delegate system for electing International officials and replace it with a one-member, one-vote structure.

According to Dewar’s account and to evidence obtained by the Guardian, top SEIU officials have been working overtime to counter Rosselli — even pushing the boundaries of the union’s own rules and colluding with political consultants who have often opposed organized labor.

‘THE ANTI-CHRIST’


In early March, Dewar said that in early March, Josie Mooney, a former Local 790 president who is now a top assistant to Stern, approached him about joining what she characterized as a "skunk team that Andy and I are putting together." Dewar recalls Mooney telling him that the purpose of the team was to counter Rosselli’s increasing popularity with the rank and file, and to sink Rosselli’s platform for the convention.

Dewar told us that Mooney asked him to join the skunk team during a brunch meeting at the Fog City Diner in early March. An e-mail exchange he shared with us shows that he and Mooney discussed having brunch at the diner on March 1.

Mooney did not return numerous calls for comment and, through an SEIU spokesperson, she declined to speak for this article. But Dewar told us Mooney promised him at the brunch that his assistance in her efforts would win him positive attention from Stern. The team, she reportedly told him, was directly authorized by Stern and "that resources would not be a problem."

Dewar said he vacillated about joining the team, torn about aiding what he considered to be an internal union smear squad. "In 1021, we’re conditioned to think that Sal Rosselli is the anti-Christ," Dewar told us. "But even still, he was still a part of the same union." A March 4 e-mail from Mooney’s SEIU e-mail account to Dewar shows her urging Dewar to make up his mind: "You have to give me your commitment. I am (as we speak) selling you at the highest levels. Don’t blow that :)."

Dewar eventually agreed to join Mooney, Tom DeBruin — an elected vice president of SEIU International — and someone Dewar said Mooney referred to as the team’s "silent partner" for a dinner meeting.

E-mails from Mooney and other attendees show that the meeting took place March 10 at Oliveto Restaurant in Oakland.

Mooney’s "silent partner" turned out to be Mark Mosher, of the enormously successful San Francisco consulting firm, Barnes, Mosher, Whitehurst, Lauter, and Partners (BMWL). John Whitehurst, another of the firm’s partners, also attended the dinner.

BMWL has worked for the SEIU since 2001. But its client roster also included Sutter Health and the Committee on Jobs. Both organizations have less-than-stellar reputations among organized labor. Nurses at 10 Bay Area Sutter hospitals recently walked off the job for a 10-day strike. The Committee on Jobs is one of the largest lobbying organizations for downtown San Francisco business interests and has fought against numerous union causes. Mosher told the Guardian by phone that, as of November of last year, the Committee is no longer a BMWL client.

THE ROSSELLI FILE


Dewar claims Sal Rosselli was the central topic of conversation at the dinner. At one point, he says, the participants discussed an "oppo research" file on Rosselli compiled by Sutter Health. The hospital giant has clashed repeatedly with Rosselli and apparently had sought to dig up dirt on him.

Whitehurst worked for Sutter in the 1990s. His efforts for the hospital chain during a ballot campaign in 1997 earned him a place on the California Labor Federation’s "do not patronize" list.

Mosher confirmed by phone that Rosselli’s file at Sutter did in fact come up at Oliveto that evening. But he said Dewar "baited" him and Whitehurst into discussing it. Furthermore, he said, Whitehurst reported that Rosselli’s file was "clean."

In fact, a March 12, 2008 e-mail from Dewar to Mosher suggests that the team focus on Rosselli’s "hypocrisy" and states, "Have we approached anyone at Sutter re: dirt on Sal? Have we been able to peek into their oppo file?"

Later that day Mosher replied, "John Whitehurst read Sutter’s whole oppo file on Sal in 1997." In a follow-up message, Mosher writes that the file "really supports the idea that he’s not motivated by money."

DeBruin did not return calls for comment. Kami Lloyd, communications coordinator for Sutter, disputed whether the oppo file even existed: "To my knowledge," she told us, "no such file exists at Sutter Health."

Reached for comment, Rosselli reacted angrily to news of the alleged "skunk team" and the fact that a research file on him, compiled by a corporation perceived to be anti-union, was being discussed among SEIU officials. "It’s shocking. It’s treasonous. For Andy Stern to be using our members’ dues money to finance [a smear] campaign against his own members in United Healthcare Workers, it’s fundamentally anti-union."

Mosher defended his firm’s involvement with SEIU. He told us that he and Whitehurst were "not brought on board to do negative things against Sal Rosselli." Instead, he said their mission has been to help tout the union’s accomplishments as it prepares to hold its convention from June 1-4 in Puerto Rico.

SEIU spokesman Andy McDonald echoed Mosher’s description of the firm’s duties. Both Mosher and McDonald brought up the fact that Whitehurst has also worked for Rosselli’s UHW union.

UHW’s Paul Kumar confirmed that Whitehurst is currently "on our payroll" to assist in a dispute against Sutter Health — the very company Whitehurst worked for in the 1990s and the same source that provided him with access to Rosselli’s research file. "These guys [BMWL] claim they are trying to reinvent themselves," Kumar said. "But to be on our payroll and to engage directly in executing a dirty tricks program … is about the most blatant violation of professional ethics I can imagine."

Whitehurst did not return calls for comment.

Dewar claimed he urged Mooney and the other attendees of the March 10 dinner to consider "appropriating" Rosselli’s democratic reforms. "The members would all wildly support it. And that way, if the International co-opted Rosselli’s ideas, then [the internal conflict] really would be about this clash of personalities, Rosselli versus Stern, instead of ideas." According to Dewar, Mosher and Whitehurst were receptive to the proposal to co-opt Rosselli’s initiatives, but that "Josie nixed it."

When we asked Mosher if he remembered this exchange from the meeting, he said his memory was "hazy" and that "a lot was being discussed that night."

Although Dewar was, by his own account, an active participant in the skunk team, he says he started to have second thoughts. The dinner at Oliveto, Dewar said, and the discussion of Sutter’s file on Rosselli, "made me want to take a shower … the cynicism I was exposed to was toxic."

One week later, he sent Mooney an e-mail informing her that, "Today’s my last day at SEIU … the circular firing squads that are now forming in the local and in SEIU nationally have left me jaded, stressed out, and depressed."

SEIU’s McDonald denied that the skunk team exists, or ever existed. He added that "the meeting [at Oliveto] was about talking about how [Mosher] could help SEIU communicate our message … within the context of the misinformation campaign being spread by Sal Rosselli and UHW’s leaders."

OUTSIDE INFLUENCE


The rancor between Rosselli and Stern has reached a boiling point in recent weeks. In compiling this story, we had to wade through reams of documents and endure long expatiations from officials and press flaks about the sins of the other side. Both factions have constructed slick, professional-looking Web sites to question the probity of their rivals, and both have coined kitschy names for their respective policy initiatives. The SEIU has countered Rosselli’s "Platform for Change" with what union leaders call a "Justice for All" platform.

But the internecine struggle may have driven Josie Mooney and other high-level SEIU staffers to do much more than vent about Rosselli or seek dirt on him from political consultants. E-mails obtained by the Guardian suggest that she and other SEIU officials worked to influence an important local delegate election last month — possibly in violation of union rules — and, some union members now allege, in violation of federal law.

Delegates selected in the election will attend the union’s international convention in June and will decide between the Rosselli’s "Change" and Stern’s "Justice" platforms. The outcome of that vote, and others like it, will shape the mammoth labor organization’s future for years to come. And the e-mails appear to show a concerted effort by Mooney and Stern loyalists to ensure that Rosselli’s dissidents don’t stack the convention and push through their set of reforms.

Referring to themselves in the e-mails as the "Salsa Team," SEIU staffers discussed strategy and coordinated campaign activity for the delegate election with high-ranking union officials like Mooney and Damita Davis-Howard, the president of Local 1021, the e-mails show. In a formal complaint, some members charge that these activities violated Local 1021’s Election Rules and Procedures — specifically Rule 18, which states that "while in the performance of their duties, union staff shall remain uninvolved and neutral in relation to candidate endorsements and all election activities."

While Rule 18 does not specifically spell out when union staff can advocate for candidates, other than proscribing such activities "while in performance of their duties," the e-mails in our possession are date- and time-stamped, and at least one was sent during normal business hours. Furthermore, the Guardian has obtained an internal memo from Local 1021 official (and apparent Salsa Team member) Patti Tamura in which she warned union staffers that the phrase "’performance of their duties’ goes beyond [Monday through Friday] and 9-5p."

One Local 1021 official who asked not to be identified told us that Tamura’s memo appeared to be a clear message that staff should stay completely out of the election. "They made it perfectly clear to the lower staff that your employment doesn’t stop [after hours]; you’re still staff. That means you don’t get involved. But now it turns out they themselves were doing it. That’s a double standard … it’s certainly not right."

The messages between Salsa Team members show them actively working to recruit potential delegates sympathetic to Stern’s platform and to aid Davis-Howard in her bid to represent the union at the June convention. One missive, dated Feb. 18, which appears to come from the personal e-mail account of Local 1021 employee Jano Oscherwitz and was sent to what appear to be the personal accounts of Tamura and Mooney, requests that a "message for Damita" be drafted.

A forwarded e-mail from that same day, from Oscherwitz to what appear to be personal e-mail accounts for Tamura, fellow 1021 staffer Gilda Valdez, and "Damita" includes a "Draft Message" with bulleted talking points, apparently for Davis-Howard to use as she "Collect[s] Signatures on Commitment Cards."

"Commitment cards" refers to pledges from union members to support certain delegates.

The e-mails go beyond merely aiding Davis-Howard and other Stern-backed candidates. They also include detailed strategy for opposing Rosselli and countering his message. A March 5 Salsa Team message includes an attached document with several talking points critical of the dissident leader. In the body of the e-mail, SEIU staffer Gilda Valdez advises Davis-Howard, Mooney, 1021 Chief of Staff Marion Steeg, and others to "Memorize the points in talking to folks." Valdez goes on to say in the e-mail that she "will be calling … about your assignments."

Reached for comment, Davis-Howard confirmed that the AOL e-mail account listed as "Damita" was hers. But she claimed no knowledge of the Salsa Team or the messages sent to her. "If you’re saying those e-mails went to my home computer, who knows if I ever even got them?"

Davis-Howard bristled at the suggestion that the Salsa Team’s activities violated union rules. "Are you trying to tell me that I can never campaign? Does it [Rule 18] say that I have to be neutral and uninvolved 24 hours a day?"

Calls to Mooney, Oscherwitz, Valdez, and Tamura were not returned. Through an SEIU spokesman, Mooney declined to comment.

