Election

The first 40

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› bruce@sfbg.com
On Oct. 27, l966, my wife, Jean Dibble, and I and some journalist and literary friends published the first issue of the first alternative paper in the country that was designed expressly to compete with the local monopoly daily combine and offer an alternative voice for an urban community.
We called it the San Francisco Bay Guardian, named after the liberal Manchester Guardian of England, and declared in our statement of intent that the Guardian would be a new model for a big-city paper: we would be independent and locally owned and edited, and we would be alternative to and competitive with the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle, which were published under a joint operating agreement that allowed them to fix prices, pool profits, share markets, and avoid competition.
We stated that “the Guardian is proposed, not as a substitute for the daily press, but as a supplement that can do much that the San Francisco and suburban dailies, with their single ownership, visceral appeal and parochial stance, cannot and will not do.” And we played off the name Guardian by stating that we would be “liberal in assessing the present and past (supporting regional government, nuclear weapons control, welfare legislation, rapid transit, tax reform, consumer protection, planning, judicial review, de-escalation and a promptly negotiated settlement in Vietnam.)” But the Guardian would also be “conservative in preserving tradition (civil liberties and minority rights, natural resources, watersheds, our bay, our hills, our air and water).”
It was rather naive to challenge the Ex-Chron JOA with little more than a good idea and not much money and a wing and a prayer. We had almost no idea of what we were getting into in San Francisco, a venue that Warren Hinckle of Ramparts and many other defunct publications would later describe as the Bermuda Triangle of publishing. But we had, I suppose, the key ingredient of the entrepreneur — the power of ignorance and not knowing any better — and somehow thought that if we could just get a good paper going, the time being l966 and the place being San Francisco and the world being full of possibilities, we would make it, come hell or high water.
Well, after going through hell and high water and endless soap operas for four decades, Jean and I and the hundreds of people who have worked for the Guardian through the years have helped realize the paper’s original vision and created something quite extraordinary: an influential new form of independent alternative journalism that works in the marketplace and provides what little real competition there is to the monopoly dailies. And let me emphasize, the alternatives do not require government-sanctioned JOA monopolies and endless chains and clusters of dailies and the other monopolizing devices that dailies claim they need to survive.
Today I am delighted to report that there are alternative papers competing effectively with their local chains throughout the Bay Area (seven, more than any other region), throughout the state from Chico to San Diego (22, more than any other state), and throughout the nation (126 in 42 states, with a total circulation of 7.5 million, and more coming all the time). There are even cities with two and three competing alternatives, and there are cities where the monopoly daily is forced by the real alternatives to create faux alternatives to try to compete (it doesn’t work). And alas, there is now a Village Voice–New Times chain of 17 papers in major markets, including San Francisco and the East Bay, that is abandoning its alternative roots and moving to ape its daily brethren.
Jean and I met at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1957. Two friends and I were driving around Lincoln one fine spring day, drinking gin and tonics, which were drawn from a tub of gin and tonic that we had mixed up and stashed in the trunk of our car. We happened upon Jean and her younger sister, Catherine, who had come from a Theta sorority function and were standing on a street corner waiting for their mother to pick them up and take them to the Dibble family home in nearby Bennet (population: 412). We stopped, convinced them to ride with us, and got them safely home. They declined our offer of gin and tonics, as did their astonished parents and grandmother when we arrived at the Dibble house.
Jean and I made a good team. We both had small-town Midwestern values and roots in family-owned small-business. Her father owned lumberyards in small towns in southeast Nebraska. Her maternal grandfather founded banks in Kansas and Nebraska and was the state-appointed receiver for failed banks in Kansas during the Depression. Her paternal grandfather owned a grocery store in Topeka, Kan. Jean had the business background and the ability to create a solid start-up plan — she was a graduate of the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration and had worked in San Francisco for Matson Navigation as well as Hansell Associates, a personnel firm.
I was the son and grandson of pioneering pharmacists in Rock Rapids, Iowa. (Population: 2,800. Slogan: “Brugmann’s Drugs. Where drugs and gold are fairly sold. Since l902.”) I had the newspaper background, starting at age l2 writing for my hometown Lyon County Reporter (under the third-generation Paul Smith family); going on to the campus paper (which we called the Rag) and then the Lincoln Star (under liberal city editor “Sterl” Earl Dyer and liberal editor Jimmy Lawrence); getting a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York City; and then working at Stars and Stripes in Korea (dateline: Yongdongpo), the Milwaukee Journal (where I got splendid professional training at one of the top 10 daily papers in the country), and the Redwood City Tribune (where I plowed into some of the juicy Peninsula scandals of the mid-l960s in bay fill, dirt hauling, and the classic Pacific Gas and Electric Co.–Stanford University Linear Accelerator battle). To those who ask how Jean and I have worked together for 40 years, I just say we have complementary abilities: she handles the bank, and I handle PG&E.
Not only did I find my partner at the University of Nebraska, but I also got the inspiration for the Guardian. In fact, I can remember the precise moment of truth that illuminated for me the value of an alternative paper in a city with a monopoly daily press (then, in Lincoln, a JOA between the afternoon Lincoln Journal and the morning Lincoln Star) that was tied into the local power structure, then known as the O Street gang (the local business owners along the downtown thoroughfare O Street). The O Street gang was so quietly powerful that it once decided to fire the Nebraska football coach before anyone bothered to notify the chancellor.
As a liberal Rag editor in the spring of 1955, I had just put out an important front-page story on how one of the most controversial professors on campus, C. Clyde Mitchell, who had been under fire for years from the conservative Farm Bureau and others because of his liberal views on farm policy, was being quietly axed as chair of the agricultural economics department.
We had gotten the tip from one of Mitchell’s students and had confirmed it by talking to professors in his department who had attended the meeting where the quiet firing was announced by Mitchell’s dean. Our lead story was headlined “Ag Ex Chairman Mitchell said relieved of post, outside pressures termed cause.” And I wrote a “demand all the facts” editorial arguing in high tones that “any attempt to make professors fair game for irresponsible charges, any attempt by pressure groups unduly to influence the academic position of university personnel … is an abridgment of the spirit of academic freedom and those principles of free communication protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” It was a bombshell.
The Lincoln Journal fired back immediately with a classic daily front-page story seeking to “scotch” the nasty rumors started by that pesky Rag on the campus. The story had all the usual recognizable elements: it did not independently investigate, did not quote our story properly, did not call us for comment, took the handout denial from the university public relations office, and put it out without blushing. Bang, that was to be the end of it, on to the next press release from the university.
It made me mad. I knew our story was right, the daily story was wrong, and the story was important and needed to be pursued. And so I stoked up a campaign for the rest of the semester that ultimately emboldened Mitchell to make formal charges that the university had violated his academic freedom. He gave us the scoop for two rousing final editions of the Rag. The proper academic committee investigated and upheld Mitchell but dragged the case out and waited until I graduated to release the report.
Against the power structure and against all odds, Mitchell, the Rag, and I had won the day and an important victory on behalf of academic freedom in a conservative university in a conservative state during the McCarthy era. During this battle I learned how the power structure fights back against aggressive editors. At the height of my campaign defending Mitchell, I was kept out of the Innocents Society, the senior men’s honorary society, although my four subeditors and managers all made it in. The blackball, the campus rumor went, came directly from the regents president, J. Leroy Welch, then president of the Omaha Grain Exchange (known to our readers as the “Old Grain Head”), via the chancellor via the dean of men.
I am forever indebted to them. They taught me at an impressionable age about the power of the alternative press and why it is best exercised by an independent paper on major power structure issues. They also taught me a lot about press freedom, which they were trying to grab from the Rag and me, and how we had to fight back publicly and with gusto.
When Jean and I founded the Guardian, we did so in the spirit of my old Rag campaigns. In fact, we borrowed the line from the old Chicago Times and put it on our masthead: “It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell.” We wanted a paper that would be willing and able to do serious watchdog reporting and take on and pursue the big stories and issues that the monopoly dailies ignored — and then were ignored by the radio, television, and mainstream media that take their news and policy cues from the Ex and Chron. In JOA San Francisco that was a lot of stories, from the PG&E Raker Act scandal to the Manhattanization of the city to the theft of the Presidio to the steady conservative downtown drumbeat on such key issues as taxes, social justice, the homeless, privatization, war and peace, and endorsements.
Significantly, because of our independent position and credibility, we were able to lead tough campaigns on public power, kicking PG&E out of a corrupted City Hall and putting a blast of sunlight on local government with the nation’s first and best Sunshine Ordinance and Sunshine Task Force.
Our first big target in our prototype issue was the Ex-Chron JOA agreement, which we portrayed in an editorial cartoon as two gigantic ostrich heads coming out of a single ostrich body, marked in the belly with a huge dollar sign. Our editorial laid out the argument that we have used ever since in covering the local monopoly and in positioning the Guardian as the independent alternative. “What the public now has in San Francisco, as it does in all 55 or so of 1,461 cities with dailies, is a privately owned utility that is constitutionally exempt from public regulation, which would violate freedom of the press. This is bad for the newspaper business and bad for San Francisco.”
The Guardian prospectus, used to raise money for the paper, bravely put forth our position: “A good metropolitan weekly, starting small but speaking with integrity, can soon have influence in inverse proportion to its size. There is nothing stronger in journalism than the force of a good example.”
It concluded, “The Guardian can succeed, despite the galloping contraction of the press in San Francisco, because there are many of us who feel that the newspaper business is a trade worth fighting for. That is what this newspaper is all about.” And we quoted the famous phrase used by Ralph Ingersoll in the prospectus for his famous PM newspaper in New York: “We are against people who push other people around.”
Our journalistic points were embarrassingly timely. A year before the Guardian was launched, Hearst and the Chronicle had formed the JOA with the Examiner and killed daily newspaper competition in San Francisco. The two papers combined all their business operations — one sales force sold ads for both, one print crew handled both editions, one distribution crew handled subscriptions and got both papers out on the streets. The newsrooms were supposedly separate — but as we pointed out over and over at the time and ever after, the papers lacked any economic incentive to compete.
The San Francisco JOA became the largest and most powerful agreement of its kind in the country, and San Francisco was the only top-10 market in the country without daily competition.
This was all grist for the Guardian editorial mills because the JOAs, most notably the recent SF JOA, were in serious legal trouble. The US attorney general was successfully prosecuting a JOA in Tucson, Ariz., claiming the arrangement was a violation of antitrust laws. Naturally, the local papers were blacking out the story. But if the Tucson deal was found to be illegal, the Chron and Ex merger would be illegal too — and the hundreds of millions of dollars the papers were making off the arrangement would be gone.
The JOA publishers, led by Hearst and the Chronicle, quietly started a major lobbying campaign in Washington for emergency passage of a federal law that would retroactively legalize their illegal JOAs. They called it the Newspaper Preservation Act. Meanwhile, the late Al Kihn, a former camera operator for KRON-TV (which was at the time owned by the Chronicle), had prompted the Federal Communications Commission to hold hearings on whether the station’s license should be renewed. His complaint: his former employer was slanting the news on behalf of its corporate interests. We pounced on these stories with relish.
For example, in our May 22, 1969, story “The Dicks from Superchron,” we disclosed how private detectives under hire by the Chronicle were probing Kihn’s private life and seeking to gather adverse information about him to discredit his complaint and to “harass and intimidate him,” as we put it. Later, I found that the Chronicle-KRON had also hired private detectives to get adverse information on me.
I was a suspicious character, I guess, because I had gone to the KRON building to check the station’s public FCC file on the Kihn complaints, the first journalist ever to do so. The way the story came out at a later hearing was that the station’s deputy director left the room as I was going through the records and called Cooper White and Cooper, then the Chronicle’s law firm. An attorney called their investigators, and four cars of detectives were pulled off other jobs and ordered to circle the building until I came out and then follow me when I left the station to return to my South of Market office. They also surveilled me for several months and even sent a detective into the office posing as a freelance writer. (The head of the detective agency and I later became friends, and he volunteered that I was “clean.” He gave me a pillow with a large eye on it that said “You are being watched.” I displayed it proudly in my office.)
Kihn and I were asked to testify before a Senate committee about the Chronicle-KRON’s use of private detectives at hearings on the Newspaper Preservation Act in Washington in June 1969. I took the occasion to call the legislation “the bill for millionaire crybaby publishers.”
I detailed the subsidies in their special interest legislation: “amnesty, immunity from prosecution, monopoly in perpetuity, the legal right to gun down what few competitors remain, and as the maraschino cherry atop this double-decker sundae, anointment as the preservers and saviors of the newspaper business.” And I summed up, “If you plant a flower on University of California property or loose an expletive on Vietnam, the cops are out of the chutes like broncos. But if you are a big publisher and you violate antitrust laws for years and you emasculate your competition with predatory practices and you drive hundreds of newspapers out of business, then you are treated as one of nature’s noble men. And senators will rise like doves on the floor of the US Senate to proffer billion-dollar subsidies.”
After I finished, Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois) rose as the first dove and characterized my testimony as “quite a dramatic recital” but said that I had not provided a “workable, feasible solution.” Sen. Philip Hart (D-Michigan) recommended that the publishers ought to “read their own editorials and relate them to their business practices.” Morton Mintz, who covered the hearing for the Washington Post, came up and congratulated me. His story, with my picture and much of my testimony, was on the front page of the Post the next day.
Back in San Francisco the Chronicle published a misleading short story in which publisher Charles de Young Thieriot avoided admitting or denying the detective charge and added he had no further comment. Less than a week later, Thieriot wrote the Senate subcommittee and admitted to the charge, saying the use of the detectives was “entirely reasonable and proper.” This statement, which contradicted his statement in his own paper, was not reported in the Chronicle. The “competing” Examiner also reported nothing — neither the original private detective story nor the Washington testimony nor the Thieriot admission.
Nor did either paper report anything about the intensive JOA lobbying campaign headed by Hearst president Richard Berlin, who twice wrote letters to President Richard Nixon threatening the withdrawal of JOA endorsements in the l972 presidential election if he refused to sign the final bill. This episode illustrated in 96-point Tempo Bold the pattern of Ex and Chron suppression and obfuscation they used to advance their corporate agenda at the expense of the public interest and good journalism, all through the years and up to Hearst’s current monopoly maneuvers with Dean Singleton and the Clint Reilly antitrust suit to stop them.
Perhaps the most telling incident came when Nicholas von Hoffman, in his Washington Post column that was regularly run in the Chronicle, called the publishers “as scurvy as the special interests they love to denounce.” He singled out the Examiner and Chronicle publishers, writing that they were “so bad that the best and most reliable periodical in the city is the Bay Guardian, a monthly put out by one man and a bunch of volunteer helpers.” Neither paper would run the column, and neither paper would publish it as an ad, even when we offered cash up front. “The publisher has the right to refuse to run anything he wants, and he doesn’t have to give a reason,” the JOA ad rep told us. The Guardian of course gleefully ran the censored column and the censored ad in our own full-page ad.
On July 25, l970, the day after Nixon signed the Newspaper Preservation Act, the Guardian filed a major antitrust action in San Francisco attacking the constitutionality of the legislation and charging that the Ex-Chron JOA had taken the lion’s share of local print advertising, leaving only crumbs for other print publications in town. We battled on for five years but finally settled because the suit became too expensive. The Examiner and Chronicle continued to black out or marginalize the story, but they and the other JOA papers gave Nixon resounding endorsements in the l972 election even though he was heading toward Watergate and unprecedented disgrace.
Well, in October 2006 the mainstream press is a different creature. Hearst and publisher Dean Singleton are working to destroy daily competition and impose a regional monopoly. The Knight-Ridder chain is no more, and the McClatchy chain has turned the KR remains into what I call Galloping Conglomerati. Even some alternatives, alas, are now getting chained. Craigslist has become a toxic chain. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (known as GYM in the online world) are poised to swoop in on San Francisco and other cities throughout the land to scoop up the local advertising dollars and ship them as fast as possible back to corporate headquarters on a conveyor belt.
I am happy to report on our 40th anniversary that the Guardian is aware of the challenge and is gearing up in the paper and online to compete and endure till the end of time, printing the news and raising hell and forcing the daily papers to scotch the rumors coming from our power structure exposés and our watchdog reporting. The future is still with us and with our special community and critical mission, in print and online. See you next year and for 40 more. SFBG
STOP THE PRESSES: As G.W. Schulz discloses in “A Tough Pill to Swallow,” (a) Hearst Corp. was fined $4 million in 200l by the Justice Department for failing to turn over key documents during its monopoly move to purchase a medical publishing subsidiary, the highest premerger antitrust fine in US history, according to a Justice Department press release; (b) Hearst was also forced by the the Federal Trade Commission to unload the subsidiary to break up its monopoly and disgorge $l9 million in profits generated during its ownership; (c) Hearst-owned First DataBank in San Bruno was alleged in the summer of 2005 to have inflated drug costs by upward of $7 billion by wrongly presenting drug prices, according to a lawsuit reported in a damning lead story in the Oct. 6 Wall Street Journal. Hearst blacked out the stories. And the Dean Singleton chain circling the Bay Area hasn’t pounced on the stories as real daily competitors used to do with fervor.
STOP THE PRESSES 2: SOS alert to the city and business desks of the “competing” Hearst and Singleton papers: here are the links to the key documents cited in our stories, including federal court records of the Oct. 6 Boston settlement with the Hearst-owned First DataBank (www.hagens-berman.com/first_data_bank_settlement.htm), the Justice Department’s antitrust fine of Hearst in 200l (www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/indx330.htm), and the Federal Trade Commission decision requiring Hearst to give up its monopolistic subsidiary, Medi-Span (www.ftc.gov/bc/healthcare/antitrust/commissionactions.htm).

Or you can read the Guardian each week in print or online.

Politics, beauty, and hope in the Guardian’s arts pages


Forty years of fighting urbicide — and promoting a very different vision of a city

Static shock

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
REVIEW When it premiered in New York two years ago, Sam Shepard’s latest play was timed to influence the outcome of the presidential election — an enticingly bold agenda. Of course, if you want to influence elections, as everybody understands by now, you need to be more than bold. You need to be Diebold. And anyway, what politician worries about what’s on an Off-Broadway stage? As political theater goes, Hugo Chávez calling George W. Bush the devil and sniffing out his sulfuric farts before the United Nations has much more oomph to it, in addition to getting at least as big a laugh. Chávez also backed up his warm-up zingers with a real political program. And he reads Noam Chomsky!
Two years and another flagrantly stolen election later, The God of Hell remains less interesting for any recyclable reference to the electoral contest between Democrats and Republicans (two packs squaring off again for dominance in the same corporate-owned kennel) than for the reflection in its bleak farce of something larger: an attempt to redraw the psychic and social landscape. Shepard’s ostensibly simple political broadside — whose call to alarm rings more with absurdist resignation than Brechtian defiance — has nonetheless a wily power curled up inside.
The play — sharply directed by Amy Glazer and leading off the 40th anniversary season of the Magic Theatre, Shepard’s old stomping ground — opens on the home of a dying breed: a Wisconsin dairy farmer and his wife. Emma (played with just the right suggestion of guileless good humor and native smarts by Anne Darragh) loves her indoor plants, which she compulsively waters to within an inch of their lives. Frank (John Flanagan), meanwhile, “loves his heifers,” as his affectionate wife readily explains to Frank’s old friend and their current houseguest, the jumpy and radioactive Graig Haynes (Jackson Davis), hiding from some unspecified disaster out west at a mysterious place called, in a name redolent of real-life nuclear disasters, Rocky Buttes. On the one hand, the couple looks primed to live happily heifer after. On the other, they appear stuck in a semiparadisial oasis amid unforgiving winter and a sea of agribusiness, isolated, alone, stoic, lonely, a little loony, and lost without knowing it — yet.
Emma is in the act of coaxing Haynes from the basement with some frying bacon when a stranger at the door interrupts her. As the pork sizzles, the man (Michael Santo), a business suit we later learn goes by the name Welch, appears to be selling a host of patriotic paraphernalia out of his attaché case. But his pushy demeanor quickly goes beyond the usual sales routine, his interest in Emma’s loyalty and her basement growing downright creepy, exuding an unctuousness and a sly arrogance that perfectly suggest the totalitarian turn in what Frank calls a “country of salesmen.” (Santo, whose face stretched into a thin grin bears an eerie resemblance to our real-life torturer-in-chief, is altogether perfect in the part.)
Shepard’s farmers, while purposefully cartoony, aren’t country bumpkins. Nor are they merely atavistic 1950s farmers, existing wholly in the past and detached from the present (as Welch, with telling condescension, likes to imagine them). Locally speaking, they are savvy and sure. (It’s no joke holding your own as an independent dairy farmer amid government-subsidized corporate behemoths.) Emma in particular is rooted to the very house itself, born on a patch of floor Hayes finds himself standing on at one point.
It’s the world beyond the farm and Wisconsin that the main couple find hard to grasp. In the play’s central irony, Frank and Emma tentatively mark the outer world by reference to a standard pop-cultural conspiracy narrative. But significantly, it’s just that laughable (at first) recourse to the formula of a TV thriller or sci-fi movie that points in the direction of the truth, helping Emma and Frank chart the terrain opened up by the arrival of Haynes and Welch. Long before his old friend resurfaces, Frank has already imagined for him, however vaguely, just the kind of intrigue and danger he turns out to have been undergoing. After passing the seeds of this narrative to his wife (who, as it were, dutifully overwaters them), Frank turns around and mocks her paranoia of government vehicles: “Dark cars. Suspicious. Tinted windows. Unmarked Chevies. Black antennas bowed over.” But we already know she’s right. The terrain of conspiracy, like the empire it limns, stretches in all directions, making borders meaningless except as a demagogic strategy in Welch’s fascist, state-centered patriotism.
The play invokes borders mainly to undermine, comically deflate, or cynically manipulate them. The overall and overwhelming implication is their irrelevance to an imperial might that recognizes no boundaries in the exercise of its will (things don’t need to escalate far before Welch threatens to send a bunker buster through Emma’s kitchen window). The vastness of the system confronting Emma and Frank comes across most dramatically in the unstoppable reach of plutonium — named after Pluto, the god of hell — which here serves as both a literal threat of the system and the ideal metaphor for its poisonous, apocalyptic reach. It’s this geography (real, metaphorical, potential) that the play wants us to pay attention to, since survival depends on some grasp of the lay of the land. SFBG
THE GOD OF HELL
Through Oct. 22
Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 p.m.
Magic Theatre
Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Buchanan at Marina, SF
$20–$45
(415) 441-8822
www.magictheatre.org

Reagan youth regurgitated

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› kimberly@sfbg.com
REVIEW Tired of those battered punk-rock veterans of the hardcore years? You know, the geezers rocking in their thrift-store easy chairs, wheezing, “You had to be there — those were the days. I saw Darby when …” before heading to the acupuncturist? Can you help it that you never saw Flag back before My War? That you never tasted the ostracism that the real punks experienced?
No — and those born too late, after the jocks took over the mosh pit, will be thankful that none of the aforementioned ’tude is present in this exhaustive but not exhausting documentary by Paul Rachman and Steven Blush. The filmmakers’ cred is impeccable (Rachman directed music videos for Bad Brains, and Blush wrote Feral House tome American Hardcore: A Tribal History, upon which the film is based), and their resilience (the two toiled in true DIY style for five years on this sprawling document) allows them to rise above Johnny-slams-lately poseur status. And as historians, journalists, and cat wranglers, they deserve the highest praise meted out to those hoping to encapsulate a fired-up, barely containable, and truly grassroots DIY movement: they get the story mostly right.
The filmmakers conducted more than 100 interviews with key players in the US hardcore scene (as well as sundry head-scratchers like, um, visual artist Matthew Barney). My, does it show. Getting essential punkers like Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye, Bad Brains’ HR, Circle Jerks’ Keith Morris, Cro-Mags’ Harley Flanagan, and Black Flag’s Henry Rollins to party with the camera and to tell their own stories was the best possible move the filmmakers could have made. Their subjects look back with all the intelligence, humor, honesty, urgency, and perhaps surprising to some, subtlety that made them form their own bands, book their own tours, and put out their own music in the first place.
Within the first half hour, Rachman and Blush do the important work of politically contextualizing the 1980–86 wave of hardcore, connecting the dots between the “mourning in America” election of Ronald Reagan; an era that only appeared to offer the alternate balms of disco decadence and shallow sitcom kicks; and the rise of a disgusted and less-than-heard generation that produced more songs, posters, and agitprop railing against a sitting president than the world has seen … until Dubya. Few other recent music docs have been as refreshingly clear-cut — and cutting — about their politics, a direct reaction to an ’80s marked, as one commentator puts it, by a ’50s-style return of the “white man’s order.” In a sense, American Hardcore will be an education not only for kids bred on MTV-appropriated mall punk but for baby boomers convinced of Generation X’s apathy; a far-from-mellowed Vic Bondi (Articles of Faith) offers, “If you’re looking for radicalism in the 1980s, you should look at hardcore.” The film also gives adequate shrift to the pressures that shaped and perhaps ultimately destroyed the genre — for instance, the TV news–making melees between punks and the Los Angeles Police Department — drawing the line from those clashes and band names like, natch, Millions of Dead Cops (MDC).
Bristling with the energy of its music, fans, and grainy shots of men yelling into mics at rec centers, Kiwanis clubs, and random bunkers-turned-venues throughout the country, American Hardcore abounds with great moments. Rachman and Blush rightfully focus on the nexus between DC and LA — Minor Threat–Bad Brains and Black Flag–Circle Jerks — giving Bad Brains in particular, and notably the few black faces in a wash of pasties, their genuine due and eyeballing that straight-outta-an-unwritten-great-American-novel, Apollonian-Dionysian odd couple, MacKaye and Rollins. Though one wishes the filmmakers had snagged more and better live footage, American Hardcore can still claim such incredible, illustrative instances as that of the graying Rollins complaining today of all the crap he’d catch from audiences as Black Flag’s frontperson (remember the halcyon days when being in a punk band meant getting loogied on?) followed by archival images of Rollins onstage getting repeatedly pummeled by an audience member before the vocalist finally loses it and starts wailing back a hundredfold.
But even as the filmmakers display a real affection for their subject, they resist getting too nostalgic. Rachman and Blush don’t pull punches when it comes to fingering the sexism and violence in the scene — and go as far as to name names. Yet the filmmakers talk to too few women and apart from Bad Brains, too few players or observers of color: perhaps there’s no skewing reality, but for a scene that’s this politicized, it looks pretty pale and male.
Perhaps revealing their native predispositions and personal connections, the pair also give the Boston and NYC scenes far too much emphasis and they pointedly neglect the flyover zones. Where are Minneapolis’s Hüsker Dü and Texas’s Big Boys? And while Rachman and Blush get brownie points for their cultural-anthropological leanings and quirky side stories, they eventually fall down on exploring the music itself, its permutations, and its impact outside the rec rooms: do we get any inkling, for instance, of the fact that hardcore started to seep into the MTV mainstream with bands like Suicidal Tendencies?
When the scene finally peters to a close in ’86, Rachman and Blush chalk it up to fickle fans moving on with the trends — wither hair bands? — and stalwarts like MacKaye wearying of the fisticuffs, but there’s just as valid a case to be made for the music changing and artists evolving, as they so often inconveniently do. Black Flag morphed toward heavier, sludgier metal, Bad Brains embraced tradder Rasta sounds, and MacKaye broke it down, post-punk-style, with Fugazi. But perhaps that’s for the next installment: American Hardcore: the Metal/Grunge Years. SFBG
AMERICAN HARDCORE
Opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters
www.sonyclassics.com/americanhardcore