A BAD AFTERTASTE


On April 4, three days after the Guardian first reported on the Salsa Team e-mails on our Web site, Sanchez and several other 1021 officials filed a formal complaint with the union’s election committee. In the complaint, they accuse Davis-Howard and the other team members of vioutf8g Rules 10 and 18 of the union’s election codes. Rule 10 forbids "the use of union and employer funds … to support any candidate."

Local 1021 executive board member and Stern appointee Ed Kinchley authored part of the complaint. According to the text, which was obtained by the Guardian, Kinchley wrote, "While telling other staff that they may be fired for any intervention in this election, Ms. Davis-Howard and the others involved secretly did exactly what they told other staff they were forbidden from doing."

The complaint was signed by 16 Local 1021 officials, including numerous members of the local’s executive board. It called on the election committee to remove Davis-Howard "from the elected Delegate list" and to bar Salsa Team members from attending the convention in June.

The issue also has landed in federal court, where UHW was expected to file against Stern and other SEIU officials, alleging interference in delegate elections.

More cynical sources both inside and outside SEIU told us they believe the Rosselli-Stern feud boils down to one thing: power — either holding onto or expanding it. But labor scholar and former Local 790 member Paul Johnston had a more nuanced perspective.

Johnston, who taught at Yale and, until recently, worked for the Monterey Bay Labor Council, told us he admired both leaders and the work each has done on behalf of the larger union. Calling the current strife "a huge can of worms," he added, "These are questions of principle and there are good ideas on both sides."

Stern’s push to increase the union’s bargaining and political clout through more consolidation, Johnston went on, "has some very positive aspects to it…. In the old days, many of these kind of mergers were done for purely political power. The mergers being conducted today [at Stern’s direction] are primarily strategic, though. But there are some power issues that inevitably arise." On the other hand, he said, Rosselli’s UHW, "is a dynamic organizing union that has [its] own issues."

Barack Obama-sistible

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Another crazy day in the presidential election.
Another crazy Obama video.

Endorsement: Barry Hermanson

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Let’s not fool ourselves: Jackie Speier, the former state senator from San Mateo County, will be replacing the late Tom Lantos in Congress. The odds are pretty good that she’ll emerge with enough votes in the special election April 8 to take the seat immediately, and she’s bound to win the Democratic primary in June and get elected to a full term in November.

And that’s not a terrible thing. Speier’s an experienced legislator, was a solid advocate for consumers and for privacy rights in Sacramento, and is already better on the war than Lantos was. Speier told us that she favors immediate troop withdrawal, and that she would was unlikely to vote for any more appropriations for the war unless the money was earmarked for drawdown and withdrawal activities.

But on a lot of issues, she’s something of a disappointment to progressives in the district. She talks about single-payer health care, but wants to keep the private insurance companies in the picture and she talked a lot to us about forcing consumers to limit medical expenses to contain costs. She wasn’t willing to commit to seeking to overturn the privatization of the Presidio and she supports Don Fisher’s plans to build a private museum there. Although she wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire, she was very, very shaky about raising taxes on the very rich (even capital gains taxes). When we asked her what she would do about preventing the financial-services mess that created the home mortgage crisis, she only said she would be “more willing to support an increased regulatory environment than not.”

In other words, she’s promising to be a mainstream Democrat who’s unwilling to push the edge on a lot of issues that people in her district care about.

So, if only as a protest vote (and to remind Speier that she has to be accountable to the progressives) we’re backing Green Party candidate Barry Hermanson.

Hermanson, who for years ran a small business in town, talks openly not just about ending the war but about dramatically cutting defense spending, which, he points out, sucks up more than 60 percent of the entire federal discretionary budget. He’s for government-run single payer, for tighter regulation of the financial sector and for a massive public investment in infrastructure and green technology.

Michelle McMurry, who is running as a Democrat, is a physician, a smart and articulate person with a thoughtful approach to health care. We’d love to see her stay active in politics, but she needs a bit more seasoning before she’s ready for Congress.

So we’ll go with Hermanson in the April 8 special election.

Migden: in for the long haul

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An update to my earlier post on Migden’s court win yesterday:

I just got off the line with a source at the Eastern District courthouse. He told me the soonest Migden’s case could be heard would be 6 weeks from now. That would be mid-May, only 2-3 weeks from the election. Any sooner than that, he said, would be “extremely unlikely.” He wouldn’t go on the record with a guess as to when it would be litigated, but from what I gathered, it could be as far down the road as three months from now.

In other words, Migden’s going to have money in the bank for the foreseeable future. That means everyone hoping she would drop out to assure the District 3 seat stays in San Francisco hands shouldn’t hold their breath; it looks like it’s going to be a three horse race for the duration.

Score one for Migden and her lawyers – and also for Joe Nation, who will probably benefit almost as much as Migden herself from the decision handed down yesterday …

Migden finally wins one …

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Yesterday, after a bruising month and a potentially devastating weekend in which she failed to win the nomination of the California Democratic Party, incumbent State Senator Carole Migden finally saw something go her way – at least for now. Judge Edmund Brennan of the Eastern District Court for California in Sacramento ruled that she should be allowed access to over $600,000 in funds the state’s campaign finance watchdog had barred her from spending.

Last month, Midgen sued the Fair Political Practices Commission to gain access to the cash. The FPPC had declared it, and a reported $400,000 more that the Senator had already spent (in possible violation of state law) “surplus.” California’s surplus funds law places strict conditions on how and when politicians can transfer funds between various accounts. Migden responded by hauling the regulators to federal court and attempting to overturn the law on First Amendment grounds – citing a landmark Supreme Court ruling which equates political money with free speech.

Judge Brennan’s ruling yesterday was not an outright victory for Migden. The judge did not officially weigh in on the law’s constitutionality. He simply stated that, until the lawsuit can proceed in earnest, she should be allowed to tap into the accounts. But Roman Porter, spokesperson for the FPPC, told us it might not be as easy to get to the money as one would think. The cash, he told us, has been shifted around so much by Migden’s campaigns, no one is quite sure how to get it into her current accounts.

“Right now we’re still trying to figure out how that can legally happen … we’ve never been in a circumstance like this before.”

But in the end, provided that regulators and Migden’s campaign can figure out a way to move the money into her coffers, the lawsuit itself might just be an afterthought. No matter how things eventually turn out, Judge Brennan’s ruling yesterday does one critical thing for the embattled incumbent – it literally buys her more time in the race.

Calls placed to the judge’s courtroom deputy, who handles his calendar, were not immediately returned, but many observers expect the legal process to drag on for weeks, even months. The primary election is on June 3rd. By the time anything gets settled for real, the race is likely to be over and Migden no doubt will have spent most, if not all, of the money in question.

SEIU skullduggery

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>jesse@sfbg.com

As an internal power struggle wracks the giant Service Employees International Union, emails obtained by the Guardian suggest that SEIU officials may have violated union rules by working to influence an important San Francisco delegate election last month.

Delegates selected by Local 1021, based in SF, will attend the union’s international convention in June and will vote on a series of democratic reforms put forward by dissident labor leader Sal Rosselli. In recent weeks, Rosselli has clashed publicly with SEIU’s international president Andy Stern over Stern’s increasing consolidation of the 1.9 million-member labor organization.

And the emails appear to show a concerted effort by Stern’s senior staff and local loyalists to ensure that the dissidents don’t dominate the convention delegation.

Referring to themselves in the emails as the “Salsa Team,” SEIU staffers discussed strategy and coordinated campaign activity for the delegate election with high-ranking union officials like Damita Davis-Howard, the president of Local 1021, and Josie Mooney, a special assistant to Stern, the emails show.

Critics charge that these activities violated Local 1021’s Election Rules and Procedures – specifically Rule 18, which states, “While in the performance of their duties, union staff shall remain uninvolved and neutral in relation to candidate endorsements and all election activities.”

While Rule 18 does not specifically spell out when union staff can advocate for candidates, other than proscribing such activities “while in performance of their duties,” the emails in our possession are date and time stamped and several of them were sent during business hours.

Furthermore, the Guardian has obtained an internal memo from Local 1021 official Patti Tamura in which she warned union staffers that the phrase “‘performance of their duties’ goes beyond [Monday through Friday] and 9-5p.”

One Local 1021 official who asked not to be identified told us that Tamura’s memo appeared to be a clear message that staff should stay completely out of the election. “They made it perfectly clear to the lower staff that your employment doesn’t stop [after hours], you’re still staff. That means, you don’t get involved. But now it turns out they themselves were doing it. That’s a double standard … it’s certainly not right.”

The messages between Salsa Team members show them actively working to recruit potential delegates sympathetic to Stern’s vision for the SEIU and to aid Davis-Howard in her bid to represent the union at the June convention. One missive, dated February 18, which appears to come from the personal email account of Local 1021 employee Jano Oscherwitz and was sent to what appear to be the personal accounts of Tamura and Mooney, requests that a “message for Damita” be drafted.

According to the time stamp on the message, Oscherwitz sent it at 12:03 PM. Feb. 18 was a Monday. [Update: February 18th was the President’s Day holiday. However an email stamped 4:26 PM on the following day, Tuesday the 19th, shows Salsa Team members continuing to confer about Davis-Howard’s campaigning, as well as the recruitment of potential delegates.]

A forwarded email stamped 3:18 PM on that same day, from Oscherwitz to what appear to be personal email accounts for Tamura, fellow 1021 staffer Gilda Valdez, and “Damita” includes a “Draft Message” with bulleted talking points, apparently for Davis-Howard to use as she “Collect[s] Signatures on Commitment Cards.”

“Commitment cards” refers to pledges from union members to support certain delegates.

At the convention, scheduled for June 1 through 4 in Puerto Rico, delegates will weigh in on a series of reforms backed by Roselli, chief of the United Health Care Workers West. These reforms include eliminating the current delegate system for electing union leaders, giving local unions more authority in bargaining for their own contracts, and granting locals more say in proposed mergers.

Stern opposes Rosselli’s reforms. A March 5 Salsa Team message includes an attached document with several talking points critical of Rosselli. In the body of the email, SEIU staffer Gilda Valdez advises Davis-Howard, Mooney, 1021 chief of staff Marion Steeg, and others to “Memorize the points in talking to folks.” Valdez goes on to say in the email that she “will be calling … about your assignments.”

Reached for comment, Davis-Howard confirmed that the AOL email account listed as “Damita” was hers. But she claimed no knowledge of the Salsa Team or the messages sent to her. “If you’re saying those emails went to my home computer, who knows if I ever even got them?”