Buried treasure

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Despite the fast-moving urban centers that surround it on each side of the San Francisco Bay, not much about Treasure Island has changed since it was shut down as a United States naval station 10 years ago.
After the feds ceased operations on the island and at several other military installations in the mid-’90s, the idea was to give the land to local governments for redevelopment to fill the economic void of losing active bases. Since then, several plans for Treasure Island have been floated with great fanfare in the press, but all have become mired in the infamously contentious development politics of San Francisco.
Late last month, after three years of deadline extensions, the Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA) finally received a full-blown plan from the developer — a partnership between Lennar Corp., Wilson Meany Sullivan, and Treasure Island Community Development — that was given exclusive negotiating rights over the land three years ago.
The $1.2 billion redevelopment plan must now run a gauntlet of state and local approval, including consideration from the Board of Supervisors, which is expected to hold hearings and debate the plan by the end of the year. It isn’t likely that construction will begin on the island for at least a couple more years.
The latest proposal anticipates about 6,000 new homes, 1,800 of which will be targeted to low-income residents, including 750 units for households earning no more than 60 percent of San Francisco’s median income and 440 built as part of a program for the homeless. Plans include town houses, single-family homes, and high-rise residential towers, although at least half the properties will be limited to 65 feet in height.
Right now the island contains about 800 occupied units, over half of which are market-rate leases with the John Stewart Co., while about 200 are operated under the Treasure Island Homeless Development Initiative. By the time the project is done, according to the newest plan, the island’s population is expected to balloon to around 10,000 residents, plus around 3,000 new workers necessary to maintain the minicity.
Some of the existing housing stock will be demolished, or as the plan calls it, “reconstructed.” Current residents will have an option to move into the new units or be placed in a lottery if demand for certain types of units outstrips the supply. The plan calls for about 27 percent of the overall planned housing units to be rentals.
Private automobile use would be regulated by metering ramp access to the island during peak commute hours; assessing possible congestion fees for driving on the island; limiting residential parking; and emphasizing thruways that promote walking, bicycling, and public transit.
Much of the development is slated for the west side of the island — with its breathtaking and profitable views of the city — near an existing ferry terminal that would provide access to the city all day long.
Treading lightly, Sup. Chris Daly, whose District 6 includes the island, said he supports the environmental and housing components so far, but if existing island residents mount significant opposition for any reason, he’d consider opposing the plan.
“You don’t know how clean something is until you take it out of the wash, and they’re just now starting to throw it in,” Daly told the Guardian.
Rob Black, Daly’s main challenger in the upcoming election, lives on Treasure Island. He was similarly cautious. “I think people have finally begun to think in a more progressive way about making this a more sustainable neighborhood,” Black told us. “Past plans have been so poorly put together.”
On the local level, the plan must be approved in the coming months by both the TIDA board and the Board of Supervisors. After that, it will undergo an extensive environmental impact review by the city’s planning department before returning to the board for final local approval.
The developer and the TIDA board — which is composed entirely of mayoral appointees, three of whom work directly for Mayor Gavin Newsom — must still overcome other major hurdles as well, including the fact that the Navy hasn’t turned over any of the land yet and likely won’t without major concessions.
The Bush administration has stalled the transfer, pushing for some payment before giving up valuable federal land. One tentative option is to relieve the Navy of about $45 million in environmental cleanup costs for which it is currently responsible. Those costs would then be borne by the redevelopment plan and the developer, which has already pledged $26 million for remediation. The land became contaminated in part after decades of military activity that included emergency drills with radioactive materials.
David Rist, a project manager for the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, which is overseeing the cleanup, said that while there is some contamination where residents are living today, it doesn’t pose an immediate threat to human health. Identified contaminants include dioxin, lead, and PCBs. Rist told us the cleanup, regardless of who ends up paying for it, will be “significantly done in the next two and a half years.”
After mulling over ideas, TIDA finally brokered an exclusive deal in 2003 with a company incorporated as Treasure Island Community Development, a group of Democratic Party heavyweights with deep links to the current and former mayoral administrations and other top elected Democrats.
Jay Wallace, a project planner for Treasure Island Community Development, said the plan’s mammoth size and uniqueness have required considerable and time-consuming attention to specifics. Investors anticipate spending $500 million of their own money, but they’re looking to earn upward of $125 million in profits, according to the plan.
The remaining cost of about $760 million for infrastructure, open space, and transportation system improvements could be covered largely by tax increment financing from the redevelopment area and Mello Roos bonds, both of which would essentially be funded by future property taxes, according to the latest term sheet.
Wallace told the Guardian that his group “has worked in good faith and transparency throughout this project, with over 150 public meetings before reaching this milestone and presenting this plan to the city.”
Daly said that while “there are going to be a hundred issues that need to be worked out,” the green-meets-affordable-housing theme “is the right proposal for San Francisco.”
“Political connections to the Newsom juggernaut notwithstanding, these guys are politically savvy enough to know what’s wise and what isn’t,” he said. “On the actual merits of the proposal, it’s palatable if you’re OK with the concept of high-rises in the middle of the bay.” SFBG

East Bay races and measures

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Editor’s note: The following story has been altered from the original to correct an error. We had originally identified Courtney Ruby as running for Alameda County Auditor; the office is actually Oakland City Auditor.

Oakland City Auditor
COURTNEY RUBY
Incumbent Roland Smith has to go. He’s been accused of harassing and verbally abusing his staff and using audits as a political weapon against his enemies. The county supervisors have had to reassign his staff to keep him from making further trouble. And yet somehow he survived the primary with 32 percent of the vote, putting him in a November runoff against Courtney Ruby, who led the field with 37 percent. Ruby, an experienced financial analyst, would bring some credibility back to the office.
Peralta Community College Board, District 7
ABEL GUILLEN
Challenger Abel Guillen has extensive knowledge of public school financing and a proven commitment to consensus building and government accountability. In the last six years Guillen, who was raised in a working-class community and was the first in his family to go to college, has raised $2.2 billion in bond money to construct and repair facilities in school districts and at community colleges. Incumbent Alona Clifton has been accused of not being responsive to teachers’ concerns about the board’s spending priorities and openness.
Berkeley mayor
TOM BATES
This race has progressives tearing at each other’s throats, particularly since they spent a ton of cash last time around to oust former mayor Shirley Dean and replace her with Tom Bates, who used to be known as a reliable progressive voice.
Bates’s reputation has shifted since he became mayor, and his record is a mixed bag. This time around, he stands accused of setting up a shadow government (via task forces that duplicate existing commissions but don’t include enough community representatives), of giving developers too many special favors instead of fighting for more community benefits, and of increasingly siding with conservative and pro-landlord city council member Gordon Wozniak.
The problem is that none of Bates’s opponents look like they would be effective as mayor. So lacking any credible alternative, we’ll go with Bates.
Berkeley City Council, District 1
LINDA MAIO
Incumbent Linda Maio’s voting record has been wimpy at times, but she is a strong proponent of affordable housing, and her sole challenger, Merrilie Mitchell, isn’t a terribly serious candidate. Vote for Maio.
Berkeley City Council, District 2
DONA SPRING
A valiant champion of every progressive cause, incumbent Dona Spring is one of the unsung heroes of Berkeley. Using a wheelchair, she puts in the energy equivalent of two or three council members and always remains on the visionary cutting edge. If that weren’t enough, her sole challenger, Latino businessman and zoning commissioner Raudel Wilson, has the endorsement of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce. Vote for Spring.
Berkeley City Council, District 7
KRISS WORTHINGTON
Incumbent Kriss Worthington is an undisputed champion of progressive causes and a courageous voice who isn’t afraid to take criticism in an age of duck and run, including the fallout he’s been experiencing following the closure of Cody’s on Telegraph Avenue, something conservatives have tried to link to his support for the homeless. His sole challenger is the evidently deep-pocketed George Beier, who describes himself as a community volunteer but has the support of landlords and the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce and has managed to blanket District 7 with signage and literature, possibly making his one of the most tree-unfriendly campaigns in Berkeley’s electoral history. Keep Berkeley progressive and vote for Worthington.
Berkeley City Council, District 8
JASON OVERMAN
Incumbent Gordon Wozniak postures as if he is going to be mayor one day, and he’s definitely the most conservative member of the council. During his tenure, Wozniak has come up with seven different ways to raise rents on tenants in Berkeley, and he didn’t even vote against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s special election last year. Challenger Jason Overman may be only 20 years old, but he’s already a seasoned political veteran, having been elected to the Rent Stabilization Board two years ago. Vote for Overman.
Berkeley city auditor
ANN-MARIE HOGAN
Ann-Marie Hogan is running unopposed for this nonpartisan post, which is hardly surprising since she’s done a great job so far and has widespread support.
Berkeley school director
KAREN HEMPHILL, NANCY RIDDLE, NORMA HARRISON
With five candidates in the running and only three seats open, some are suggesting progressives cast only one vote — for Karen Hemphill — to ensure she becomes board president in two years, since the job goes to the person with the most votes in the previous election.
Hemphill has done a great job and has the support of Latino and African American parent groups, so a vote for her is a no-brainer.
So is any vote that helps make sure that incumbents Shirley Issel and David Baggins don’t get reelected.
Nancy Riddle isn’t a hardcore liberal, but she’s a certified public accountant, so she has number-crunching skills in her favor. Our third pick is Norma Harrison, although her superradical talk about capitalism being horrible and schools being like prisons needs to be matched with some concrete and doable suggestions.
Rent Stabilization Board
DAVE BLAKE, HOWARD CHONG, CHRIS KAVANAGH, LISA STEPHENS, PAM WEBSTER
If it weren’t for the nine-member elected Rent Stabilization Board, Berkeley would have long since been taken over by the landlords and the wealthy. This powerful agency has been controlled by progressives most of the time, and this year there are five strong progressives running unopposed for five seats on the board. We recommend voting for all of them.
Oakland City Council
AIMEE ALLISON
When we endorsed Aimee Allison in the primary in June, we pointed out that this was a crucial race: incumbent Patrician Kernighan has been a staunch ally of outgoing mayor Jerry Brown and Councilmember Ignacio de La Fuente — and now that Ron Dellums is taking over the Mayor’s Office and a new political era could be dawning in Oakland, it’s crucial that the old prodevelopment types don’t control the council.
Kernighan’s vision of Oakland has always included extensive new commercial and luxury housing development, and like De La Fuente, she’s shown little concern for gentrification and displacement. Allison, a Green Party member, is the kind of progressive who could make a huge difference in Oakland, and she’s our clear and unequivocal choice for this seat.
From crime to city finance, Allison is well-informed and has cogent, practical proposals. She favors community policing and programs to help the 10,000 parolees in Oakland. She wants the city to collect an annual fee from the port, which brings in huge amounts of money and puts very little into the General Fund. She wants to promote environmentally sound development, eviction protections, and a stronger sunshine ordinance. Vote for Allison.
East Bay Municipal Utility District director, Ward 4
ANDY KATZ
Environmental planner Andy Katz is running unopposed. Despite his relative youth, he’s been an energetic and committed board member and deserves another term.
AC Transit director at large
REBECCA KAPLAN
Incumbent Rebecca Kaplan is a fixture on the East Bay progressive political scene and has been a strong advocate of free bus-pass programs and environmentally sound policies over the years. A former public interest lawyer, Kaplan’s only challenger is paralegal James K. Muhammad.
Berkeley measures
Measure A
BERKELEY PUBLIC SCHOOLS TAX
YES
This measure takes two existing taxes and combines them into one but without increasing existing rates. Since 30 percent of local teachers will get paid out of the revenue from this measure, a no vote could devastate the quality of education in the city. Vote yes.
Measure E
RENT STABILIZATION BOARD VACANCY
YES
Measure E seeks to eliminate the need to have a citywide special election every time a vacancy occurs on the Rent Stabilization Board, a process that currently costs about $400,000 and consumes huge amounts of time and energy. The proposal would require that vacancies be filled at November general elections instead, since that ballot attracts a wider and more representative group of voters. In the interim, the board would fill its own vacancies.
Measure F
GILMAN STREET PLAYING FIELDS
YES
Measure F follows the council’s October 2005 adoption of amendments that establish the proper use for public and commercial recreation sports facilities, thereby allowing development of the proposed Gilman Street fields. Vote yes.
Measure G
GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
YES
Measure G is a nice, feel-good advisory measure that expresses Berkeley’s opinion about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions to the global climate and advises the mayor to work with the community to come up with a plan that would significantly reduce such emissions, with a target of an 80 percent reduction by 2050. Vote yes.
Measure H
IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH AND VICE-PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY
YES
In left-leaning Berkeley this is probably the least controversial measure on the ballot. Do we really need to spell out all over again the many reasons why you should vote yes on this issue?
If this measure passes, both Berkeley and San Francisco will have taken public stands in favor of impeachment, which won’t by itself do much to force Congress to act but will start the national ball rolling. Vote yes.
Measure I
AMENDING CONDO CONVERSION ORDINANCE
NO, NO, NO
Measure I is a really bad idea, one that links the creation of home ownership opportunities to the eviction of families from their homes. It was clearly cooked up by landlord groups that are unhappy with Berkeley’s current condo conversion ordinance, which allows for 100 conversions a year. Measure I proposes increasing that limit to 500 conversions a year, which could translate into more than 1,000 people facing evictions. Those evictions will hit hardest on the most financially vulnerable — seniors, the disabled, low- and moderate-income families, and children. With less than 15 percent of current Berkeley tenants earning enough to purchase their units, this measure decreases the overall supply of rentals, eliminates requirements to disclose seismic conditions to prospective buyers, and violates the city’s stated commitment to fairness, compassion, and economic diversity. Vote no.
Measure J
AMENDING LANDMARK PRESERVATION ORDINANCES
YES
A well-meaning measure that’s opposed by developers, Measure J earns a lukewarm yes. It establishes a nine-member Landmarks Preservation Commission; designates landmarks, structures of merit, and historic districts; and may approve or deny alteration of such historic resources but may not deny their demolition. It’s worth noting that if Proposition 90 passes, the city could face liability for damages if Measure J is found to result in substantial economic loss to property — all of which gives us yet another reason to say “vote no” on the horribly flawed Prop. 90 while you’re voting yes on Measure J.
Oakland Measures
Measure M
POLICE AND FIRE RETIREMENT BOARD INVESTMENTS
YES
Measure M would amend the City Charter to allow the board that oversees the Oakland Police and Fire Retirement System (PFRS) slightly more leeway in making investment decisions. The board claims that its current requirements — which bar investment in stocks that don’t pay dividends — are hampering returns. That’s an issue: between July 2002 and July 2005, the unfunded liability of the PFRS grew from $200 million to $268 million — a liability for which the city of Oakland is responsible. We’re always nervous about giving investment managers the ability to use public money without close oversight, but the new rules would be the same as ones currently in place in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Measure N
LIBRARY IMPROVEMENT AND EXPANSION BONDS
YES
Oakland wants to improve and expand all library branch facilities, construct a new main library at the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, and buy land for and construct two new library facilities in the Laurel and 81st Avenue communities. The upgrades and construction plans come in response to residents’ insistence that they need more space for studying and meeting, increased library programs and services, tutoring and homework assistance for children, increased literacy programs, and greater access to current technology and locations that offer wi-fi.
This $148 million bond would cost only $40 a year for every $100,000 of assessed property. Vote yes.
Measure O
INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING
Ranked-choice voting, or instant runoff voting, is a great concept. The city of Oakland is using it to elect officials in the November election without holding a prior June election. There’s only one problem: so far, Alameda County hasn’t invested in voting equipment that could make implementing this measure possible. Voting yes is a first step in forcing the county’s hand in the right direction. SFBG

You Can’t Trust Arnold

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By Sarah Phelan
I saw the “Angelides for Governor” bus long before I saw the man who would be the next Democratic Governor of California. The bus was peacefully barreling up San Francisco’s Franklin Street on its way to the Central Labor Council where Phil Angelides was set to speak to a crowd of blue and yellow-sign waving supporters. But not before a horn-honking tow truck, cut in on the scene, its driver shouting “No to the Angelides Tax Tune-Up!” (And was that Arnold, dressed in a Super Man suit, driving a big rig, laughing manically as he pressed on a ear-drum shattering horn just as Angelides alighted from bus? Probably not, but it’s hard to tell, given the tendency of Arnie’s supporters to hide their true identities behind Super Hero masks and costumes.)
Either way, nurses, teachers, firefighters and working folks in general haven’t forgotten what Arnold has done, or tried to do, to them in the past 3 years.
Like wasting over $70 million on a special election that nobody wanted instead of trying to fix the state’s educational system.
Like stomping for Bush in Ohio in 2004, instead of demanding that California get its share of federal funds.
Like bragging about kicking nurses’ butts instead of ensuring that all Californians have access to health insurance.
Speaking of which, “Someone got their butt kicked and it wasn’t a nurse,” laughed Assemblymember Mark Leno as he addressed the crowd prior to Angelides’ appearance. “Phil Angelides slam dunked that debate.”
And as Angelides supporters pointed out, after spending over $35 million and beating up on Angelides for the past 3 months, Arnold is frozen at 44 percent in the polls. And his record sucks.
Maybe Phil Angelides hasn’t made any movies but he sure seems more trustworthy than Arnold. As Angelides told the crowd,
“I’m running with you at my side to stop the greedy obscene corporate-interest give aways.”

Back to Black

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By Steven T. Jones
These are busy days, so I suppose I’ll just have to dump out the District 6 dirt just a little at a time. That’s cool, considering tomorrow’s deadline for filing pre-election campaign statement will allow me to plow into the freshest compost for y’all. We’re also having a few technical difficulties in getting the audio from Rob Black’s endorsement interview with us online, but that problem should be solved in the next couple days. And it’s worth the wait to hear him squirm in his seat over tough and legitimate questions about how he’s been doing the bidding of the wrong people for awhile now. Stay tuned.
For now, let’s recap yesterday’s Black press conference (which was held in the City Hall Press Room, despite state laws against campaigning in government offices not open to the general public, and just as the Board of Supervisors meeting was starting down the hall).

Pot. Kettle. Black.

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By Steven T. Jones
District 6 supervisorial candidate Rob Black called a press conference this afternoon to accuse incumbent Sup. Chris Daly of “illegal campaigning.” The charges involve the letters that Daly and other supervisors send to their constituents. Frankly, I don’t have time right now to fully get into all the dimensions of this incident, which is rich with good color and hypocrisy. I’ll spin the full tale for y’all tomorrow. But for now, suffice it to say that the City Attorney’s Office — which Daly checked with before sending out the letters in batches of less than 200 each — doesn’t think this is illegal. That’s point one. Point two is that desperate candidates calling for a Fair Political Practices Commission investigation during the height of an election is trite, transparent, and downright cliche. But the third point is the most important. Black is a candidate that has benefitted mightly from a series of unethical, deceptive, expensive, and probably illegal attacks on Daly, many of which were orchestrated by Black’s mentor and former boss, campaign attorney Jim Sutton. These are attacks that Black has refused to fully condemn or disassociate himself from. So that’s what made today’s press conference not just ironic, but downright amusing. Check back tomorrow when I’ll have more, including good links to much of the above so you don’t just have to accept my perspective on the situation.

WEDNESDAY

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Sept. 27

Event

“Slam Arnold Poetry Competition”

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been shot at, beat up, and humiliated as Conan, Commando, the Terminator, and a kindergarten cop. Most Bay Area residents would agree the governor can handle a little bit of verbal abuse. The San Francisco League of Young Voters is hosting the “Slam Arnold Poetry Competition” at the Balazo Gallery to help boot the actor out of office, register voters, and educate young people about important issues. The event will open a forum for discussion regarding current political concerns. Work by local artists will be on the walls, and 12 popular regional poets will compete for prizes and laughs. Ill-Literacy will perform, along with female MCs Rhapsodistas. (Kellie Ell)

6-11 p.m.
Balazo 18 Art Gallery
2183 Mission, SF
$10-$25, sliding scale
(415) 255-7227
www.balazogallery.org
www.indyvoter.org

Film/Event

SF 360 Home Movie Night: American Blackout

It’s a little too late for you to host an American Blackout screening, but it isn’t too late to attend one at someone else’s house – even though some places have already reached sold-out capacity. This first installment of SF360 Home Movie Night showcases Ian Inaba’s documentary about schemes against black voters, which generated waves of praise at the latest SF International Film Festival. Guerilla News Network member Inaba focuses on the campaigns – including covert ones – waged against Democratic Rep. (and outspoken George W. Bush and 2000 presidential election critic) Cynthia McKinney. (Johnny Ray Huston)

10 p.m. (postscreening after-party)
Tosca
242 Columbus, SF
Free
1-866-456-WEED
www.partylaunch.com/ironweedfilms

40-year-old teens

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
American Conservatory Theater, the Magic Theatre, and Marin Theatre Company all turn 40 this year. Accordingly, these three regionally and nationally preeminent Bay Area companies are rolling out ambitious celebratory seasons. But despite all the satisfaction rightfully implied by this triple birthday, theater finds itself in a significant and uncertain period of transition.
Relevance and sustainability were prominent themes when artistic directors Carey Perloff (ACT), Lee Sankowich (MTC), and Chris Smith (Magic) sat down with the Guardian to share their thoughts on the trajectories of their respective organizations as well as theater’s past, present, and future in the culture at large.
CHRIS SMITH There is a lot of looking back and celebration of legacies and all that a significant landmark — turning 40 — suggests. But organic to the Magic’s mission is seeding the future, because we really are about new work. And to be committed to new work is really to have a perspective on the horizon.
We can talk about it from a number of different points of view, including the way most people want to talk about theater and art making these days, which is from the consumer model. We’re all completely obsessed with audiences and consumers. And that’s one of the critical differences [between] now and 40 years ago. In a weird way we’re a 40-year-old teenager. Suddenly we’re saying we have to be more concerned now than in the past about making sure people are having a good experience and getting them in.
But if you stop thinking for one split second about the financial success of the theater or the relevancy of the theater within a country that is arguably celebrating the dumbing down of the political spectrum, the health of the theater as an art form is very, very good. The best thing to cite on that front is the proliferation of high-quality MFA writing programs contributing to the number of committed, intelligent, craft-oriented, theatrically vibrant artists coming into our field.
So I actually have a great deal of optimism about the value that theater will have in the next decade in our society. That’s very distinct from numbers. The audiences that will be attending challenging, literate, smart work I expect are going to shrink. But I think it brings us back to a kind of churchlike sensibility.
The theater as a church for a thinking person is increasingly at value in our digital age, where we’re being separated from liveness, we’re being separated from the communal, separated from contact. We are in a moment between a fundamental impulse to look backwards and an impulse to look forwards. And the artists are the ones that live in that cusp.
CAREY PERLOFF Of course, this is exactly what [Tom Stoppard’s] Travesties is about. There’s a great moment where [Tristan] Tzara says, “As a Dadaist I’m a natural ally of the political left, but the paradox is the further left you go politically, the more bourgeois they like their art.” On the other hand, obviously what Stoppard believes — and what we all have to believe or we wouldn’t be doing this — is that in the long run, when everything else goes, the thing that lasts is art.
The real fight for us in the field right now is to have our own barometers of value. You have to try to take the long view. The only external measures of value [now] are box office sales and critical response. But there are many plays that had miserable box office returns and disastrous critical responses and have come to be the plays we treasure. As I get older, what I most admire in certain artists is their willingness to stay the course and keep their own exploration, their own voice, their own particular artistic journey going, whether or not it seems to be popular or viable.
We wrestle with it here all the time, because I wish people were writing bigger plays. We’re doing [Philip Kan Gotanda’s After the War] at the Geary. Now this may be the most foolhardy choice I’ve ever made, but it’s such a big, meaty play that it deserves to be on the Geary stage. We do Lillian Hellman, we do August Wilson, we do Stoppard. Who’s the next generation of writers writing 10-character plays that can fit in the Geary? No wonder nobody’s doing it, because who’s producing it? Nobody! Of course everyone’s writing four-character plays. They’re not idiots.
You have to say to a writer, “Have the courage to think big. Learn the Chekhovian skill of writing for 10 actors,” which is extremely difficult. To sustain complex character over a canvas that size is a totally different challenge. We don’t ask our writers to do that anymore.
LEE SANKOWICH Well, it comes down to support. To be able to do what both of you are talking about, it comes down to corporate funding and grants.
CP But the grant ethos right now — the word that is used more than anything else — is outcomes, right? We’re all being asked to demonstrate measurable outcomes. To me this is so hilarious. It’s like saying, “I’m going to be raising my children, and the measurable outcomes are what?”
CS We need to — as artists and as leaders of artistic institutions — stand up and say, “No, we need cultural metrics. We need the enlightenment-o-meter for measurable outcomes.” Did I walk out of this performance of Orson’s Shadow knowing more about the peculiar nature of these tremendous stars and their relationships and how that impulse really created art? Did I leave there somehow changed? And can we measure that? Can we say, instead, there was a 20 percent increase in enlightenment — what a remarkable outcome! — although the attendance figures stayed flat?
LS It’s interesting, [when] you walk out of Orson’s Shadow, if nothing else, you realize that the big struggle, especially for Welles and Olivier, [is that] they’re known for what they did 30 years earlier. And their big thing is they’re trying to become modern.
CS The opening of our seasons is really emblematic. MTC is working with these great artists in a very literate, funny, interesting perspective. ACT is working on this very big social canvas in a really smart way with Stoppard. The Magic Theatre is getting to work with Sam Shepard and his most recent play [The God of Hell], likewise his most passionate play, written in a moment specifically with the intention to affect the outcome of an election! SFBG
www.act-sfbay.org
www.magictheatre.org
www.marintheatre.org
For the complete interview with Perloff, Sankowich, and Smith, see www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Save KQED! Vote No!

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EDITORIAL KQED, San Francisco’s venerable public radio and television outlet, is trying to summarily abandon internal democracy. The station’s management is sending out letters this week asking its 190,000 members to vote on a bylaws change that would eliminate direct election of board members and shift complete control of the station’s operations to a self-appointed board. The proposal would also strip members of the right to vote on future changes to the bylaws.
This is a horrible idea and KQED members should reject it.
The bylaws change, KQED spokesperson Yoon Lee told us, comes in the wake of a May merger between KQED and San Jose’s public station, KTEH, and is aimed at simplifying operations at the stations. Besides, she said, elections are expensive: KQED spends roughly $250,000 each time it chooses new board members.
Of course, the United States could save huge sums of money by canceling congressional elections and letting the House and Senate choose their own members, but that idea wouldn’t get too far. Neither should the idea of the people — who pay for the programming, pay for the staff, pay for the salaries of the station executives, and pay for the elections — being cut out of the process.
For half a century, KQED has had a tradition of membership participation. It’s been awkward and stilted at times (the board appoints its own slate of candidates, and it’s tough for outside candidates to get on the ballot and get elected). But critics of station management have won seats on the board now and then, and their input has been tremendously healthy for the organization.
KQED has always needed independent watchdogs. For years, the station has poured money into bad projects and wasted cash on overpaid executives — at the expense of its primary mission, which is (and ought to be) to provide quality local programming. There’s no KQED TV news show (although there used to be). Other than Michael Krasny on the radio, there’s precious little in the way of local public affairs shows.
That’s the kind of thing rebel board members like Henry Kroll and Sasha Futran used to bring up and force onto the agenda. They also made the case for letting the members — and the public — have access to the details of KQED’s finances.
Lee says that none of the other big stations in the Public Broadcasting Service system have elected boards, but this is San Francisco, a city that takes its publicly supported institutions seriously and demands accountability. And locally, the direction of member-sponsored broadcasting is just the opposite: KPFA has gone to great lengths to elect a community-based board.
This is the last chance members will ever have to halt the corporatization of KQED. Most members just throw their ballots out; this time, it’s worth taking a minute to vote no on the new bylaws. SFBG

The people’s program

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OPINION San Francisco progressives have spent years getting on the political power map. We have achieved amazing victories, such as the 2000 sweep that defeated the Brown machine and ushered in an independent Board of Supervisors. At times we’ve gotten mired in sectarian clashes that have prevented unity around a common vision. However, such obstacles and stumbles have taught us valuable lessons that can be the building blocks for a vibrant people’s movement. To be successful, we progressives need to have a clear vision and to keep asking ourselves questions. What does it mean to be progressive and for progressives to have power? Assuming we all agree that progressive unity is a necessary foundation for social change, what should unity look like today? And if we’re successful at maintaining power, what do we want to look like five and 10 years from now? In the first year following its founding convention and with these questions in mind, the San Francisco Peoples’ Organization (SFPO) has chosen to focus on three issues central to the lives of all San Franciscans — health care, affordable housing, and violence prevention. Over the past year, this fledgling organization has logged a long list of achievements and participated in many exciting causes. The SFPO has: •worked with the Alliance for a Better California to defeat Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s special election measures in November 2005; •assisted in the development and passage of Supervisor Tom Ammiano’s Worker Health Care Security Ordinance, creating universal health care for local residents; •advocated for Supervisor Chris Daly’s recently passed legislation to increase mandatory levels of affordable housing in new housing developments; •took a leadership role in uniting communities of color and progressives to fight for Proposition A’s homicide and violence prevention efforts, including a host of new budget initiatives addressing some of the root causes of violence; •launched an e-mail dispatch that reaches over 5,000 constituents and highlights local progressive issues, campaigns, and events; •played an active role in the UNITE-HERE Local 2 contract campaign, attending pickets, planning meetings, and participating in civil disobedience. Part of our effort involves critically analyzing the policy agendas of our elected lawmakers and making recommendations. Mayor Gavin Newsom, through his highly visible work to legalize same-sex marriage, rightfully gained the respect and admiration of progressive San Franciscans. However, same-sex marriage is only one issue; Mayor Newsom should not be given carte blanche among progressives for this single act. The SFPO’s second annual convention will take place Sept. 30 at St. Mary’s Cathedral. Please join us. We cannot wait to work together. The future of our city — who we want to live here, who we want to work here, who we want educated here — is being determined now. SFBG Jane Kim and John Avalos The writers are president and vice president, respectively, of the San Francisco Peoples’ Organization. For more information about the SFPO and the Sept. 30 convention, go to www.sfpeople.org.