Despite her unwillingness to acknowledge whether she had received the messages, Davis-Howard bristled at the suggestion that the Salsa Team’s activities violated union rules. “Are you trying to tell me that I can never campaign? Does it [Rule 18] say that I have to be neutral and uninvolved 24 hours a day?”

Calls to Mooney, Oscherwitz, Valdez, and Tamura were not returned.

But some union members think there’s a serious problem here. In a written statement, Roxanne Sanchez, who was the president of the San Francisco local before it was merged with other Northern California locals to create 1021, accused Davis-Howard and the Salsa Team of “rigging the outcome” of the delegate election.

“This type of breach in ethical conduct – at such a high level – threatens the foundation of trust and confidence in our Union and in President Damita Davis-Howard’s ability to hold fair elections,” she said.

Sanchez informed us by phone that a formal complaint will be filed with the union’s election committee by Friday.

Labor’s merger pains

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› jesse@sfbg.com

Part one of a series on the emerging problems with labor mergers

For well over 100 years, San Francisco hod carriers — workers who assist stone, brick, and plaster masons — have gathered at the Local 36 hiring hall to find work. Though not as large and bustling as it was in its heyday, the hall, now situated in Daly City, still serves as an important social as well as professional gathering place for San Francisco and San Mateo County "hoddies."

But on Monday, March 10 and Tuesday the 11th, when the union’s members arrived to put in for jobs, they found the entrance shuttered and a paper sign taped to the door.

"This Office Will be Temporarily Closed Due to the Transition of the Separation between Local Unions," the sign read. Several South Bay phone numbers were listed below — one for the dispatch office at Local 270, a much larger South Bay chapter of the Laborer’s International Union of North America (LIUNA), and one for Carlos Lujan, 270’s business manager. When the workers tried to call the numbers to secure work, they claim officials at 270 told them they couldn’t help them.

Meanwhile, several told the Guardian they could hear the phone ringing through the hiring hall door as calls from contractors came into the office. Every phone call most likely meant a job that would not be filled by one of the willing workers left outside.

"I felt abandoned," 25-year union member Jerrold ‘JJ’ Jones told the Guardian. Jones told us he waited for nearly three hours for the hall to open on March 11, only to give up in frustration. "Here I pay dues six months in advance and because that hall is closed, I didn’t have the opportunity to go out for a job that day."

A LESS THAN PERFECT UNION


The reasons for the hall’s closure trace back to an ill-fated merger between Local 36 and Local 270. The story is more than just a tiff in a relatively small labor group; it’s symbolic of a much wider issue that’s beginning to explode in organized labor.

In recent years, unions across the country have been encouraging smaller locals like 36 to join with larger shops to increase their clout and negotiating power. Supporters say these mergers create organizations better able to stand up to giant businesses and institutions.

But the trend also has drawbacks: more members under the aegis of one organization means more power in fewer hands — and sometimes, a lack of union democracy.

Local 36 seemed a prime candidate for merger, with only 120 members. Local 270 had more than 4,000 dues-paying workers and hefty political and trust fund accounts. But high-placed sources within the San Jose local tell us that it’s had serious turmoil over the past year — and the members from San Francisco say they feel left out.

Local 270’s leader, Carlos Lujan, is the subject of an investigation by the international union’s inspector general. Documents provided to the Guardian show that the inspector general has been looking into several complaints about Lujan’s leadership, including his conduct of meetings. An official from the parent union has observed the last three executive board gatherings and is expected to file a report with the Washington brass in the coming weeks.

"Clearly there are troubles out there," attorney Bob Luskin of the Washington firm Patton, Boggs, told us. Luskin acts as the union’s special counsel. "The marriage [between 36 and 270] looked like a good idea at first," he said. "But in the end, it didn’t turn out so well."

Much of the current internal strife at Local 270 appears to have begun when Lujan announced his retirement at the end of March 2007. Two weeks prior to his planned departure, Lujan’s advisors proposed a post-retirement consultant’s job for him. According to a complaint filed with the Department of Fair Housing and Employment by former 270 employee Leslie Scanagatta, the consulting gig would have paid Lujan $500 a week, and the union would pay to fly him from his home in Texas to San Jose for meetings.

Scanagatta’s complaint states that Lujan became angry after she and several other officials voiced concerns with the plan. It alleges that Lujan declared to another union official that she would "be terminated by the end of the week" — which she was.

"It was devastating," Scanagatta, who now works for Santa Cruz County, said. "I was laid off for eight months and I’ve taken a 38 percent pay cut now."

Lujan did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.

One of the people pushing for Lujan’s consultant job was Edgar Calonje. Calonje, who worked for the union as an independent contractor, said he met with Lujan before the boss announced his retirement, and that Lujan told him and Enrique Arguello, a member of 270’s executive board, that he was planning "to get his retirement [benefits] and consultant fees as well."

"We thought if we helped him [get the deal], we would be in good shape," Calonje said by phone from Nicaragua, where he was visiting family. "But that’s not what happened."

First, Lujan withdrew his retirement and decided to stay on. Then, in November 2007, Colanje lost his job — after, he says, a private memo he had written surfaced in which he criticized Lujan’s leadership and integrity.

Shortly after Colanje was let go, Arguello — who now says he didn’t actively support Lujan’s retirement plan — resigned from his job as a business agent rather than accept a demotion. A Nov. 28 letter from Lujan to Arguello obtained by the Guardian states, "the reason for the change in your position was because the pattern of actions made by you in the past could put this Local in a difficult position."

THE LOCK OUT


Early in 2008, the atmosphere of dissension in San Jose began to affect the hiring hall in Daly City, and eventually boiled over into physical confrontation. First, former Local 36 business manager Alex Corns clashed with Lujan and resigned in a huff from his new job at 270. Then Will Davis, who ran the Daly City hall after the merger, was dismissed. A March 6 letter from Lujan to Davis cites Davis’s "lack of commitment to work under my agenda as Business Manager" as the reason for his termination.

The following afternoon, Friday, March 7, Davis and Corns arrived at the hall to find the locks changed. That evening, they told us, a group of former Local 36 members met in a pizza parlor across from the shuttered hall and decided to petition the International to grant Local 36 back its independence. According to their account of what happened next, which was verified by Sgt. Ron Mussman of the Daly City Police Department, when Davis, Corns, and the other participants in the meeting emerged from the pizza parlor, they saw Lujan sitting in his pickup truck, which was parked in the restaurant’s lot. Across the street, two officials from 270 were inside the hiring hall removing computer equipment.

The now-dissident union members surrounded Lujan’s vehicle. Lujan fled the scene, according to worker and police accounts, allegedly striking one of the members in the forearm with his car as he backed up. The incensed crowd moved across the street and the workers from 270 barricaded themselves inside the hall. Lujan reportedly flagged down a police car as he drove away and the cops drove to the hall to escort the two men from San Jose safely out of the building.

Corns and Davis said they could not secure keys to the hall’s new locks by the time of Monday morning’s job call. For two consecutive mornings, out-of-work union members were turned away. Corns told us he finally called a local locksmith late Tuesday morning, March 11, so that members could be dispatched to jobs the following day.

HOW BIG IS TOO BIG?


For Corns, the failed merger with Local 270 is a personal as well as a professional tragedy: he was instrumental in helping 36 join with 270 after Lujan’s election as the bigger local’s business manager. Now he feels responsible for jeopardizing the organization he’s worked for since he was a teenager.

"I’ve been in the union for 35 years," Corns said, his voice choking up. "This is so heartbreaking to me."

Beyond the problems with one controversial business manager, Corns says the story is about the larger problem: increasingly top-down union management. In late February, he told us, 70 members of Local 36 voted unanimously to secede from 270 and become an autonomous chapter again. A representative from LIUNA was present at the vote and confirmed their version of the events for us. Despite the members’ calls for autonomy, officials in LIUNA’s International office in Washington, DC refused to go along; instead, on March 13, union brass granted their secession from Local 270 but immediately forced 36 into another merger — this time with a chapter based in Oakland, Local 166.

As a result of the two mergers, Corns says, the assets of Local 36 have been swallowed up by the larger chapters. He produced old bank account statements for us that showed well more than $100,000 in Local 36’s coffers before the organization joined with 270. Now, he says, he doesn’t know where that money is. Laborer’s International spokesperson Jacob Hay told us that the parent union is undertaking a "reconciliation process" to determine how much of Local 36’s money should go to Oakland and how much should stay in San Jose. Despite the apparent desire for independence among 36’s members, Hay argued that the union is making the right decision by forcing them into another merger.

"We think that it is in the best interests of smaller locals like [36] to join with larger, more powerful locals," he said. "You have more collective bargaining power with larger numbers [of members] … the goal here is to get all the hod carriers in the Bay Area into one local."

Will Davis and other Local 36 members do not share Hay’s bigger-is-better enthusiasm. "We’ve never gotten a good reason why we can’t just have the local back," Davis said. "We’ve never done anything wrong. We’ve never been under investigation. Why are we being punished for something we didn’t do?"

Editor’s Note: In the paper edition of this article, the Guardian misidentified two dates. Lujan announced his retirement in 2007, and the atmosphere of dissension began to affect the hiring hall in Daly City early in 2008.

Mexico’s comeback kid

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MEXICO CITY — As Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the leftist firebrand whom millions of Mexicans consider their legitimate president, made his way to the podium in the packed Zocalo plaza here March 18th, the 70th anniversary of the expropriation and nationalization of an oil industry now threatened with re-privatization, hundreds of senior citizens, AMLO’s firmest followers, rose as one from their seats of honor at the side of the stage, raised their frail fists in salute, and chanted that, despite the cobwebs of old age, they do not forget. “Tenemos Memoria!” We Have Memory!

What did they remember? Tiburcio Quintanilla, 83, remembers how when President Lazaro Cardenas called upon his countrymen and women to donate to a fund to pay indemnities to the gringo oil companies, he went with his father to the Palace of Bellas Artes and stood on line for hours with their chickens, their contribution to taking back “our chapopote (petroleum).” I was born in the same week that Lazaro Cardenas nationalized Mexico’s oil, I tell Don Tiburcio. I’m only a kid.

Up on the same stage from which he directed the historic seven-week siege of the capital after the Great Fraud of 2006 that awarded the presidency to his right-wing rival Felipe Calderon, AMLO looked more grizzled, weather-beaten, a little hoarse after two years on the road relentlessly roaming the Mexican outback bringing his message to “los de abajo” (those down below) and signing up nearly 2,000,000 new constituents for his National Democratic Convention (CND), which is increasingly embroiled in a bitter battle for control of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD.)