Casting off

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› amanda@sfbg.com
Hornblower Yachts assumed control of the ferry service to Alcatraz Island on Sept. 25. As the new crew cast off the dock lines, spurned union workers — some 30-year veterans with the former contractor, Blue and Gold — rallied with supporters at the entrance, asking passengers not to board the boats.
Two union-friendly visitors from Sydney, Australia, ripped up their tickets and demanded refunds. “We don’t agree with what they’re doing to the workers,” one said, while in the background Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Tom Ammiano took turns with the bullhorn, also offering their support to the workers.
“All of our colleagues on the board are not going to stand for it,” Peskin said to the couple hundred laborers gathered on the sidewalk. “We’re going to stand with you and march with you.”
Terry MacRae, CEO of Hornblower, expressed little concern about the boycotting tourists and the rally at his gate. “I suspect there’s plenty more people who want the tickets if they’re not going to use them,” he told the Guardian. Visits to Alcatraz peak this time of year, with a couple thousand people turned away every day when tickets sell out, according to National Park Service spokesperson Rich Wiedeman.
The NPS decision to grant the lucrative, 10-year contract to Hornblower over Blue and Gold has resulted in more than just what some are calling the largest union layoff in San Francisco waterfront history. The story also has an environmental angle as slick as an oil spill and a nasty landlord-tenant tussle.
“The port and I are extremely concerned with how Hornblower has conducted itself,” City Attorney Dennis Herrera told the Guardian, referring to the company’s artful dodge of city and state permitting processes. “They’ve focused more energy on sidestepping public oversight than complying with it.”
Despite infuriating two leading San Francisco institutions — unions and city planners — MacRae has managed thus far to avoid too much of a stir by keeping another critical local constituency off his back with a well-played “green” card.
THE GREEN MACHINE
When NPS put out a request for proposals in 2004, three companies submitted bids for Alcatraz: Red and White, a local charter and bay cruise company that ran the service when it first started in the ’70s; Blue and Gold, which took over Red and White’s boats and unionized crew in 1994; and Hornblower Cruises and Events, which runs charter and dinner boat cruises from five California ports and is a subsidiary of a larger, $30 million company.
When Brian O’Neill, superintendent of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, announced last year that Hornblower won the bid, union activists immediately challenged the choice. Mayor Gavin Newsom, Peskin, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and both of California’s US senators expressed concerns about the decision. Neighborhood group Citizens to Save the Waterfront filed suit. Environmentalists, however, were elated.
For the first time since being passed by Congress in 1998, the Concessions Management Act applied to the bid for Alcatraz. In addition to forbidding the Department of the Interior from favoring incumbent contractors, the act also outlined new criteria for awarding contracts that included a mandate to improve environmental quality in national parklands.
“Bluewater Network has been advocating for more than five years for a solar- and wind-powered ferry for San Francisco Bay,” said Teri Schore, a spokesperson for the local environmental group. She added that diesel vessels in the Bay Area account for more pollution than cars and buses combined. “We’ve been talking to every ferry operator on the bay, and we also knew that the Alcatraz contract was up. We thought it was the perfect application.”
Hornblower’s MacRae wrote a provision into his bid that within two years of taking over the Alcatraz service, the company would build and launch a ferry to run on a combination of solar, wind, and diesel power. After one year of testing the vessel, a second would be built within five years.
That — in combination with a plan to make two initial vessels 90 percent more fuel efficient, as well as implement a clean energy shuttle service on the Embarcadero, power the landing facilities with solar panels, purchase green products, and vend healthy snacks — put Hornblower’s bid over the top.
Wiedeman said all bidders are informed that financial feasibility of the company and potential revenue for the government, as well as environmental and sustainability initiatives, were considered. But some criteria were more weighted than others, and Hornblower ranked strongly on all points.
“We’re ecstatic,” Wiedeman said. “We’re looking at higher-quality visitor services from the get-go.”
But some doubt whether the proposed vessels are anywhere close to a reality. MacRae said a final design and marine contractor have not been selected yet, although Solar Sailor’s model BayTri has been touted. A giant solar-arrayed fin provides auxiliary wind and sun power to the trimaran’s diesel engines. No such vessel has ever been built, but the model is based on a smaller solar ferry that services Sydney Harbor in Australia — with a top speed of just seven knots.
The proposed boat is emissions free and could go 12 knots with the aid of the wind, although it would need a push from auxiliary diesel engines to keep up with Alcatraz’s schedule. Boats now run between 15 and 19 knots.
The other concern is that MacRae’s commitment of $5 million for constructing the 600-passenger vessel might not be enough. The San Francisco Water Transit Authority has been looking into a similar vessel carrying no more than 150 passengers that would cost between $6 and $8 million.
“Their requirements for design are different than what mine would be,” MacRae said. “I think it’s possible to do it for $5 million.”
Bluewater Network founder Russell Long worries that the low-budget cap could hurt the vessel’s environmental potential. “We believe that Hornblower may intend to maintain this budget ceiling even if it compromises other aspects of the design, such as best management practices in regard to environmental components,” he wrote in a letter to NPS, urging reconsideration of the contract.
NPS awarded the contract anyway and Bluewater is hoping for the best.
“We will be watchdogging the progress and keeping track of what’s going on. If it doesn’t happen, it will be a huge black eye for the National Park Service, Hornblower, and the city of San Francisco,” Schore said. “At this point we have faith that it’s going to get built, because it’s in the contract.”
However, Hornblower’s snub toward union contracts and dodgy relations with the city suggest that playing by the rules may not be a top priority for the company.
THE PERFECT TYPO
Since 1974, boats to Alcatraz have run from the Pier 39 area of Fisherman’s Wharf, where waiting ticket holders can indulge in the myriad distractions the tourist hub offers.
MacRae launched his new ferry service from Pier 31, half a mile farther south on the Embarcadero, where he currently leases space and operates a charter and dining cruise business.
Pier 31 is little more than a parking lot with a ramp and floating dock, which only sees about 100,000 people a year, far fewer than the 1.3 million annual passengers Alcatraz draws.
MacRae has attractive plans for a complete overhaul of the area, which would include landscaping and sheltered seating, a bookstore, and an informational center. Such alterations would require a thorough run through the city’s planning process, which MacRae told the NPS he won’t be doing until 12 to 18 months from now.
Instead, interim improvements to the lot were planned, which sparked concern from the city that the sudden increase in foot traffic wouldn’t be properly mitigated. That area of the Embarcadero also hosts 250,000 passengers a year from cruise ships docking at adjacent Pier 35. The Port spent close to $200,000 last year controlling that traffic with signage and police officers. The addition of thousands more visitors streaming down the sidewalks seeking passage to Alcatraz could cause gridlock every time a cruise ship docks.
Monique Moyer, executive director of the port, sent repeated letters over the last year to MacRae asking for clarifications about his plans and expressing concern that the change in use of Pier 31 required a review of existing permits.
She wasn’t alone. On July 31, Citizens to Save the Waterfront filed suit against Hornblower, claiming that the amount of activity at Pier 31 would increase twentyfold. “That represents a substantial change in the intensity of use,” Jon Golinger, a representative from the group, told us.
A change in the intensity of use of a waterfront property triggers the need for a complete environmental impact review (EIR) from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), a state agency with jurisdiction over anything within 100 feet of the shoreline. As many city developers know, EIRs can take many months to consider all potential changes to the existing landscape that the applicant would cause. Delays of that sort could have hindered MacRae’s ability to assume ferry service on the contracted date of Sept. 25.
MacRae said the litigation kept him from divulging to the city his proposed plans for upgrades to the pier.
Just days before the lawsuit was to be argued in San Francisco Superior Court on Sept. 6, BCDC executive director Will Travis sent a letter to Moyer stating that Hornblower’s new service and alterations to Pier 31 did not require any new permits.
He cited a typo from Hornblower’s current BCDC-issued permit as an allowance for the increase in passengers. The permit states that the pier may provide “access to the entire bay via vessel for 200,000 to 5000,000 [sic] people/year.”
He footnoted the quote: “There is clearly a typographical error in the 5000,000 number, which is intended to state the maximum anticipated usage of the dock … the correct number is probably either 500,000 or 5,000,000. While it seems reasonable to believe that the correct number is 500,000, the record contains nothing to substantiate this conclusion.”
Travis also relayed that Hornblower plans to use temporary measures that include trailers with port-a-potties, a portable ticket booth, and hollow traffic barriers for guiding traffic and pedestrians on and off the boat.
Herrera told us that this was the first Moyer had heard of what was planned for the lot and there was concern about how other services in the area and traffic on the Embarcadero would be affected, as well as if any structures, signage, and other enhancements would require additional permits. “It certainly would have been nice if they had shared all these plans so the port could conduct the proper environmental review that we all agree is in order,” he said.
In a strongly worded letter to Travis, Herrera wrote that to allow Hornblower to proceed without any environmental review could violate the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and urged the BCDC to “issue an immediate cease and desist order” to prevent the start of service. Herrera also made the salient point that “the later the environmental review process begins, the more bureaucratic and financial momentum there is behind a proposed project, thus providing a strong incentive to ignore environmental concerns that could be dealt with more easily at an early stage of the project.”
On Sept. 7, BCDC commissioners met in closed session at the end of a four-hour meeting and voted to stand by Travis’s argument.
David Owen, a former Peskin aide who’s also a BCDC commissioner, was one of two abstentions to the otherwise unanimous vote. “It was really frustrating, because it seemed like Hornblower did everything in their power to avoid a permit review,” Owen told us. “Now what? We have a CEQA lawsuit and then the Board of Supervisors shuts down the Alcatraz ferry service? They’ve managed to start up service without acquiring a single permit. Kudos to them for strategy.”
Citizens to Save the Waterfront then dropped its lawsuit, feeling it was weakened by the BCDC decision.
“Essentially, now there’s a turf war between Bush’s park service and the Port of San Francisco,” Golinger said. “BCDC tried to avoid getting involved, but the precedent it sets is horrible. A corporation can come in and skirt any planning process.”
UNION TOWN POLITICS
After scoring the Alcatraz bid, Hornblower sought an exemption to the Service Contract Act of 1965 that would have required MacRae to pay equal to or more than what current crew make. But the Department of Labor ruled Sept. 21 against Hornblower. So veteran Blue and Gold crew have added safety to their concerns.
“I’ve made tens of thousands of landings on Alcatraz Island, and now they have captains who have never been there,” Capt. Andy Miller said. For 17 years, Miller has navigated the busy shipping lanes and the constant summer fog against the tugging tide and the sudden slams of inclement weather to bring tourists, park service staff, and supplies to the island.
“No one’s ever gotten hurt. It’s a very tricky place to land a boat. It takes skill and experience that you can’t just hire off the street,” he said.
Miller said he applied for a job with Hornblower but was not interviewed. So far, no captains and only three ticket agents and a deckhand have been hired from Blue and Gold’s former fleet.
“We have a ready workforce,” Master, Mate, and Pilot union spokesperson Veronica Sanchez said. “They’re going to have to be paid the same wages as union workers at Blue and Gold. They don’t want to be a union shop. Why don’t you want to be a union shop on a union waterfront like San Francisco?”
One reason could be concern that it might bump up costs for Hornblower’s other tour operations. “They want us to agree that if we sign up our workers for Alcatraz, that we won’t organize the dining yachts,” Sanchez said. In 1998, the union attempted to organize Hornblower’s dinner cruise operations in San Francisco but didn’t prevail in a supervised election.
MacRae said he’s not opposed to the unions and he’s encouraged the Blue and Gold staff to apply for jobs. “The unionization is the choice of the workers,” he said. “We try to let the employees make the choices. Last time I checked, that’s who the unions represent.”
“We want to make sure we have the best crew,” he said. “Many of the products and guest services we provide aren’t what Blue and Gold do now.” He added that some current employees from the dining cruises have also been shifted to the Alcatraz route.
“I’ve been here 21 years, and we’ve been replaced by busboys and waiters,” said deckhand Robert Estrada, standing with fellow workers outside the gate of the new Alcatraz ferry service.
Estrada said Hornblower’s reliance on part-time, low-wage workers has earned the company the nickname “the Wal-Mart of the Water.” The company’s rapid expansion, from a two-boat Berkeley-based charter to a multinational fleet with government contracts is a similar characteristic.
Blue and Gold spokesperson Alicia Vargas assured us that the remaining ferry services to Alameda, Angel Island, Oakland, Sausalito, Tiburon, and Vallejo will be solvent, but some of the veteran crew who haven’t been laid off yet are worried this is the beginning of the end.
“The public needs to be warned. If funds don’t come from Alcatraz, Blue and Gold could fold,” said David Heran, an International Boatmen’s Union member and deckhand since 1974 who applied to Hornblower but wasn’t hired. “I’m not ready to retire yet, and this wasn’t the way I was expecting it to happen.” SFBG

A vote on Oak to Ninth

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In just 30 days, the Oak to Ninth Referendum Committee collected the signatures of 25,068 Oakland residents who want a chance to vote on a massive development project that would bring 31,000 new homes to the Oakland waterfront. But the matter may never be on the ballot: on Sept. 6, Oakland City Attorney John Russo directed the city clerk to invalidate the petition because it didn’t conform to the requirements of state election law.
It’s likely that from a legal standpoint Russo’s determination is correct. Nevertheless, the decision exposes flaws in California’s election system that the state legislature should fix. In the shorter term, the Oakland City Council ought to recognize that there’s strong public sentiment for a referendum on the project and put Oak to Ninth before the voters.
It’s tough to force a referendum vote on an act of local government: you need to gather a significant number of signatures within 30 days of the passage of the bill — and there are no second chances. If the petition doesn’t meet every possible legal standard — and the standards are high, the rules complex — then the referendum is dead forever.
Erica Harrold, communications director for Russo’s office, told us she sympathized with the plight of Oak to Ninth foes and acknowledged that the current rules applying to referendum petitions are “draconian.” Russo, she said, is seeking reforms to the current system, including establishment of a new rule that would not start the 30-day period until the city provides a certified final version of an ordinance to petition sponsors. That was a key issue in this conflict: the Oak to Ninth Referendum Committee apparently had to rush to gather signatures to meet the deadline and for various reasons did not submit the version of the ordinance that Russo and the City Council consider the final draft (additionally, the committee did not include certain attachments to the ordinance that the City Attorney’s Office says were required).
The legislature should follow Russo’s suggestion and change the deadlines. It should also consider allowing petition sponsors to cure unintentional defects in their petitions.
State legislative reform can’t come quickly enough to remedy the current situation involving the Oak to Ninth petition. But the City Council can still act: it’s well within the authority of local officials to simply acknowledge the public interest in (and demand for) a citywide vote on a project that will change Oakland forever — and place the entire matter on next June’s ballot.
There’s no rush to break ground here — in fact, we’ve long argued that the project shouldn’t have final approval until the incoming mayor, Ron Dellums (who has expressed real concerns with the deal), takes office. Legal technicalities aside, the bottom line is simple: Oakland residents deserve a chance to be heard on Oak to Ninth. SFBG
PS Stop the presses: on Sept. 19, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera ruled that petitions demanding a vote on the redevelopment plan for Bayview–Hunters Point were invalid — on a legal technicality similar to the one that undermined the Oakland petitions. Again, Herrera may well be legally correct (and we’re under no illusions here — the referendum was financed in part by a private housing developer) — but when in doubt, the desire of the voters to weigh in on an issue should be paramount. The supervisors should determine whether it’s possible to put this plan on the ballot anyway.

EDITOR’S NOTES

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
None of the candidates for public office this year can beat the performance of a 2004 supervisorial hopeful who showed up at the Guardian office for an endorsement interview with a completely spaced-out homeless friend in tow. The candidate was talking rapid-fire for an hour, shifting effortlessly back and forth from his history as a welfare recipient turned bartender turned subject of a drug bust turned successful businessperson to his suggestions for public policy and proposals for improving the neighborhood. His pal was muttering the entire time, off in his own world, his random comments a kind of atonal counterpoint to the candidate’s high-speed pronouncements and reminiscences — until the would-be politician began to talk about the time years ago when the cops caught him with a bunch of LSD that wasn’t really his. Quite a bit of LSD. At the description of the inventory, the sidekick snapped out of his reverie for a moment and proclaimed, “That’s a lot of dose.” Then he was back to his own world.
The 2006 contenders are a much more predictable lot, generally speaking. But there have been some moments.
At the top of the list, I think, were Starchild, the Libertarian candidate for District 8 supervisor, and Philip Berg, the Libertarian for Congress, who came in together and told us that the city would be a much safer place if the entire populace were armed — not just with handguns but with AK-47s — and that the trouble-plagued Halloween Night in the Castro would be much more peaceful if everyone who attended had a weapon.
I’ve always wanted the rest of the world to be able to share these moments with us — Guardian endorsement interviews are great moments in policy formation and political debate, as well as high theater of the finest kind. Soon we’ll have them online, unedited — questions, answers, speeches (ours and theirs), fights, laughs … every moment, for your listening pleasure. Check www.sfbg.com for details.
We generally don’t record interviews with people who just come down to the office to chat and give us advice about the election, which is fair — but I want to share a really sad moment with you. Sarah Lipson stopped by at my request to talk about the SF school board race; she’s one of the best members of that often-dysfunctional panel, the kind of person who gives you hope for the schools and for local politics … and she’s not seeking reelection. She misses teaching, she told us, and that’s understandable — but she also said that it’s basically impossible for someone with kids who isn’t rich to devote perhaps 30 or 40 hours a week to the school board and still have a job on the side.
Thing is, the San Francisco Board of Education, which oversees a half-billion-a-year budget, is essentially a volunteer ($500 a month) gig. That’s a model from a very different era, and it doesn’t work anymore.
San Francisco is a hideously expensive place, a city where almost nobody can support a family on one income. Full-time volunteerism is an impossible burden, and it means people like Lipson — who is exactly the sort of person we want setting policy for the schools — can’t serve on the board. Either you punish your family or you don’t do the job you want to do.
Being on the school board is a full-time job. We need to pay these folks a full-time salary. SFBG

Discovering the formula

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› amanda@sfbg.com
San Francisco has a thing for local businesses. From Chinatown to Hayes Valley, the dozens of distinctive neighborhoods that constitute this city have for the most part maintained their individuality with one-of-a-kind, locally owned places to shop, snack, and seek services.
While many cities and small towns across the country have succumbed to the sprawl and homogeneity of chain stores, some have resisted, even in the face of lawsuits and wily campaigning from megaretailers. Big corporations including Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Target are combating restrictive municipal legislation with their money, pouring millions into local political races and flying in paid signature gatherers for ballot referenda.
“They’re spending $100 per vote in some cases,” Stacy Mitchell told the Guardian. Mitchell is the author of Big-Box Swindle and a senior researcher for the New Rules Project, a subsidiary of the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, which tracks legislation against formula retail.
“They’re getting mixed results,” she said, which means sometimes the big boys lose, like in the multiyear battle with Inglewood that sent Wal-Mart walking. But more often than not, the formula retailers win.
Take Chicago as a recent example: Mayor Richard Daley overrode city councilors and issued his first veto in 17 years, against legislation that would have required large retailers to pay a living wage to employees. Councilors hoped to trump the mayor with another vote, but at the last minute three councilors switched positions to side with Daley.
“I still don’t understand how it happened,” said SF supervisor Tom Ammiano, who flew into Chicago to speak in favor of the legislation. He told us the city was behind it, though opponents were arguing that low-income people needed the option to work and shop at Wal-Mart and it was discriminatory to not allow the store to move into the city. “They played the race card. It was obvious they were people on [Wal-Mart’s] payroll.”
In the week since the veto, Wal-Mart has already swooped in with several site proposals for the first 20-acre megamart in Chicago. It’s stated an eventual goal of building 20 stores in the Windy City. Could Wal-Mart spite San Francisco just like it did Chicago?
Since 2004, San Francisco has operated with the Formula Retail Ordinance, designed to preserve “the city’s goal of a diverse retail base.” This isn’t an outright ban, but it makes the application and review process more arduous for formula retail. The ordinance defines formula retail as any chain with 11 or more outlets that offer standardized services or mimic one another in decor, architecture, and practices (like Starbucks, the Gap, and Wal-Mart, to name an infamous few).
The relevant legislation, Section 703.3 of the Planning Code, reads like it was penned by a Norman Rockwell acolyte and cites such businesses as generally undesirable, granting neighborhoods the right to be notified of potential chain store proposals. While the legislation allows neighborhoods to create their own stricter legislation, it also grants them the right to accept a chain into the fold, which is a pretty big loophole.
So far, most neighborhoods haven’t been welcoming. A battle in North Beach over Home Depot resulted in an outright ban of all formula retail in the neighborhood. Hayes Valley followed suit. Conditional use permits in western SoMa, Cole Valley, and Divisadero from Haight to Turk add an extra layer of scrutiny to the planning process when a Starbucks or Target want to set up shop. Potrero Hill–Showplace Square is the next in the trend, with a 12-month interim conditional-use period and a more permanent restriction on the way. That restriction was introduced by Sup. Sophie Maxwell, approved by the Land Use and Economic Development Committee, and headed to the full Board of Supervisors for initial approval Sept. 19 after Guardian press time.
Maxwell’s legislation could become moot this November if voters approve Proposition G, the Small Business Protection Act, which would extend conditional-use permitting to the entire city, making any proposal from a chain store subject to public hearings and an arduous Environmental Impact Review at the expense of the applicant, not the city.
Dozens of counties and municipalities have enacted similar ordinances around the country in response to the track records of megaretailers. Public criticism is mounting against corporations such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot for drawing the shopping masses by reducing prices to quash smaller competitors and for pulling profits out of communities instead of keeping them local, as small businesses tend to do.
But the chain stores aren’t just rolling over.
“It’s happening in enough places that it’s reached a point where they’re feeling nervous about how it’s affecting their growth,” Mitchell said about the retail giants. Her organization has been assisting communities for several years in drafting legislation against formula retail and is seeing some of that legislation undercut by voracious chain stores. Wal-Mart, the most notorious foe, dumps thousands of dollars into local election races. The tactic is especially evident in California.
“Wal-Mart spends more in California than anywhere,” said Nu Wexler, spokesperson for Wal-Mart Watch, a Washington-based organization with hawk eyes on the company. “They have active lobbying in all 50 states, but California is a particularly important market for them.”
He attributes that to the state’s status as the sixth-largest economy in the world. In 2002, Wal-Mart promised to open 40 supercenters in the state within four to six years. As of October 2005, only six had been opened. “They’re fighting expansion battles all over the country, but they’re having an especially difficult time in California,” Wexler said. Inglewood, Turlock, and Hercules have all recently dodged Wal-Mart.
But several other cities have not, despite protective measures, and in the last year 12 more supercenters have opened in California, bringing the grand total to 19.
Contra Costa County, apropos of no immediate threat, passed a 2003 ordinance prohibiting “big box” stores over 90,000 square feet. In response, Wal-Mart dumped more than $1.5 million campaigning for a measure overriding the ordinance on the next available ballot. In 2004, the ordinance was overturned by 54 percent of voters.
Four years of fighting in Rosemead resulted in two city council shake-ups, with a recall election of two council members set to be decided this week; a possible Brown Act violation when city officials approved a permit for Wal-Mart during a meeting when it wasn’t on the agenda; and multiple lawsuits from both sides. Wal-Mart spent $200,000 campaigning and dropped another $100,000 in local charities to spread some good cheer. It worked: doors opened at a new supercenter Sept. 18.
Last August, a Wal-Mart opened just across the bay in Oakland even though the city already had a ban on big-box retail larger than 2.5 acres. Spurning the city’s provincial laws, Wal-Mart found real estate regulated by the Port of Oakland — which, similar to San Francisco’s port, is outside the city’s jurisdiction and not subject to local ordinances.
“It was passed in a backroom deal with the port before the city could have any public hearings,” said Adam Gold, a spokesperson from Just Cause Oakland, a local group that opposed the store. “It made it difficult to resist it. It had already been approved.”
At the state level, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently vetoed Senate Bill 1414, introduced by San Francisco’s state senator Carol Migden, which would have required employers with more than 10,000 workers to put 8 percent of total wages toward health care. Not a surprise: Wal-Mart’s Walton family dropped more than half a million dollars into electing the governor, with a most timely donation of $250,000 last year on the very day he vetoed legislation aimed at Wal-Mart that would have required businesses to disclose when employees use public health care services.
Two other bills, SB1523, requiring environmental impact reports and public hearings for the construction of stores larger than 100,000 square feet, and SB1818, allowing cities to recover legal fees when sued by big-box retailers, sailed through the legislature but are currently festering on the governor’s desk.
Is it all enough to protect San Francisco? Can the city keep mom and pop on the corners and resist the commercialism that has made a city like Emeryville the mall that it is today?
Maxwell, who pushed the recent legislation for Showplace Square and Potrero Hill, hopes so. “I’d rather have the position of them on the offense than the defense,” she said of potential retail applicants. When asked if the city codes are strict enough, she said, “If not, I’d be willing to put forth the legislation that is.”
As for the idea of Wal-Mart coming to town, the District 10 supervisor was nothing if not firm: “No, no way. Not in San Francisco.” SFBG

The age of 9/11

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OPINION We all remember where we were on Sept. 11, 2001. The event rocked the world as the last remaining superpower was attacked in full view of its citizens. The images entered our collective consciousness, and we began a new era of global unrest. The gloves came off, diplomacy was mocked, and the United States blasted onto the world stage, weapons drawn.
Let’s not relive the events of Sept. 11. We have been reminded of that morning over and over as it has become the sole source of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The international war on terror has taken center stage as Bush and others have used it as a pretext to undermine the pillars of democracy — the rule of law and transparent government. We now take racial profiling for granted. We watch as people are kidnapped from their countries and imprisoned indefinitely. Illegal torture is commonplace, as is the hideous killing of civilians, and now we hear accusations that our soldiers in Iraq seek revenge through rape and murder. We are forced to accept the USA PATRIOT Act and illegal National Security Agency surveillance, supposedly for our own good.
As Bush used Sept. 11 to justify a renewed campaign of imperialist aggression, he also eviscerated social programs at home. He gutted the Federal Emergency Management Agency and placed it under the control of the Department of Homeland Security, leaving us unable to respond adequately to natural disasters. He deployed our National Guard overseas and depleted our treasury to pay for war. He failed to address global warming, in deference to industry supporters. Finally, we have had to let go of the assumption that our government would protect its own people, as we ask: when did the Bush team know about Sept. 11? Will this question take as long to answer as “Who killed JFK?”
Nothing about the Bush regime is working for the average citizen, and yet all of the above have been completely normalized and barely contested by Congress, with hardly a whimper, a press conference, or a filibuster. Five years later, Bush still attempts to build his legacy on the twin towers of fear and aggression, working with the pathological paranoia that has become the hallmark of our 21st-century society.
But five years later, public opinion is reversing. Impeachment, which once seemed as far-fetched as due process for Guantánamo prisoners, has become a rallying cry for the next election. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently passed a resolution in support of Bush’s impeachment, and Sup. Chris Daly has sponsored another one, which will appear on the November ballot. They are an important response from the people to a criminal administration and an anemic Congress. If Bill Clinton can be impeached for a sexual indiscretion to the tune of $60 million in tax dollars and Bush gets off scot-free, what are we telling our children? That a blow job is worse than blowing up a country, and that illegal lying and spying play second fiddle to a marital blunder? The Christian fundamentalists who run our country would have us think so.
Vote for Chris Daly’s impeachment resolution. Yes on J! SFBG
Krissy Keefer
Krissy Keefer is the Green Party candidate for the 8th Congressional District.

Welcome to the nightmare

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MEXICO CITY (Sept. 14th) – In an epiphany of how he might have to govern Mexico if, in fact, an aggrieved left opposition allows him to assume the presidency December 1st, right-winger Felipe Calderon had to be helicoptered to the bunker in the deep south of this conflictive capital, where the nation’s top electoral tribunal doing business as the TRIFE was to hand him the certificate attesting that he had, in the judges’ less-than-august opinions, won the hotly-contested July 2nd election from leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO.).

Upon emerging from the chopper, which had been accompanied by a military gunship, the stubby, balding Calderon, his eyes darting like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights, was quickly hustled into the TRIFE headquarters by the back door, a full 90 minutes before the actual ceremony was to commence, a subterfuge necessitated by the presence by thousands of AMLO’s enraged supporters, some of whom had already stripped naked.

Calderon’s witnesses – members of his campaign team and functionaries of the archly-rightist PAN party who had the misfortune to arrive by land — were greeted by clods of earth and screams of “Rateros!” (Thieves) and “Fraude!” (Fraud.) The ritual unfolded under a steady barrage of rotten eggs and tomatoes that AMLO’s people kept hurling at the TRIFE bunker, a kind of Aztec version of a U.S. missile silo, to express their unhappiness with the seven-judge panel that had neither heard nor seen any evil in the maladroit machinations of President Vicente Fox, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and the PAN to steal the election from their candidate.

On September 5th, just hours before the constitutional deadline for confirming the next president of Mexico, the TRIFE had finally handed down its eagerly anticipated decision. In the learned justices’ unanimous judgment, outgoing president Vicente Fox’s unconstitutional intromission in the electoral campaign on behalf of Calderon had put the validity of the July 2nd balloting “at risk.”

Moreover, months of venomous anti-AMLO hit pieces designed by U.S. carpetbagger Dick Morris that labeled Lopez Obrador a DANGER to Mexico in big red letters “unquestionably” impacted the results and were illegally financed by big business councils that included such transnationals as Wal Mart and Halliburton, a patently criminal act.

In addition, the election was riddled with “arithmetic mistakes.” The TRIFE’s own recalculation of the actual vote count, effected by its much-maligned twin the IFE, demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Calderon had been credited with hundreds of thousands of votes that could not be substantiated by the number of ballots inside the ballot boxes. A partial recount of 9.7% of the 130,000 “casillas” (precincts) had turned up a total of 237,000 questionable votes that the TRIFE had chosen to annul, a quarter of those cast in the sample, and more than Calderon’s supposed margin which had been reduced to 233,000 out of a total 41.5 million cast.

Having duly noticed these egregious outrages, the seven judges concluded that they could not calibrate the impact of such organized criminal activity upon the final outcome and awarded the presidency to one Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa to the great delight and immediate congratulations of Mexico’s masters in Washington D.C.

Did the TRIFE go into the tank? Three of the justices are expected to be promoted to the Mexican Supreme Court when and if Felipe Calderon takes over the presidency. A fourth, Alejandro Luna Ramos, who will remain at the helm of the electoral tribunal, is a business partner of PAN topdog “El Jefe” Diego Fernandez de Cevallos – El Jefe won millions for the Ramos family from the Mexico City government before AMLO became mayor in a shady land deal involving the site of the Aztec football stadium. A Ramos sister sits on Mexico’s Supreme Court.

Lopez Obrador has suggested that the judges were willing recipients of “canonazos” (cannonades of pesos) to help them better contemplate the “validity” of the election. Porfirio Munoz Ledo, a hoary political chameleon who was Fox’s ambassador to the European Union, describes a post-electoral huddle at the home of Chief Supreme Court Justice Mariano Azuela, a Fox ally, where the Presidente warned the “TRIFitos” that should they declare the election null and avoid due to the overwhelming evidence of fraud, the Mexican economy would collapse and anarchy would reign in the streets. Although Munoz Ledo is an unsavory sort, his sources are usually impeccable.