Now Lopez Obrador has thrust himself into the leadership of the movement to defend the nation’s oil industry (PEMEX) from privatization in the guise of Calderon’s energy-reform legislation.

Calderon and his cohorts seek to persuade Mexicans that PEMEX is broken, the reserves running out, and the nation’s only hope lies in deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Drilling for what the Calderonistas describe as “The Treasure of Mexico” in a widely distributed, lavishly produced infomercial, will require an “association” with Big Oil. But as many experts, such as Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of the president who expropriated the oil in the first place, point out, it is not at all certain that these purported deep sea reserves are actually in Mexican waters.

AMLO’s March 18th “informative assembly” of the National Democratic Convention was certainly the most emotional since he convoked the CND on Independence Day in September 2006, after the courts had designated Calderon as president. Poised under a monumental tri-color flag that furled and unfurled dramatically in the spring zephyrs, and addressing tens of thousands of loyalists in the heart of the Mexican body politic, Lopez Obrador told the story of Mexico’s oil.

Oil is a patriotic lubricant here, and AMLO is imbued in what historians once called revolutionary nationalism, the apogee of which was Lazaro Cardenas’s March 18th 1938 order expropriating the holdings of 17 Anglo-American oil companies who were about to secede from the union and declare themselves “The Republic of the Gulf of Mexico.” AMLO recalled how the companies had defied a Supreme Court order to pay $26 million USD to the nation’s oil workers leaving General Cardenas (he had been a revolutionary general) no option but to take back Mexico’s oil. How patriotic Mexicans like Don Tiburcio and his father lined up to pay off the debt with their chickens and family jewels. Cardenas’s subsequent creation of a national oil corporation, “Petrolios Mexicanos” or PEMEX, was seen as the guarantee of a great future for Mexico.

But things have worked out differently.

“Privatization is corruption!” AMLO harangues, “The oil is ours! La Patria No Se Vende!”

“La Patria No Se Vende, La Patria Se Defiende!” the crowd roars back, “The country is not for sale, The country is to defend!” “Pais Petrolero, Pueblo Sin Dinero” – “Country With Oil, People Without Money!”

Lopez Obrador, or “El Peje,” as his followers affectionately nickname him, warms to the task, outlining plans for a new “civil insurrection” that will be led by “women commandos” who will encircle congress on the day energy reform legislation is introduced, shut down banks, the Stock Exchange, the airports, and block highways. If all that doesn’t work, AMLO calls for a national strike. All of this projected and highly illegal activism would unfold “peacefully, without violence” – El Peje is a disciple of Gandhi and often cites Dr. King in his calls to action.

Indeed, Lopez Obrador takes pains to warn the petroleum defenders about government provocateurs and those who would foment violence, perhaps a message to the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), which has thrice bombed PEMEX pipelines in the past year.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is at his incendiary best as a leader of social upheaval. During the post-electoral struggle, he put 2,000,000 souls on the streets of Mexico City July 30th 2006, the largest political demonstration in the history of this contentious republic. Back in 1996, this reporter shadowed Lopez Obrador as he led Chontal Indian farmers in blocking 60 PEMEX oil platforms that had been contaminating their cornfields in his native Tabasco, a movement that catapulted AMLO into the presidency of the PRD, later to become the wildly popular mayor of Mexico City and the de facto winner of the 2006 presidential election.

Although Lopez Obrador once seemed assured of his party’s nomination in 2012, he is now challenged by his successor as the capital’s mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, who stood stolidly at his side during the March 18th convocation.

While Lopez Obrador held forth in the center of the republic, its titular president Felipe Calderon campaigned in El Peje’s home turf of Tabasco, the site of Mexico’s largest land-based deposits, touting the “association of capitals” as the key to the “Treasure of Mexico” and swearing up and down that he had no intention of privatizing PEMEX. The idea instead was to make the laws governing oil revenues more “flexible” (“flexabilizar”) and build a “strategic alliance” with the global oil titans.

To mark the 70th anniversary of General Cardenas’s brave act of revolutionary nationalism, Calderon shared a stage with Carlos Romero Deschamps, the boss of the corruption-ridden oil workers union, and Francisco Labastida, the once-ruling PRI party’s losing 2000 presidential candidate and now chairman of the Senate Energy Commission where the energy reform legislation will most probably be introduced.

In 2000, PEMEX illegally funneled $110,000,000 USD through Romero’s union into Labastida’s campaign coffers, a scandal known here as PEMEXgate, which has since been swept into the sea.

While Calderon embraced these scoundrels in the port of Paradise Tabasco, a thousand AMLO supporters were kept at bay a mile from the ceremony by a phalanx of federal police.

The most glaring absentee at the Tabasco séance was Calderon’s dashing young Secretary of the Interior, Juan Camilo Mourino, his former chief of staff who the president appointed to the second most powerful position in Mexico’s political hierarchy this past January to oversee negotiations between the parties on energy reform legislation. But Mourino’s creds were seriously damaged this past February 24th when Lopez Obrador released documents revealing that the then-future interior secretary’s family business had been awarded four choice PEMEX transportation contracts while he presided over the Chamber of Deputies Energy Commission.

The GES Corporation also won four other PEMEX contracts when Mourino was Calderon’s right-hand man during the much-questioned president’s stint as the nation’s energy secretary in the previous administration. AMLO accuses Mourino, who was born in Spain and may still be a Spanish citizen, of cutting a pre-privatization deal with the Spanish energy giant Repsol.

There were notable absences at AMLO’s big revival in the Zocalo too, among them Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the scion of the general and founder of the PRD whose moral authority has been greatly eroded in recent years. Estranged from his protégé Lopez Obrador, whose cause he did not leap to after the 2006 election was stolen, Cardenas chose to “defend the petrolio” in his home state of Michoacan, to which he has semi-retired and where his son Lazaro, grandson of the “Tata,” is the outgoing governor.

Although young Lazaro has endorsed “the association of private capital” in PEMEX, his father has hedged on Calderon’s privatization plans, reserving judgment until legislation is actually presented. Cuauhtemoc has, however, urged that Mexico and the U.S. first settle the ownership of deep-water tracts in the Gulf before any legislation is ratified.

Deep-water exploration requires an 11-year construction and drilling cycle before wells come on line. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Mexico has only ten years of proven reserves left.

Calderon’s legislative package is liable to steer away from constitutional amendment required for privatization and focus on secondary laws, a legaloid move that could take the wind out of Lopez Obrador’s sails. Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the PRI senate leader whose support Calderon needs to pass energy reform (not all PRIistas are expected to back it) once warned that a strong measure would “hand the presidency” to AMLO.

The other prominent no-show in Lopez Obrador’s revival tent in the Zocalo was Jesus Ortega, the front-runner for the PRD presidency in March 16th party elections. Ortega heads up the rival New Left faction, a group that is prone to negotiate with Calderon’s representatives despite AMLO’s insistence that the PRD continue to refuse to recognize what he labels the “spurious” president. Lopez Obrador backed former Mexico City interim mayor, the roly-poly ex-commie Alejandro Encinas in the race for the party presidency.

Ortega, a PRD senator, refused to attend the Zocalo rally because he said he feared for his personal safety after other leaders of the New Left faction (AKA “Los Chuchos” because so many top New Leftites are named Jesus – “chucho” is also an endearing name for a dog) had been roughed up by Lopez Obrador supporters during an anti-privatization demonstration at the PEMEX office towers some weeks earlier.

The head-to-head between Ortega and Encinas turned toxic overnight with mutual accusations of vote stealing, vote stuffing, vote buying, vote burning, voters “razored” from the voting lists, fake ballots and phony counts flying as if the March 16th debacle was a funny mirror reflection of July 2nd 2006, when Lopez Obrador was stripped of the presidency by Calderon’s chicanery. The PRD implosion has stoked the party’s enemies like Televisa, the TV tyrant, which devotes half its primetime news hour to the shenanigans. The television giant blacked out all news of similar fraud in the 2006 presidential election.

It is long-standing tradition that PRD internal elections will inevitably turn into a “desmadre” (disgrace.) Similar desmadres occurred in 1996, 1999, and again in 2002, the year Ortega first tried to take control after Rosario Robles, Cardenas’s successor as Mexico City mayor, bought the party presidency – her campaign was bankrolled by a crooked construction contractor who filmed videos of her go-fors pocketing boodles of bills with which he later tried to blackmail the PRD in general and Lopez Obrador in particular. “The horror is interminable,” laments Miguel Angel Velazquez who pens the “Lost City” column for the left daily La Jornada, a PRD paper.

The legitimacy of the March 16th results can be measured by the mechanism with which they will be determined. At the helm of the PRD’s internal electoral commission is one Arturo “The Penguin” Nunez, once the tainted president of the Federal Electoral Institute during his life as a PRIista, and the architect of countless PRI frauds, including one against Lopez Obrador in their native Tabasco.

In truth, Lopez Obrador has been running away from the “horror” of the PRD since the formation of the CND, a crusade to weld those who voted for AMLO in 2006 into a force for social and political change, and his base is now thought to be wider than that of the party. Should Encinas prevail in the brawl for the PRD presidency, Lopez Obrador’s hold on the party would still be tenuous – the Chuchos appear to have wrested many state elections – and he will look to the CND as he battles the privatizers. Indeed. The announced encirclement of congress by “woman commandos” will put pressure on the FAP – the Broad Political Front of left legislators led by the PRD – to pay attention and hold the line against privatization.

The Party of the Democratic Revolution was the Phoenix bird born in fire after the PRI stole the 1988 “presidenciales” from Cardenas. Its 16 original “currents” (now called “tribes”) included ex-PRIistas like Cardenas and Lopez Obrador, ex-communists (like Encinas), urban activists, peasants’ organizations, social democrats, and other left opportunists (like Ortega.)

In its early years, the party sought to define what it would be: a confluence of grassroots movements that ran candidates for public office as one means of achieving social change? Or an exclusively electoral formation intent on obtaining its quotient of power in which the party became an end in itself? Although the PRD has devolved into the latter, Lopez Obrador’s 2006 campaign reinvigorated the activist side of the equation.

Now, leading the defense of Mexican oil against the privatizers, AMLO has leveraged himself back into the political spotlight, and once again, is leading a reinvigorated challenge to the faltering Calderon who desperately needs to make good on his pledge to his Washington masters to privatize PEMEX.

John Ross is back in Mexico City purportedly working on a book about Mexico City. Write him at johnross@igc.org if you have further information.

Off to Caracas!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last November, as attentive readers of this blog will remember, I was declared non grata (not welcome) in Caracas, Venezuela, on a special mission of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) to check on President Hugo Chavez’s accelerating crackdown on the news media.

We had been invited to come by the Venezuelan press who had hoped our mission would put international pressure on Chavez to guarantee press freedom during the upcoming referendum giving Chavez a lifetime presidency. On the first morning, our delegation found Chavez had declared us all non grata in a half-page advertisement from the Venezuelan National Assembly, in the big morning Caracas daily paper El Universal.

Today, as I prepare to fly out tomorrow for the spring IAPA assembly in Caracas this weekend,
I find that I am a “media terrorist.” Chavez has scheduled a counter convention close to our hotel called a “Latin American Meeting Against Media Terrorism.” Over the weekend, Chavez announced, Caracas “will be converted into the world capital of the struggle against media terrorism. It is necessary to discuss themes such as this,” Chavez said, “since media terrorism utilizes the means of communication–radio, press, television, to generate war, violence, fear and anxiety in our peoples.”

Well, we must have done some good last time around on our November mission. Chavez lost the election, even though the countryside and the airwaves were covered with his pictures and campaign slogans. This time around, things may be just as newsworthy. I’ll keep you posted. B3

Click here to read about IAPA’s Nov. 17 mission to Caracas.

Karaoke revolution

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>a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The radio at my neighborhood Laundromat is a source of pop music melancholy. That a-ha song "Take on Me" gets me misty while folding socks — damn it.

Something similar happened when I first saw British artist Phil Collins’s captivating Smiths karaoke video project, dünya dinlemiyor (Turkish for "the world won’t listen") at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2006. The piece documents Turkish Smiths fans performing versions of the band’s classics in front of high-keyed landscape photo backdrops — many depicting sites far more tropical than Istanbul. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the cozy projection room was packed with people who stayed far longer than they would for more blatantly arty video pieces. They laughed with empathy — and perhaps to deflect the mix of emotions roused by their own powerful memory triggers.

Dünya dinlemiyor was just one-third of a recently completed trilogy by Collins: to bracket his shoot in Istanbul, he also conducted karaoke sessions at Bogotá, Colombia, and two Indonesian cities. All three were recently united as a triptych at the Dallas Museum of Art. That Texas metropolis — site of the 1992 concert DVD Morrissey: Live in Dallas — is a long way from here. But the monograph produced for the exhibition, Phil Collins: the world won’t listen (Yale University Press, 132 pages, $45), serves as something akin to an edifying concert brochure. This is particularly true of a historical essay (regarding the Smiths oppositional relationship to Thatcherism and corporate label hegemony) by music critic Simon Reynolds.

In addition to Reynolds’s observations, Phil Collins: the world won’t listen includes still photos from videos, related imagery, two other illuminating essays, and a particularly engaging interview with Collins. "Karaoke is a form of joyful treason in which you quite materially supplant your idol," he tells the book’s editor, Dallas Museum curator Suzanne Weaver. Her conversation with the artist illuminates his interest in mediated subjects, and positions his Smiths project as an anti–American Idol. "Every single season [American Idol] is about complete conformity around the idea of the songbook," he observes. Collins’ Smiths project shatters that conformity, presenting an international range of people swayed by the idiosyncratic, outsider, emo aura of, say, "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side."

Critic Bruce Hainley links American Idol to the George W. Bush administration in a manner that — fittingly, considering that the Smiths are a touchstone of Collins’s project — combines longing with astute social observation. "What does it take to be a celebrity (not a star), circa 2007?" he asks, and then provides the American Idol–inspired answer: "Twelve weeks, and consumers voting with more gusto than they have voted in any recent American presidential election." Just as insistently, Hainley points to the crush-generating erotic lure of pop music collateral, citing a shirtless Joe Dallesandro on the cover of the first Smiths album, as well as the camera’s apparent lust for a Smiths fan in a red T-shirt in Collins’s Bogotá-set video. Next, Liz Kotz provides descriptive insight into Collins’s other works, which subvert standard practices of popular media in their depictions of Kosovo refugees, Iraqi citizens, and people emotionally scarred by their appearance on reality TV.

Because musical performance is so central to Collins’s work, it’s a shame that this slip-cased volume doesn’t include a DVD with a few song snippets and examples of the similarities and differences between each national version of the project. But there are compensations: the book does sport images of the Smiths’ set lists, an unauthenticated 1981 handwritten note from Morrissey, and Hainley’s comic acknowledgment of Collins’s pop music namesake: "Why not Genesis karaoke?"

Or maybe just, No Joe Nation

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Well, my blog item on some supporters of Ross Mirkarimi suggesting he run as a green for state Senate attracted calls almost the moment I posted it. And the callers have a point:

This isn’t just a San Francisco seat. Right now it’s a queer seat. And it’s possible that even the talk of Mirkarimi running could siphon away some of the energy that progressives say is needed to defeat Joe Nation.

For the record, I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea for Mirkarimi to run for state Senate; as I wrote, I think he would do better to stay in San Francisco. But I think the fact that this is even being talked about (and not by Ross, who I’m sure is flattered by it but who really isn’t pushing the issue) is evidence that there’s a concern out there about what would happen if neither Carole Migden nor Mark Leno wins the June primary.

Here’s the other option: Progressive supporters of both Leno and Migden could do something entirely radical, and come together to campaign to keep this a queer SF seat — which means running a campaign that says hey: Vote Leno. Or vote Migden. But don’t vote for Nation.

That might mean Migden and Leno deciding not to attack each other as Election Day approaches, and to save their negative campaigning for the candidate from Up North.

Gee, could they actually do that?

Mirkarimi for state Senate?

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I just heard a fascinating little rumor that says something about the state Senate race between Carole Migden, Mark Leno and Joe Nation.

Nation’s from Marin and is the more moderate candidate, and some San Franciscans fear that the two more progressive queer legislators could split the SF vote and leave the door open for Nation to win – and for San Francisco to lose a state Senate seat. So a few supporters of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi are saying that he ought to enter the race, as a write-in for the June Green Party primary.

Under the theory here, Mirkarimi would get the Green nomination. If Migden or Leno is the Democrat in the race, he’d drop out. If it’s Nation, he might want to decide to stay in.

Of course, that could mean giving up his board seat, since he’s up for re-election in November, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Perhaps better to have Mirkarimi in San Francisco than Sacramento.

But it shows how concerned people are about the prospect of SF losing this seat.

Mirkarimi was a little startled when he first heard of the plan, which was hatched by supporters who never actually talked to him about it. “I was taken by surprise at how well thought out this became, completely independent of me,” he said. He said he’s running for re-election to the Board of Supervisors, and that’s his priority. But he’s not against the concept of joining the Green Party primary, and if the Democrat were Joe Nation “then I would have to make a decision.”

Migden sues the FPPC

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› jesse@sfbg.com

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton aren’t the only Democrats beating each other up this campaign season. The race for California’s third senate district has turned into a nasty three-way donnybrook, with incumbent Carole Migden fighting for her political life against San Francisco Assemblymember Mark Leno and former North Bay Assemblymember Joe Nation.

Now, to save her campaign from possible financial ruin, Migden has taken on yet another adversary: state campaign finance regulators.

On March 3, in a stunning move, Migden filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Fair Political Practices Commission, challenging its decision to strip her of nearly $1 million in campaign funds. A hearing is scheduled for April 1.

If Migden loses, it could leave her with very little money to spend in the heat of an expensive primary battle — a situation that might seriously hurt her chances for reelection.

"This lawsuit is very unusual," government scholar and former FPPC general counsel Bob Stern told the Guardian. "I can’t remember the last time a legislator sued the FPPC. Usually it’s the other way around."

Last October, after several months of investigation, the FPPC barred Migden from accessing $997,340.28 in her reelection accounts. She had transferred the cash to her current campaign from an account dating back to her days in the State Assembly. California’s "surplus funds" law, which Migden’s suit seeks to overturn, says public officials running for a new office must move old campaign funds into new accounts before they leave their original office. Migden did not move the money until October 2006, four years after she left the assembly.

After it was filed in the federal court for the Eastern District of California, the senator’s lawsuit provoked an angry response from the commission’s chair, Ross Johnson. In a statement, he said Migden was attempting to "bully" and "distract" the FPPC. Johnson, who pledged to "enforce the law," also asserted that Migden had already spent "nearly $400,000" from her assembly campaign. That could mean big trouble for the senator: by law, she might be liable for up to three times that amount in penalties, as well as additional fines. In recent weeks, FPPC commissioners have met several times in closed session to discuss an unnamed matter that many observers guessed was her case.

Last week, the commissioners met in secret again — and after they adjourned, they disclosed that they were in fact consulting with their attorneys about Migden. Given their actions both before and after the senator filed her suit, the buzz around Sacramento was that it was only a matter of time before the regulators started formal proceedings against her.

By beating them to the punch and challenging the law in the federal system, Migden may be trying to head off disaster. Polls show her currently running third behind Nation and Leno. In such a tight race, a large fine would cripple her campaign. And even if the FPPC didn’t choose to fine her, she still desperately needs the cash that they forbade her from spending — not just for the election, but also for a slough of legal expenses she’s racked up defending herself against regulators. As the text of her lawsuit states, her lost assembly funds, "could well make the difference in the June primary election."

Migden’s lawyer, James Harrison, called her campaign’s failure to properly transfer the money from her assembly accounts "a technical glitch" caused by a volunteer staffer. Why the senator would trust a volunteer to make sure such a huge sum of money was moved legally from one account to another has people in and around the capital scratching their heads.

"It’s mind-boggling to me," Stern said. "This is an awful lot of money to entrust to a volunteer. How long has she been in the Legislature?"

Migden told us by phone that at the end of 2006, after she was fined nearly $100,000 for other violations by the FPPC, she initiated a "top-to-bottom audit" of her finances. During the audit, she said, "We discovered that we had problems that exceeded the [abilities] of volunteer staff, so we brought in experts." Migden herself is now listed as the treasurer of her reelection campaign committee as well as her legal defense fund. But these staffing changes, she said, came after the assembly money had been transferred.

Whether or not the faulty funds transfer was caused by an innocent mistake, Migden is taking huge political as well as legal risks by challenging state law in federal court. Her lawsuit cites a controversial 1976 Supreme Court case, Buckley v. Valeo, which holds that the First Amendment’s right to free speech protects political campaign expenditures. That decision has been used by many — mostly conservative — opponents of campaign finance reform. In other words, Migden, a liberal lawmaker in one of the most liberal districts in the state, finds herself arguing from a conservative viewpoint against a key campaign finance law. Moreover, Migden publicly supported a 2000 ballot initiative, Proposition 34, which reaffirmed the surplus funds statute — the very law she now says is unconstitutional.