Now that the TRIFE has legitimized the fraud, the IFE brain trust under the beady gaze of the chief architect of the July 2nd debacle, Luis Carlos Ugalde, is moving quickly to destroy the evidence. Following the modus operandi established after the stolen election of 1988 when the then-ruling PRI in connivance with the PAN ordered the ballots to be burnt by the military, the IFE has refused petitions from 16,000 suspicious subscribers to PROCESO magazine and a blue-ribbon commission of prominent members of the civil society to allow them to conduct a citizens recount of the ballots that are now, once again, under the protection of the military. Never! Ugalde and his mafia scoff. The ballots are “inviolable!” “The property of the people!”

But, on the other hand, the ballots are not “documents” open to public scrutiny as guaranteed by law, the IFE contends, and therefore are eminently “burnable” under current electoral stipulations. Ugalde’s ruling was described as “metaphysical” by National University law professor John Ackerman. According to the IFE’s hypothesis, the ballots were “documents” before they were marked by the voters but now they have been reduced to symbolic “expressions of the people’s will” and thus are candidates for the incinerator.

AMLO is sworn to preventing a repeat of the 1988 flimflam and his people are pleading with Azuela’s Supreme Court to stay the December date set for the burning – after all, an Ohio court just stepped in to save what ballots remain from Bush’s stealing of that state’s electoral votes in the smarmy 2004 presidential balloting. Not without a certain sense of déjà vu all over again, the final arbiter in this dispute may well be (who else but?) the TRIFE.

As illustrated by his armed airlift to the TRIFE silo, Felipe Calderon has a problem meeting the people he intends to govern over the next six years. In his first junket as president-elect, Fecal (as his detractors have dubbed him) took a sentimental journey to his native Morelia, the capital of the narco-ridden western state of Michoacan, where he was scheduled to lay a wreathe at the feet of that city’s namesake, Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon, a black defrocked priest who led the guerrilla war against the Spanish Crown several centuries before the 44 year-old Calderon first slithered from the darkness of his PANista mother’s womb.

Calderon’s family on all sides is a founding pillar of the PAN, an Opus Dei-like creature of Catholic bankers formed to denigrate Mexico’s beloved depression-era “Bolshevik” president Lazaro Cardenas, also a Michoacan native whose grandson, also Lazaro Cardenas, now besmirches that hallowed name as governor. Indeed, Calderon ‘s trip to Michoacan was designed to split Lopez Obrador’s three-party Coalition for the Good of All – young Cardenas is titularly a member of the PRD, AMLO’s home party, founded by his father Cuauhtemoc after he was swindled out of the presidency in 1988.

But Felipillo never made it to Morales’s feet (the good padre probably exhaled a sigh of relief). Hundreds of AMLO’s faithful tore down the barricades, tossed the usual rotten eggs and tomatoes at Calderon’s entourage, battled Cardenas’s state police and the elite Presidential military guard, and generally made the venue so unsafe that the wreath-laying had to be called off and the president-elect sped into a nearby locked-down convention center for a speech to a carefully-culled audience of “perfumados” (literally the perfumed ones.)

The draconian security measures at the convention center – sniffer dogs, metal detectors, pat-down searches – were not unwarranted. On the eve of Calderon’s confirmation, in Michoacan’s second city Uruapan, the capital of the state’s “hot lands” where drug cropping accounts for the whole economy, a ski-masked commando burst into a local dance hall, forced the patrons to lie face down on the dance floor under pain of being Swiss cheesed by the automatic weapons they were waving convincingly, and carefully removed five severed human heads from black plastic bags which they artfully arranged in the center of the “pista” (dance floor) with the accompanying message: “the family does not kill for money. It does not kill women. It does not kill innocents. Those who deserve to die, die. Justice is divine.”

This country has been visited by unspeakable acts of narco-terrorism in the months that Calderon has been blaspheming Lopez Obrador as “a DANGER to Mexico” (thanks Sasha for this observation). Such beheadings are now a regular feature of the cityscapes in Acapulco and Tijuana. Corpses are strewn in Baghdad-sized numbers each month in the rural outback of Sinaloa, Jalisco, Guerrero, Michoacan, and Chiapas. Judges are gunned down on their way to court at La Palma, Mexico’s maximum narco-lockup – published reports speak of a “psychosis of fear” spooking the nation’s judiciary. The brains of industry and the stock market are not immune from being splattered all over the street. Last week, the top official of a privatized customs agency part-owned by Fox’s financial secretary Francisco Gil, was cut down by professional hit men on a busy Mexico City street as the end-of-the-administration chickens begin to come home to roost. La Jornada, the left daily, has even gone on “suicide” watch – officials often blow their brains out or sever their veins with box cutters at such moments in the Mexican political dynamic.

The TRIFE’s confirmation of the stealing of the 2006 election has generated an avalanche of accolades for Felipe de Jesus – Bush and his crony ambassador Tony Garza were first in line to extend their congratulations all over again (they did so hours after the deeply flawed preliminary vote count came in July 2nd.) Spain’s Rodriguez Zapatero and his pals at REPSOL were right behind, looking to get in on the ground floor of the fire sale of privatization Calderon has pledged for PEMEX, the once-nationalized state petroleum enterprise. The U.S. State Department’s “democratic” answers to Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, Alan Garcia and Oscar Arias, along with Salvador’s fawning Tony Saca chimed in. Improbably, so did Nestor Kirschner – can Fidel and Lula be far behind?

But to my ear, the most appropriate toast to Felipe Calderon ‘s confirmation as the next president of this dangerous neighbor nation was one that was not sounded (at least not yet.) In 1994, after Ernesto Zedillo had finally relieved the reviled Carlos Salinas at the wheel of state, the still missing-in-action Subcomandante Marcos scribbled salutations to the new prez that began, much as does this chronicle, “Welcome to the Nightmare.”

This past Sunday, Lopez Obrador’s weekly packed-as-usual revival meeting in the Zocalo transpired parallel to Felipe Calderon’s “victory” celebration, held appropriately enough in a bullring in an affluent district of the capital. AMLO’s numbers as always dwarfed his diminutive rival’s – the PAN reportedly padded out the crowd by requiring the compulsory attendance of Catholic school children and their parents. and the wealthy burghers in the south of the city were said to have obligated their servants to attend.

While the President-elect swore vengeance on his enemies across town, AMLO did not. As always, he let his furious flock call Fecal bad names but eschewed even mentioning his rival. Lopez Obrador had other plans. The seven week, seven mile encampment of his followers that so vex upper and middle class “capitolinos” would stay in place through Friday night, September 15th, the eve of Mexican Independence Day when AMLO intends to deliver the “Grito” of “Viva Mexico!” to the multitudes gathered in the great square, an honor reserved for the President of Mexico.

But rather than challenging the Mexican military, AMLO’s people will then dismantle their encampments and retreat from the Zocalo for 12 hours to allow the Generals and Admirals to conduct their traditional Independence Day parade. “The army belongs to the people, not the government – we have no argument with this institution,” AMLO explained seeking to mollify his militants who are reluctant to step back. “Many members of military families voted for us July 2nd. And besides the troops are so badly paid that they can’t even support their families.”

Once the military procession which always features tanks and jet fighter planes is done with – Vicente Fox will wave it on from a balcony of the National Palace and receive it at the newly refurbished (by the PRD Mexico City government) Angel of Independence – an expected million delegates to Lopez Obrador’s National Democratic Convention (CND) will retake the Zocalo and sit in session to install AMLO as the legitimate president of Mexico.

But Fox, who was prevented from delivering his State of the Union address to congress September 1st when Lopez Obrador’s senators and deputies stormed the tribune, is said to be obsessed with decrying his final Grito from the presidential balcony overlooking the Zocalo. Cornered between his hubris and personal ambition for a notch in history, and the huge angry crowd seething in the plaza below, the outgoing president could make a fatal mistake by turning the military and/or the military police on AMLO’s people to force them out of the Tiennemens-sized square that sits at the heart of Mexico’s political life, a move that indeed invokes both Tiennemens and Tlatelolco where in 1968 hundreds of striking students were massacred by the paranoid, anti-communist president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, and a wound that has never closed here.

As Sub Marcos so eloquently waxes: “Welcome to the Nightmare.”

John Ross’s “ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible – Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006” will be published in October by Nation Books and the Blindman will set out on a tour of the left coast from border to border and beyond to flog it. But before the flogging comes the honeymoon. Sasha Crow and John Ross (they met while human shielding in Baghdad) will be traveling in Turkey and Greece for the next few weeks.

Ammiano’s coup

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By Tim Redmond

Matier and Ross reported Sunday what everyone on the San Francisco left knew was coming: Sup. Tom Ammiano is formally announcing his run for State Assembly in 2008. Aside from the fact that Ammiano would make an excellent state Assembly member, here’s the political brilliance of the move: The only other person remotely rumored to be considering running for that seat is Sup. Chris Daly. In fact, behind the scenes, a lot of local players have been saying that state Sen. Carole Migden would suport Daly, even in a run against Ammiano.

But Daly is up for re-election this fall, and obviously can’t announce a run for Assembly (if he’s even interested) until well after November. That means for months to come, Ammiano will be the only game in town — and he can start lining up endorsements. According to M&R, Migden has formally endorsed Ammiano, as has the incumbent in that seat, Mark Leno.

Daly would also be an excellent member of the state Assembly — but if he wants to run, he’s already way behind and will have the challenging task of explaining why he’s better than Ammiano, particularly when they generally agree on all the issues.

The Village Voice, 1953 to October 2005 (the date the New Times purchased the Voice), RIP

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The hitman cometh

There’s a key phrase in this morning’s New York Times account of the Mike Lacey massacre at the Village Voice (“Village Voice Dismisses 8, including Senior Arts Editors, a ‘reconfiguration’ leaves the critic Robert Christgau unemployed”). Click here

It followed the standard boilerplate press release that always accompanies what a former Voice press critic Cynthia Cotts called “the signature New Times bloodbath.” The boilerplate: Village Voice Media/New Times/Mike Lacey described the layoffs as an effort to “reconfigure the editorial department to place an emphasis on writers as opposed to editors.” The company added: “Painful though they may be in the short term, these moves are consistent with long-range efforts to position the Voice as an integral journalistic force in New York City.”

Then comes the standard line that is widely known to all of us who have tried in vain for years to get Lacey, the editor in chief of VVM/NT and the l7 paper chain from Phoenix, Arizona, to respond on the phone or by email to legitimate news issues:

Lacey “did not return calls seeking further comment.”

Lacey is a colorful editor. After New Times purchases a paper, he loves to ride into town and shoot up the saloon
and massacre the staff and the paper. He did this in San Francisco when the New Times bought the SF Weekly and he did it with the Voice in New York. He loves to whack away at me and the Bay Guardian with long screeds (his latest, a 20-pager of high volume vitriol up on the web somewhere, with the head, “Brugmann’s Brain Vomit, cleaning up the latest drivel from San Francisco’s leading bullgoose looney.”) It full of marvelous stuff and is one of my prized possessions.

But Mike and the New Times folks have a fatal flaw: They love to hit, run, and hide.

That’s how I started guerrilla blogging awhile back. The local version of Lacey’s journalistic ethics, the SF Weekly, would through the years blast away at me and the Guardian and our issues with a distinct pattern: they rarely would call for comment before publication. When they did call, they would get the quote wrong or out of context. And, when we would write a letter to the editor to correct the quote or get our point out, they would refuse to run the letter and would not explain why.

So I started doing some guerrilla blogging and sending my points by email to the SF Weekly/New Times people-and, of course, to Mike safely hunkered down in his foxhole in Phoenix.

The classic was when the SF Weekly/New Times/Lacey gave me a Best of award in 2003 for “Best Local Psychic.” It read: “Move over, Madam Zolta, at least when it comes to predicting the outcome of wars, Bruce-watchers will recall with glee his most recent howler, an April 2 Bay Guardian cover story headlined ‘The New Vietnam.’ The article was accompanies by an all caps heading and a photo of a panic-stricken U.S. serviceman in Iraq, cowering behind a huge fireball. The clear message: Look out, folks; this new war’s gonna be as deep a sinkhole as the old one. Comparing a modern U.S. war to Vietnam-how edgy! How brilliant! How original! And how did the prediction pan out? Let’s see now: More than 50,000 U.S. soldiers got killed in Vietnam vs. about l00 in Iraq. Vietnam lasted more than l0 years; Iraq lasted less than a month (effectively ending about two weeks after the story ran.) Vietnam destroyed a U.S. president, while Iraq turned one into an action hero. Well, you get the picture. Trying to draw analogies between Vietnam and Iraq is as ridiculous as Brugmann’s other pet causes. Scores of reputable publications around the nation opposed the Iraq war, but did so in a thoughtful, intelligent manner. Leave it to the SFBG, our favorite political pamphlet, to help delegitimize yet another liberal cause. Bush, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft send their sincerest thanks, Bruce.”

Three years later, the war drags on, “reputable publications” all over the country are calling it another Vietnam–and Lacey and his Best of writers and editors look like fools and we still don’t know what the Lacey/New Times position is on Bush, the war, and the occupation. But this is vintage Lacey and vintage New Times politics distilled into their publication run largely on a centralized format out of Phoenix. The key point: the article was not bylined and I tried, again and again by guerrilla email and phone calls to Lacey and his SF Weekly editors, to get someone to say who conceived, wrote, and edited the item. Nobody would fess up. But I was told reliably that the writer was the cartoonist Dan Siegler and the editor was John Mecklin, then reported to be Lacey’s favorite editor and hand-picked by Lacey to take on the Guardian in San Francisco. I confronted them with emails, asking for confirmation or comment. I have not gotten any to this very day.

Alas, that in a nutshell is the political and journalistic and ethical policies that Lacey and the New Times have imposed on the Voice. No more liberal politics. No more James Ridgeway in Washington. No more Press Critic Syd Schanberg and no more press clips columns. No regular section criticizing the Bush administration and the war. No more editorials and no more endorsements and no more legendary Voice thundering away on the major New York and national issues of the day that cry out for a strong news and editorial voice from the Left.

And, according to the Times story, Voice layoffs and firings that “decimated the senior ranks of its arts staff,” including theater editor Jorge Morales, dance editor Elizabeth Zimmer, senior editor in charge of books Ed Park, art director Minh Uong, and Robert Cristgau, 64, who as a senior editor and longtime pop musit critic “helped put the Voice on the map,” as the Times put it. Cristgau had been with the Voice off and on since l969 and is quite rightly known as the dean of the Voice.

No more Village Voice as we have known it through all these years.

Instead, the Voice has Mike Lacey. I last ran into Mike at the annual business meeting of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) in Little Rock in June.
I held out my hand for a handshake and said, in a friendly way, “Mike, how are you doing?”
He stopped, looked at me, and said, “Bruce, Go fuck yourself.” And he turned and scampered off, never to return to the meeting and never to come near me again.

Mike, get out out of your bunker and give people a chance to ask you some questions. Start a blog.

P.S. We had fun with the Best of issue. We did a counter Best of, a full page ad, titled “Best Premature Ejaculation,” a special award to the editors of the SF Weekly/New Times.
We ended with this note: “Sorry, folks: WE wish the war in Iraq were as neat and tidy as you, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft would like to think it is. But you, um, spoke too soon.”