Reached by phone, her opponent Leno pounced on Migden’s apparent flip-flop on the law she is now challenging. "She never suggested that the [surplus funds] law was unconstitutional prior to breaking it. I wasn’t aware that as citizens or lawmakers, we got to pick and choose which laws we follow."

Migden would not address the matter of Proposition 34 with us. "The funds ought to be available to communicate with voters," she argued. "It’s a constitutional protection … whatever we did was lawful, we believe, and therefore we’re asking for a court decision."

For Stern, Migden’s gambit shows that she has nothing left to lose anymore. "It’s obvious that she needs this money desperately because [the lawsuit is] not good press…. She’s probably not going to win [in court], but there’s so much at stake, I can understand why she’s doing it."

Resistance is futile — or is it?

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Resistance is futile — or is it?

It was a time without precedent in American history. The commander-in-chief voiced his intention to take the country to war — a voluntary, preemptive war with no clear catalyst, no faraway invasion or Pearl Harbor or sinking of the Maine — and millions of people shouted their opposition. With plenty of time to avert war, the protesters warned the invasion would be a costly disaster.

They were right. And it didn’t matter.

The war in Iraq was a test of our democratic ideals. It was a test that this country failed, a failure that has been felt by the people of the United States, Iraq, and elsewhere for the last five years. For many, the refusal of the US government to heed the demands of its citizens left them disillusioned and disempowered.

But others say it sparked a political change that woke up an apathetic citizenry, pulled the Democratic Party back to the left, and may have averted war with Iran.

It’s certainly arguable that the presidential campaign of Barack Obama owes its energy and success in part to the antiwar movement — and if Obama wins, he will be the first president in a long time who took office thanks to the support of a strong grassroots progressive movement.

Nowhere was the clash of people power and government will more acute than on the streets of San Francisco, where a series of massive marches, some drawing nearly 100,000 people, filled the streets prior to the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003. The onset of war led protesters to effectively shut down the city, resulting in about 2,300 arrests and millions of dollars in costs to the city.

President George W. Bush dismissed the protests, of course, but he wasn’t the only one. Political leaders such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi, then-Mayor Willie Brown and soon-to-be Mayor Gavin Newsom (who didn’t attend any of the marches, unlike progressives on the Board of Supervisors) condemned the peace movement for hurting an innocent city. But with the “battle for San Francisco” making international news, the protesters were more concerned with the global audience.

A month earlier, on the weekend of Feb. 15 and 16, there were coordinated protests against the impending war in about 800 cities around the world, drawing around 10 million people. The peace march in Rome included about 3 million people, earning a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest anti-war rally in history. People have never made such a loud and clear statement against an incipient war.

Beyond the numbers, the antiwar movement was also right. On every major issue and prediction, the messages from the street proved correct while those from the White House were wrong. The US wasn’t welcomed as liberators. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq after the invasion isn’t a stable democracy or shining beacon to anyone but the new generation of jihadis Bush created.

We can blame a hard-headed president, ineffectual opposition party, failure of the national media, or the national climate of fear following Sept. 11. But rather than refighting that lost battle, now is the time to gain perspective on the events of five years ago and determine what it means for democracy and the post-Bush national agenda.

 

TO THE STREETS

There were two main umbrella groups organizing protests before the war: Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW) and International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). ANSWER has remained active and DASW has recently been reconstituted for the fifth anniversary of the war, using direct action in San Francisco as well as other urban centers and outposts like Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, which has reportedly been processing Iraqi oil.

“With the fifth anniversary coming up, we’re going back to direct action on the streets,” said Henry Norr of DASW. “But I don’t have any illusions that it’s going to be like it was five years ago.”

The maddening march to an ill-advised war created a political dynamic in which a broad cross-section of Americans was willing to hit the streets.

“We had a wonderfully diverse group of people, from soccer moms to anarchists,” said Mary Bull, who cofounded DASW, a collective of various affinity groups and concerned individuals formed in October of 2002 as Bush started beating the drums of war.

It was a group fiercely determined to prevent the war — and really believed that was possible. In fact, Bull recalls how she and other members of the group burst out crying at one meeting when a key activist said the war was going to happen.

Richard Becker, who cofounded ANSWER and serves as its West Coast coordinator, said that in the summer of 2002, “we came to the conclusion that [the war] was going to happen.” The group called its first big protest for Sept. 15, 2002, and another one two weeks later. But the movement really exploded on Oct. 26 when almost 100,000 people took to Market Street, much of it a spontaneous popular uprising.

“We were overwhelmed,” Becker said. “We were in a perpetual state of mobilization to keep up with what was going on. But then it didn’t stop the war.”

Did he think they could?

“I think a lot of people thought maybe it was possible to stop it. And we thought maybe it was possible to stop it,” Becker said.

The high point, according to Becker and Norr, was Feb. 17, 2003, when the New York Times ran a front page analysis piece entitled “A new power in the streets” that claimed “the huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” But then Colin Powell went to the United Nations to argue for the invasion, and the Democrats in Congress did nothing, and it became clear war was coming.

Norr stayed out there protesting, being arrested several times and even shot in the leg by Oakland police with a rubber bullet during a protest at the Oakland docks. And he thinks some good came from the experience.

“The lesson for people is the political and economic elites are committed to preserving and extending empire. And they basically say as much in their own writing,” Norr said. “Wars are not anomalies.”

Despite being a frustrating and depressing exercise, most saw benefits to the failed movement. “People got an incredible education about how the system really worked,” Becker said. “Building a movement is mostly about a series of setbacks.”

Medea Benjamin, cofounder of both Global Exchange and CodePink and fixture of the anti-establishment peace movement for years, was upbeat about the protests. “We did our job as citizens. We did what we were supposed to do: organize, get people to take action, get people onto the streets,” she said. “We did everything we could think of.

“What you take from it is we don’t have a very well-developed democracy because the people spoke and the government didn’t listen.”

25war2_Lars1.jpg The ever-evolving “Democracy Wall” on Valencia Street, March 2003, helped stir up debate (Photo by Lars Howlett)

 

FACING ARREST

The collective action of five years ago starts with a series of personal stories — tens of thousands of them — so let me briefly begin with mine.

My arrival in San Francisco was closely tied to the march to war. I was living in Sacramento and working as the news editor of the Sacramento News & Review when Bush began his saber rattling against Saddam Hussein, but by the end of 2002 I had a falling out with my boss and found myself jobless.

Like most Northern Californians who opposed the war, I came to San Francisco on Jan. 18 to make my voice heard and experienced a bit of serendipity on my way to Justin Herman Plaza: while reading the Guardian on Muni, I saw their advertisement for a city editor, a job that was ideal for me at a paper I’ve always loved. Needless to say, it was a great day, empowering and full of possibilities.

Less than two months later I was on the job, and on the second week of that job I was back on the turbulent streets of San Francisco, part of a Guardian team covering the eruption of this city on the first full day of war. When I stepped off the cable car just after 7 a.m., people were streaming up Market Street and I joined them.

When a large group stopped at the intersection of Market and Beale, I stopped too, taking notes and bearing witness to this historic, exciting event. I had a press pass issued by the California Highway Patrol that allowed me to cross police lines, so when police in riot gear surrounded us and threatened arrest, I held my ground with 100 or so protesters.

After interviewing about a dozen people about why they were there and that they hoped to accomplish (see “On the bus: Journalists, lawyers, four-year-olds — the cops were ready to bust anyone Thursday morning“), I was arrested with the others and taken to a makeshift jail and processing center at Pier 27 (no charges were filed in my case, and charges against all of the 2,300 people arrested here in those first few days of the war were later dropped).

I recently tracked down a few of the people who appeared in my article, including Daphne and Ross Miller, who were at the center of the most interesting drama to play out during our standoff with the police. She’s a family practice physician, he’s an architect, and they live in Diamond Heights with their two children, Emet, who is almost 9, and Arlen, 12, who was away on vacation when the war began.

“We were genuinely shocked that the war started,” Ross told me. “We were at some of the earlier protests and really thought there was no way [Bush] could do it.”

They woke up March 20, 2003, to news that the war had begun and immediately walked to the BART station with Emet and rode to the Embarcadero station, not really planning for the day ahead but just knowing that they had to make themselves heard.

“We were pissed as hell. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my life,” Daphne said.

They quickly came up with a plan. “We basically decided that if anyone was going to be arrested, it was going to be Ross and I’d stay with Emet. But it didn’t end up that way and I ended up in the arrest circle.”

Daphne had their house keys and threw them over the police line to Ross at one point. A photographer in the circle had gotten shots of a man named Roman Fliegel being roughed up by police as they pulled him off his bicycle, which was towing a trailer with a sound system, and decided to throw his backpack with camera gear out as well. When Ross — who had four-year-old Emet on his shoulders — caught it and refused police orders to give it to them, police grabbed Emet and roughly arrested Ross, leaving a gash on his forehead.

“Rage surged through the crowd, and it seemed as if things might get ugly, but the police kept a tight lid on the situation, using their clubs to shove back protesters who had moved forward,” I wrote at the time.

Emet was delivered into the circle with Daphne as the arrests continued, many quite rough. “At that point, as a mom, I had to exercise the most restraint ever,” said Daphne, who was angry about the situation but fearful about what she was exposing her son to. “Please, don’t let any violence happen here,” she pleaded with the crowd. Eventually, commanders on the scene let the mother and child go.

“The officer who let me go said that if he saw me again out there, he would call Child Protective Services on me,” Daphne said. But two days later, still brimming with outrage at her country’s actions, she ditched a downtown medical conference to rejoin the street protests, this time solo.

The couple say they’ve lost friendships over the war and have become more engaged with politics, coming to believe that Bush and the neocons are malevolent figures who knew how badly the war would go and did it anyway to establish a large, permanent military base in Iraq.

“Since that day, we’ve been far more active,” Ross said. “We realized you can’t just trust the system. You have to push.”

But that determination was mixed with feelings of disempowerment and depression. They attended some of the protests that following year, but the couple — like most people — just stopped going at some point because they seemed so futile.

“There was a horrible sense of resignation and a genuine depression that followed,” Ross told me.

The nadir was when Bush was reelected and they considered leaving the country. But then, Ross said, “we decided we’re not just going to run away and we’re not going to accept this.” Looking back, even with the scare over Emet, they express no regrets.

“It was the right thing to do because it was the wrong war to have. I’d do it again and again and again if I had to,” Ross said

They’re guardedly hopeful that Barack Obama could begin to turn things around if he’s elected. “I think the right president can at least start to dismantle this,” Daphne said. “I think thousands of people marching in the streets is something he would listen to.”

25war3_Charles1.jpg A die-in on the streets of San Francisco in March 2007 marked the fourth anniversary of the invasion (Photo by Charles Russo)

 

WITNESS TO HISTORY

Covering the peace movement in those early days was a heady experience, like reporting on a revolutionary uprising or working in a foreign country where the people are organized and active enough to be able to shut down society and brave enough to risk bodily injury for their beliefs.

I was at the founding meeting of CodePink — which became the most effective group at personally confronting the warmongers and keeping the war in the public eye — one evening at Muddy Waters in the Mission District shortly after the war started.

Looking back, Benjamin rattled off a long list of the alliances the group built — with labor, churches, businesses, and a wide array of social movements — and creative actions intended to build and demonstrate popular support for ending the war.

“We’ve done so many things and what did we get? We got a surge,” she said. “It shows the crisis in our democracy, the crisis of the two-party system, the crisis of a dysfunctional opposition party.”

Yet she said the peace movement has been remarkably successful in convincing the public that the war was a mistake and that it’s time for the troops to come home, even if the Democrats have been slow to respond to that shift.

“The progress we’ve made is turning around public opinion and that’s going to play a big role in the upcoming elections,” she said. For Norr, the role of the news media is a particular sore spot. He was a technology reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who called in sick on the first full day of war and was arrested on Market Street with his wife and daughter, resulting in suspension by editor Phil Bronstein for his actions.

I wrote several stories on the issue, which culminated in Norr being fired and Bronstein unilaterally banning Chron employees from peace protests. I even borrowed CodePink’s guerilla tactics when Bronstein repeatedly refused to return my calls or address why he had singled out antiwar protesters for uniquely punitive treatment. I confronted him during a speech he gave at the Commonwealth Club (see “Lies and half-truths,” 5/7/03). That was the tenor of the times: we were all tired of being lied to and we decided to push back.

Norr was particularly frustrated with his own paper’s reporting of the war and started sending articles by the foreign press to his paper’s news desk, trying to wake his colleagues up to the pro-war propaganda being passed off as journalism in this country.

He was also disappointed with the country and with the Chronicle — both the management and his fellow reporters, who did little to support him — but the experience caused him to return to his roots as a progressive activist.

“The war and losing the job and everything brought an abrupt end to my consumerist phase and dumped me back into the world of being an activist,” said Norr, who serves on the KPFA 94.1 FM local station board and has made three recent trips to the Palestinian territories while working with the International Solidarity Movement.

Benjamin said Americans shouldn’t expect the next president to end the war — not without lots of pressure from a renewed and vocal peace movement. “This is the time to set the stage for the post-Bush agenda,” Benjamin said. “Don’t put your hopes in Barack Obama in getting us out of Iraq. Put your hopes in the people.”

25war4_Lane1.jpg A rally and nonviolent direct action at the Richmond refinery targeted Chevron on March 15 (Photo by Lane Hartwell)

 

THE AFTERMATH

The San Francisco Police Department, which spent more than $2 million on overtime costs responding to peace protests between March 15 and April 16, 2003, generally behaved with restraint and professionalism, but there were several exceptions.

The most costly and disturbing incident came when Officer Anthony Nelson began aggressively swinging his long riot baton at protesters, badly shattering the arm of peaceful protester Linda K. Vaccarezza, who suffered a permanent disability in her career as a court reporter.

Nelson’s incident report falsely stated that Vaccarezza had threatened him with a sign attached to a solid pole, but video of the incident later clearly showed there was no pole and that she was retreating when he teed off on her (see “The home front,” 05/19/04).

Vaccarezza received an $835,000 settlement from the city in November of 2004. On Oct. 5, 2005, two and a half years after the incident, SFPD fired Nelson for lying about what happened that day, and the City Attorney’s Office has been successfully fighting Nelson’s appeals in court ever since, putting in more than $100,000 in attorney time and costs into the Nelson and Vaccarezza cases.

The other significant ongoing litigation from the antiwar protests involved Mary Bull, who was arrested during an early protest for pouring fake blood in front of the entrance to Chevron’s San Francisco office before being allegedly strip searched and left naked in her San Francisco Jail cell for 36 hours.

Ironically, Bull was among those who brought a successful class action lawsuit against Sacramento County after she and others protesting a logging plan were strip searched, setting a precedent and led most counties to reform their strip-search policies. She used her share of the $15 million judgment to buy an organic permaculture farm in Sebastopol.

Her San Francisco case, in which Bull won a multimillion-dollar judgment, is still under appeal and now in mediation. Bull said the protests five years ago did make a difference, something she tells those who fret about its apparent failure. “I tell them to look at what issues the candidates are talking about now and I thank them for protesting then.”

“Even though we had millions throughout the world, we were sort of blocked, but now we’re regaining that momentum,” Melodie Barclay, a massage therapist who was also arrested with me on the first day of the war, told me recently. “We can’t judge it by the fact that we didn’t get the momentum we wanted.”

Norr started his antiwar activism working with Students for a Democratic Society in Boston, protesting the Vietnam War, which he said shares many similarities with the current situation, for good or for ill. He said that people tend to forget that while the protests then were huge and helped end the war, the movement did wane after Nixon ended the draft and substituted massive aerial bombardment for boots on the ground.

“The protests dropped off considerably,” he said. “A lot of the things that drove people to take risks in the late ’60s had faded by the early ’70s.”

He thinks the current administration learned a lesson from those days: it’s easier to maintain a war effort if the average citizen isn’t affected.

But there are other factors as well keeping a lid on the antiwar outrage.

“The culture has changed too. Young people are oversaddled with debt. People in schools seem to be docile. The culture as a whole seems to be more individualist and consumerist,” Norr said.

Yet some young people have woken up and many of them are funneling their energies into a peace group that was formed in the summer of 2005: World Can’t Wait, as in: the world can’t wait for the end of Bush’s second term before we change our direction and leadership.

“We don’t just want them gone, we need to repudiate their program,” said Giovanni Jackson, a 26-year-old WCW student organizer. “If we’re going to change anything, we need the youth.”

Jackson was at WCW’s founding convention in New York City, which came just as New Orleans was being flooded and then essentially abandoned by the federal government.

“When [Kerry] lost, people felt demoralized and World Can’t Wait kind of stepped into that situation,” Jackson said. “There was a lot of demoralization in the antiwar movement at that time.”

The group organized protests and student walkouts on Nov. 2, 2005.

“Everyone has their moments of doubt,” he said, “but I’m motivated by the crimes we see everyday.”

 

THE LESSONS

One of the biggest barriers to galvanizing people and turning the fifth anniversary of the war into something that might make a difference is the presidential election, which is diverting the energy of many potential protesters — and at the same time, offering some hope that a new president may lead to peace.

After all, every single one of the Democratic presidential candidates has promised to withdraw troops from Iraq, with varying timelines and numbers of US personnel left behind. And with enough encouragement, they might be willing to help change the status quo.

Many of the activists who volunteered their time and money to help move the Obama campaign into its front-runner position came out of the antiwar movement, and Obama’s strong stand against the war has been a key factor in his popularity.

Becker and some other activists don’t have much faith that a change in presidents will change the course in Iraq, although he agrees that much of the energy now surrounding Barack Obama derives directly from the antiwar movement.

“There’s been a huge upsurge of hope for Obama and that he might bring about the kind of change we need,” Bull said, adding that she doesn’t share that hope, believing the only path to peace is to pressure Obama and other leaders to commit to more progressive positions.

Norr said, “On one level, people have illusions about the power of peaceful protests. People believe in democracy, as well they should. We feel like the rulers should be paying attention to public opinion.

“It’s a remarkable story how broadly and quickly the American people have turned against the war. Public opinion was certainly ahead of the Democrats.”

And people will only grow more disenchanted with Iraq and its multitude of costs. “The people here are paying for this war, and everyday we have new stories about health clinics being shut down,” Becker said.

Becker was amazed last March as massive demonstrations for immigrant rights seemed to explode out of nowhere. “We think there will be more things like that,” he said.

Because after five years of organizing communities to resist the military-industrial complex’s plans, Becker thinks there’s been some visible progress.

“There isn’t a town or hamlet in the US that doesn’t have activism going on, but you wouldn’t know it from the corporate media,” Becker said. “It’s a mistake for people to feel discouraged.”

PG&E’s Green War Chest?

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Greetings, Californians for a Clean Energy Future! Welcome to the fold of innocuous sounding, pseudo-environmental political front groups. This one is brought to us by our buddies over at Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

The group, which doesn’t seem to have a Web site or any other physical manifestation outside of filings with the California Secretary of State, already has $340,000 ready and waiting for the upcoming election cycle. According to a Secretary of State spokesperson, the group was born on Dec. 21, 2007. The only contact is the law firm Nielsen Merksamer, which has a history of teaming up with PG&E to break the law for political gain.

So far, they haven’t spent a cent — all of which were dumped into the committee by PG&E in three lump sums. Wonder what they’re going to spend all that money on? Since it’s calling itself a “coalition of environmentalists, taxpayers, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company,” it could go for or against nearly anything — including boosting Prop 98 on this June’s ballot. If passed, the measure would kill rent control and make it illegal for governments to use eminent domain to seize utility infrastructure and use it to provide the services themselves, an idea San Francisco has considered in the past and Stockton is currently pursuing.

Questioning Matt

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Matt Gonzalez consulted few of his colleagues in San Francisco’s progressive political community before announcing Feb. 28 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, that he’ll be Ralph Nader’s running mate on another quixotic run for president.

That’s fairly typical for Gonzalez, who has tended to keep mostly his own counsel for all of his big political decisions: switching from Democrat to Green in 2000; successfully running for president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2002; jumping into the mayor’s race at the last minute the next year; abruptly deciding not to run for reelection to his supervisorial seat in 2004; and — last year — deciding against another run for mayor while being coy about his intentions until the very end.

But if he had polled those closest to him politically, Gonzalez would have learned what a difficult and divisive task he’s undertaken (something he probably knew already given what a polarizing figure Nader has become). Not one significant political official or media outlet in San Francisco has voiced support for his candidacy, and some have criticized its potential to pull support away from the Democratic Party nominee and give Republican John McCain a shot at the White House.

In fact, most of his ideological allies are enthusiastically backing the candidacy of Barack Obama, who Gonzalez targeted with an acerbic editorial titled “The Obama Craze: Count Me Out” on the local BeyondChron Web site on the eve of his announcement (while not telling BeyondChron staffers of his impending announcement, to their mild irritation).

It’s telling that all of the top Green Party leaders in San Francisco — including Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, school board president and supervisorial candidate Mark Sanchez, and Jane Kim, who got the most votes in the last school board election after Gonzalez encouraged her to run — have endorsed Barack Obama.

Mirkarimi, who ran Nader’s Northern California presidential effort in 2000 and ran Gonzalez’s 2003 mayoral campaign, has had nothing but polite words for Gonzalez in public, but he reaffirmed in a conversation with the Guardian that his support for Obama didn’t waver with news of the Nader-Gonzalez ticket.

Mirkarimi has a significant African American constituency in the Western Addition and has worked hard to build ties to those voters. He’s also got a good head for political reality — and it’s hard to blame him if he thinks that the Nader-Gonzalez effort is going nowhere and will simply cause further tensions between Greens and progressive Democrats.

Sup. Chris Daly is strongly supporting Obama and said the decision of his former colleague to run didn’t even present him with a dilemma: “It’s unfortunately not a hard one — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it.”

Daly doesn’t think the Nader-Gonzalez will have much impact on the presidential race or the issues it’s pushing. “The movement for Obama is so significant that it eclipses everything else,” Daly told us. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change how politics happens in this country.”

While few San Francisco progressives argue that Obama’s policy positions are perfect, Daly doesn’t agree with Gonzalez’s critique of Obama’s bad votes and statements. “I don’t understand the argument that you should only back a candidate that you agree with all the time,” Daly said. “If that was the case, I would only ever vote for myself.”

On the national level, Gonzalez told us that he was running to challenge the two-party hold on power and to help focus Nader’s campaign on issues like ballot access for independent candidates. “If I’m his running mate, then we’ll be talking about electoral reform,” he said.

On a local level, the Gonzalez move will have a complicated impact. It will, in some ways, damage his ability to play a significant role in San Francisco politics in the future. That’s in part because Gonzalez has taken himself out of the position of a leader in the local progressive movement.

San Francisco progressives don’t like lone actors: the thousands of activists in many different camps don’t always agree, but they like their representatives to be, well, representative. That means when housing activists — one of Daly’s key constituencies — need someone to carry a major piece of legislation for them, they expect Daly to be there.

Sup. Tom Ammiano hasn’t come up with his landmark bills on health care, public power, and other issues all by himself; he’s been part of a coalition that has worked at the grassroots level to support the work he’s doing in City Hall.

Daly sought to find a mayoral candidate last year through a progressive convention. That seemed a bit unorthodox to the big-time political consultants who like to see their candidates self-selected and anointed by powerful donors, but it was very much a San Francisco thing. This is a city of neighborhoods, coalitions, and interest groups that try to hold their elected officials accountable.

Obama’s politics are far from perfect, and Nader and Gonzalez have very legitimate criticisms of the Democratic candidates and important proposals for electoral reform. But right now the grassroots action in San Francisco and elsewhere in the country — the movement-building excitement — is with Barack Obama. The activists who made the Gonzalez mayoral effort possible are now working on the Obama campaign.

In fact, Daly has repeatedly voiced hope that an Obama victory could help empower the progressive movement in San Francisco and give it more leverage against moderates like Mayor Gavin Newsom who support Hillary Clinton (see “Who Wants Change?” 1/30/08).

Daly said the Gonzalez decision complicates that narrative a little. “I don’t think it’s undercut,” Daly said, “but I think it’s confused a bit.”

On shaky ground

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› gwschultz@sfbg.com

The violations were purported to be accidental. Top administrators broke the law in two separate incidents in 2005 when they diverted a total of $30,000 belonging to City College of San Francisco to a local bond campaign committee, although they said it was an innocent mistake.

Now new documents obtained by the Guardian show an apparent pattern to this misuse of public funds. A special audit indicates that on Nov. 7, 2006, administrators from the school district transferred $38,670 to a bank account controlled by the Foundation of the City College of San Francisco, a nonprofit that seeks donations for the school and funds scholarships.

Just one day before, on Nov. 6, 2006, the foundation made a $35,000 cash contribution to the Community College Facility Coalition Issues Committee, which lobbies for and promotes statewide bonds to benefit schools like City College. State law bars City College from using public funds for such political purposes.

When asked about the money transfers, Vice Chancellor Peter Goldstein conceded to the Guardian that $28,670 of the newly uncovered funds were improperly moved to the foundation to replenish the Nov. 6, 2006 contribution, but he referred questions regarding who made that decision to outgoing chancellor Phil Day, who did not return a call.

The firm that conducted the audit, Louie & Wong, based in San Francisco, could find no evidence that the foundation’s board approved the contribution, and a lawyer hired by the foundation says the directors were not aware of the transfer of district funds into the foundation bank account at that time.

Although some of the board members later recalled authorizing the contribution, it wasn’t reflected in meeting minutes, and the directors say they never intended to launder public funds into a political contribution.

These revelations further damage the credibility of City College administrators, who for several months have undergone an investigation by the District Attorney’s Office into political fundraising efforts by the school. Spending public funds to support or oppose a ballot measure or candidate is against California law.

Two school trustees, Rodel Rodis and Julio Ramos, confirmed for the Guardian that the district attorney in recent weeks requested documents related to the transactions and will be interviewing senior administrators at the school soon, presumably including Day, who is leaving for a new job in Washington, DC, as this story goes to press. Both say the trustees only learned about the audit’s conclusions this month, although it was completed last summer.

"The way it’s always been presented to me is the foundation is supposed to give the district money in order for the district to fulfill its function of educating students," Ramos told us, "not vice versa."

The District Attorney’s Office will neither confirm nor deny the existence of such probes, but its investigation has been confirmed by sources and reported in both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Guardian (see "Day’s Dilemma," 8/8/07).

Day characterized the earlier diversions from the 2005 bond campaign as a simple misunderstanding when they were publicized last year. His administration wasn’t trying to do anything illegal, he wrote in a public statement at the time, and a resulting internal investigation called for by City College’s board of trustees seemed to confirm his claim.

"The 2005 campaign was compressed into little more than three months, and as a result of this rush, we made some mistakes," Day wrote in response to the report when it was released in January. "As the chancellor and CEO of this college, I take responsibility for these missteps."

But despite the breadth of the internal investigation, which filled 232 pages and detailed the history of the hastily organized 2005 bond election, its scope never reached the foundation’s political activities.

Now it appears that after the Chronicle published stories last April exposing the misdirected funds from 2005, the foundation’s board of directors asked for a special audit to ensure that all its financial transactions between 2005 and 2007 were free from any association with public funds the board wasn’t aware of.

The foundation at that time hired a lawyer, Peter Bagatelos, who told the Guardian that the board didn’t know $38,670 was transferred to the foundation’s bank account on the day of the November 2006 statewide election, when voters were asked for $10.4 billion in bond money to support California’s public schools.

"It was never done with their consent or knowledge or participation," Bagatelos said.

During the same two-year period covered by the audit, the foundation made cash donations to other political action committees (PACs) totaling $110,000, including $75,000 that went toward City College’s $246.3 million local bond election in 2005.

Those transactions appear to be legal because the foundation is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that technically operates separately from the school and can promote political causes that benefit community colleges within certain parameters, according to a coalition lobbyist. Each of those contributions were approved and properly documented by the foundation’s board, unlike the transactions from early November 2006.

Goldstein also said that the foundation’s board was not happy about the discovery and that the directors returned the money last April, just as the Chronicle‘s stories were breaking. He said the remaining $10,000 was legally acquired from yet another nonprofit controlled by the college and through a private vendor, but the foundation’s board elected to return that money as well on the advice of legal counsel "to avoid any appearance of impropriety."

"Any funds that the college is entitled to cannot and should not be transferred to the foundation," Goldstein told us. "The particular item that you’re asking about was absolutely a mistake. It should not have been transferred. It was found internally, corrected, and the funds were distributed to a variety of student organizations."

The Community College Facility Coalition, which received the $35,000 donation, was formed by a small group of school presidents in the spring of 1993 and today includes 52 districts across California. Its "issues committee" was created expressly for financing statewide bond campaigns.

The political action committee’s state election filings show that the foundation’s contribution was actually made on the same day City College transferred the $38,670 to the foundation’s bank account, rather than a day earlier as the audit states.

City College has aggressively sought such state money — nearly $200 million since 1998 — to match funds raised through local bonds from San Francisco taxpayers to help with its ongoing capital projects like a new gymnasium, a performing arts center, and campuses in the Mission and Chinatown.

The $35,000 contribution was among the largest made to the coalition’s PAC leading up to the election, and Paul Holmes, a lobbyist for the coalition, said only 10 to 12 schools use their foundations to support ballot measures each year. Rarely does it receive a donation of more than $20,000, he said. Holmes added that many colleges use their supporters for donations.

Judy Iannaccone, a spokesperson for the Rancho Santiago Community College District in Orange County, which helped raise $13,600 for the 2006 election, said they did so by forwarding the names of potential donors to the coalition, which allowed the school to remain impartial.

"The money was absolutely not from the general fund," Iannaccone told us.

Colleges and universities commonly form nonprofit foundations to raise money on their behalf from alumni and other supporters, like the behemoth $1.1 billion endowment of the UCSF Foundation, which encourages and administers private giving to the medical school and health-related research of the University of California-San Francisco.

City College’s foundation is considerably smaller. It had $22 million in net assets at the end of the 2007 fiscal year, according to district documents, and describes itself in an audit as a discrete component of the school. The foundation gives out hundreds of relatively small scholarships to students every year, some worth up to $3,000, but most for smaller amounts of between $250 and $500.

The foundation also maintains a separate board of directors that, like many higher-education foundations, contains top officials from the school itself, like Chancellor Day and Vice Chancellor Goldstein.

Most of the foundation’s other directors, however, are simply civic leaders who support City College’s mission but don’t work for the district and aren’t affiliated directly with Day’s administration.

The two entities are still close enough that the district handles bookkeeping for the foundation and shares its employees. For instance, the audit shows that the foundation’s finances — including its political contributions — were often prepared by City College’s chief administrative services officer, the title carried by Stephen Herman, who was implicated in the first round of illegal diversions made public last year.

"People literally thought that the college was obligated to make a contribution to this statewide campaign and that meant funds that would otherwise be under the college’s control could be eligible for a donation," Vice Chancellor Goldstein told us. "But, of course, that’s incorrect."

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