Our postscripts drove home the points about Lacey’s style of hit and run journalism.
“PS: The real mystery of the city: who wrote the SF Weekly piece? Who assigned it? Who edited it? We’ve been calling, writing, e-mailing, and faxing the local office and corporate headquarters in Phoenix, but nobody will tell us.”

“PPS: Gee, what’s the New Times position on the war, anyway. We can’t seem to figure it out.”

And, let me add in retrospect, what was their position on Bush’s reelection? Well, as far as I can tell, the only endorsement published in any New Times paper came at the end of their syndicated sex column by their gay sex columnist Dan Savage just before election day. Dan, bless his heart, came out for Kerry and is now pushing publicly for impeachment. Where’s Mike? Mike? Mike? B3

A final PS point: If any one at New Times is still wondering about their pretty little month-long war that turned a president into an action hero, check out This nice item from the NY Times. We’re still at war, Mike, and kids are still dying. In case you hadn’t noticed.
‘Voice’ Staffers To Be Crying Into Their Bongs Tonight?

The Dean is Dead

‘Voice’ Issues Statement on Staff Decimation

Here comes Miami Beach

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
A pebbled, unmarked trail crunches underneath Peter Loeb’s soft leather shoes as he walks through the Rockaway Quarry in Pacifica, his dog following behind.
Until recently, the 87-acre plot was owned by a man named William F. Bottoms. But he never showed much interest in developing it, and locals have long used the network of trails for hiking. It’s one of the few remaining vacant lots of its size in Pacifica.
Bordering the west side of the property is a ridgeline — a small stone peak literally cut in half by what was once a noisy limestone mining operation — that separates the Pacific Ocean from flat seasonal marshlands that turn to rolling hills just past the highway, where the property stops.
Like the rest of the small coastal town, the former quarry is submerged much of the year in a thick, fast-moving fog. From the ground, it hardly seems like an ideal place in which to introduce luxury living.
“It’s the windiest spot in Pacifica,” Loeb says. “It’s the coldest, windiest spot in the whole city.”
But its close proximity to San Francisco has a headstrong Miami developer drooling.
R. Donahue Peebles bought the quarry last summer for what he says was $7.5 million, and although he hasn’t actually submitted a formal proposal to the town, he’s talking about building 350 exclusive hotel suites, 130 single-family homes, more than 200 town houses, live-work lofts and apartments, and an untold number of stores, such as the Gap and Trader Joe’s.
It’s an unusual battle for the normally quiet town. Tucked 10 miles south of San Francisco just off Highway 1, Pacifica is a largely middle-class bedroom community of about 37,000 people that’s so overwhelmingly residential, it’s hardly seen any commercial development larger than a shopping center with a Safeway.
Loeb served on Pacifica’s City Council for eight years in the 1980s and has lived in the same home near the quarry for three decades. He helped formulate the land use plan for the property, which was designated a redevelopment area in 1986. The plan calls for mixed-use residential and commercial spaces, preservation of the walk and bikeway system, and “high-quality design in both public and private developments including buildings, landscaping, signing and street lighting.”
Joined by a stay-at-home dad named Ken Restivo, Loeb is now organizing the opposition to Peebles — and it hasn’t been an easy task. Peebles has already poured several hundred thousand dollars into a campaign to overturn a 1983 city law that requires voter approval of a housing element in the redevelopment zone. This in a town where the typical council candidate spends less than $10,000 running for office.
Of course, as the opponents point out, it’s not clear exactly what Peebles wants to do. His plans are still tentative; he’s trying to get blanket approval for a massive development before he actually applies for a building permit.
The point of the 1983 law was to ensure that new development on the property would be mixed-use, mostly to offset the city’s high residential concentration and to increase the amount of money the city received in tax revenue.
“What he’s trying to do is privatize the certainty and socialize the risk,” Restivo said. “He wants to know whether he can build the houses before he even starts with a plan, and he wants to leave us trusting him to do whatever.”
Measure L on the November ballot would give Peebles the right to include as many as 355 housing units in any final plan. But even if the bill passes, Pacifica’s City Council would get to negotiate and vote on any final deal with Peebles.
Peebles isn’t the first developer to spend a small fortune attempting to overcome the required ballot vote to develop housing on the quarry, which could attract buyers from all over the millionaire-heavy Bay Area. A similarly well-funded effort failed just four years ago.
The difference is, Peebles likes to win — and has proven before that he knows how to do it.
When it comes to commercial and residential development, Peebles is a prodigy of sorts.
At just 23 years old, after one year at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, the ambitious young man forged a relationship with Washington, DC’s infamous former mayor Marion Barry.
The returns were handsome. Barry appointed Peebles to a city property assessment appeals board membership, a sleep-inducing government function that is nonetheless among the most powerful at the municipal level. Peebles also counts the legendary former congressman and now Oakland mayor–elect Ron Dellums as a mentor; a teenage Peebles worked for him as a legislative page.
“Ron was an interesting person,” Peebles said in a recent phone interview. “One of the things I learned was that you can have your own ideas. He was a very liberal member of Congress. He got to chair two committees even though he was an antiwar person [during Vietnam], because he respected the process.”
After a short tenure on the assessment board, Peebles was developing thousands of square feet of commercial space across the nation’s capital under the Peebles Atlantic Development Corporation, today known simply as the Peebles Corporation. Eventually, an attempt to lease a multimillion-dollar office building to the city inspired accusations of cronyism, according to a 2001 Miami New Times profile. Peebles left Washington and moved to Florida.
There he indulged in the truest spirit of American affluence, putting together enormous hotels and condominium complexes, working in partnership with public agencies. He earned a reputation for resorting to multimillion-dollar litigation when those relationships went bad.
Peebles is well aware that major developments naturally attract conflict. He says it took him a while to become thick-skinned as a controversial developer. In south Florida, however, he proved skilled at getting cranes into the air, completing a $230 million residential tower and a $140 million art deco hotel in Miami Beach during the first half of this decade.
And now he’s set his sights on the low-density, small-scale town of Pacifica.
“Pacifica is unique in many ways, but politically it’s not,” he told the Guardian. “If you look at any city, small or large, it always has people on both sides of the issue. There are people who like to say ‘no’ a lot. [In] most environments — if you look by and large across the country, DC for example — developers are generally not the most popular all the time. Pacifica is not different politically in that regard from other places.”
Press accounts depict Peebles as highly self-assured, even cocky. He once cited his favorite saying to the San Francisco Business Journal as “Sometimes you have to be prepared to stand on the mountain alone.” But he’s also charming and enthusiastic, something that Loeb admits has won Peebles the hearts of many Pacificans.
“The comments we get from people who have seen him speak is, ‘I was soooo charmed by him. I trust him,’” Loeb said. “On the basis of what?”
Restivo chimed in, “He’s a very charismatic speaker. He makes promises and gives voice to people’s fantasies and wishes.”
Pacifica isn’t technically the first place in California where Peebles has attempted to introduce his version of the East Coast’s taste for high-rise condos and hotels. In 1996 a bid to redevelop the old Williams Buildings at Third and Mission in San Francisco crumbled when the partnership he’d created with Oakland businessman Otho Green turned into a civil battle in San Francisco Superior Court. The two couldn’t agree on who would control the majority stake, and another bidder was eventually chosen by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. Peebles and Green later settled a $400,000 dispute over the project’s deposit, according to court records. Green, in fact, alleged in a complaint against the city that Willie Brown had him kicked out of the deal.
The 1996 fallout notwithstanding, Pacifica marks the first time Peebles has actually bought land on the West Coast for development.
And he’s using a proven political tactic to win over hearts and minds: fear.
The quarry is still zoned as commercial land, and if Measure L fails, Peebles reminds Pacificans, he could go to the city council with a proposal that strictly includes retail and office space.
In a letter he circulated to the city’s residents, he warned that the alternative to a plan that includes housing could just as easily be a Wal-Mart.
“Your ‘yes’ vote means we will have an opportunity to study and evaluate a better option for our community,” Peebles wrote in the letter. “A ‘no’ vote means we would be forced to file an application for a large scale commercial development such as a big box or a business/industrial complex.”
But a plan that exclusively contains commercial space doesn’t appear to be what Peebles really wants. Despite the fact that Pacifica is hardly the type of crony-driven city that he’s used to, he’s shown that he’s willing to pay what it takes to get his housing element.
In a six-month period, the political action committee that he formed to push through Measure L spent more than $163,000, according to campaign disclosure forms kept in Pacific’s tiny, half-century-old City Hall, which sits close to the ocean amid a neighborhood of clapboard beach houses.
Nearly $90,000 went to a Santa Barbara public relations firm called Davies Communications, whose clients range from schools and major oil producers to Harrah’s Entertainment and the Nashville-based privatization pioneer Hospital Corporation of America.
Two user profiles under the names “Jimmy” and “Susan” surfaced on a Google message board where the development has been discussed, and they link back to a Davies mail server in Santa Barbara. Jimmy and Susan claimed to be Pacifica residents in favor of Peebles’s plan. (A call to Sara Costin, a Davies project manager who’s been present at some of the community meetings, was not returned.)
Peebles spent $10,000 more on the influential Sacramento lobbying firm Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller and Naylor, which specializes in passing ballot measures. Another $70,000 went to professional petition circulators who were needed to get the measure on a ballot.
Peebles isn’t the first one to bring big money to the city. Four years ago the publicly traded Texas developer Trammell Crow Company spent $290,000 just on election costs in an attempt to get a mixed-use development with housing past Pacifica voters, according to public records. The company’s plan for the quarry included 165,000 square feet of retail space, over 300 apartments and town houses, and a town center. The late 2002 ballot measure still lost by over 65 percent of the vote, despite the fact that the opposing political action committee, Pacificans for Sustainable Development, spent just $6,500.
An Environmental Impact Review released at the time suggested the wrong type of development could threaten the habitat of an endangered garter snake and a red-legged frog, both known to be living in the area. The lush Calara Creek, which runs the length of the property to the ocean, was also perceived to be in danger of pollution runoff without the proper setbacks. And traffic mitigation on Highway 1 has remained a top concern of the city’s residents.
Peebles insists he’s identified state money that can help with widening the highway and says he’d also donate land for a library and new city center. Beyond election costs, Peebles says he’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on experts who’ve helped him craft a better plan that promotes sustainability compared to what Trammel Crow had to offer.
“I’ve had an environmental consulting team and contractual consulting team for the last year analyzing this property, analyzing these issues that are necessary,” he said.
Affordability is another matter, however. Peebles has suggested to the business press that single-family home prices on the land could range from $3 million to $8 million.
A mixed-use development on the land could still bring millions of new tax dollars to a city that has struggled in the past to find money for emergency services and even basic public works projects.
Loeb and Restivo haven’t been without their own rhetoric in the debate. They started a Web site, www.pacificaquarry.org, which prophesies a nightmare traffic scenario on Highway 1 where it bottlenecks into two lanes through town. They add that estimates on potential tax revenue are unreliable without a definite plan.
But their group, Pacifica Today and Tomorrow, has hardly spent enough to even trigger disclosure requirements. And Pacifica remains a modest world, far removed from Miami’s glass-and-steel monoliths. Only a man with an ego equal to the size of his development dreams would try to so dramatically alter Pacifica’s topography. Peebles says he’s confident he’ll prevail in November.
Loeb and Restivo recognize that the area won’t stay empty forever, and they aren’t opposed to all development. Restivo told us he’d be more than happy to consider a commercial and residential project on the site — “but ideally it’d be much smaller.” SFBG

No Pasaran!

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MEXICO CITY, Aug. 24th — The Congress of the country is ringed by two-meter tall grilled metal barriers soldered together, apparently to thwart a suicide car-bomb attack. Behind this metal wall, 3000 vizored, kevlar-wearing robocops — the Federal Preventative Police (PFP, a police force drawn from the army) — and members of the elite Estado Mayor or presidential military command, form a second line of defense. Armed with tear gas launchers, water cannons, and reportedly light tanks, this Praetorian Guard has been assigned to protect law and order and the institutions of the republic against left-wing mobs that threaten to storm the Legislative Palace – or so the president informs his fellow citizens in repeated messages transmitted on national television.
No, the president’s name is not Pinochet and this military tableau is not being mounted in the usual banana republic or some African satrap. This is Mexico, a paragon of democracy (dixit George Bush), Washington’s third trading partner, and the eighth leading petroleum producer on the planet, seven weeks after the fraud-marred July 2nd presidential election of which, at this writing, no winner has been officially declared. One of the elite military units assigned to seal off congress is indeed titled the July 2nd brigade.

“MEXICO ON A KNIFEBLADE” headlines the British Guardian. The typically short-term-memory-loss U.S. print media seems to have forgotten about the imbroglio just south of its borders. Nonetheless, the phone rings and it’s New York telling me they just got a call from their man on the border and Homeland Security is beefing up its forces around Laredo in anticipation of upheaval further south. The phone rings again and it’s California telling me they just heard on Air America that U.S. Navy patrols were being dispatched to safeguard Mexican oil platforms in the Gulf. The left-wing daily La Jornada runs a citizen-snapped photo of army convoys arriving carrying soldiers disguised as farmers and young toughs. Rumors race through the seven mile-long encampment installed by supporters of leftist presidential challenger Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) three weeks ago, who have tied up big city traffic and enraged the motorist class here, that PFP robocops will attack before dawn. The campers stay up all night huddled around bum fires prepared to defend their tent cities.

The moment reminds many Mexicans of the tense weeks in September and October 1968 when, 12 days before the Olympic Games were to be inaugurated here, President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz ordered the military to massacre striking students in a downtown plaza not far from where AMLO’s people are now camped out. Some 300 were killed in the Plaza of Three Cultures, their bodies incinerated at Military Camp #1 in western Mexico City. The Tlatelolco massacre was a watershed in social conflict here and the similarities are sinister– in fact, Lopez Obrador has taken to comparing outgoing President Vicente Fox with Diaz Ordaz.

Fox will go to congress September 1st to deliver his final State of the Union address; the new legislature will be convened the same day. The country may or may not have a new president by that day. In anticipation of this show-down, on August 14th, newly-elected senators and deputies from the three parties that comprise AMLO’s Coalition for the Good of All attempted to encamp on the sidewalk in front of the legislative palace only to be rousted and clobbered bloody by the President’s robocops.

With 160 representatives, the Coalition forms just a quarter of the 628 members of the new congress, but its members will be a loud minority during Fox’s “Informe.” Since the 1988 presidenciales were stolen from Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, founder of AMLO’s Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD legislators have routinely interrupted the president during this authoritarian ritual in orchestrated outbursts that have sometimes degenerated into partisan fisticuffs.

The first to challenge the Imperial Presidency was Porfirio Munoz Ledo, a hoary political warhorse, who in 1988 thrust a finger at President Miguel De la Madrid, accusing him of overseeing the theft of the election from Cardenas. Munoz Ledo’s J’Acuse stunned the political class; he was slugged and pummeled by members of De la Madrid’s long-ruling PRI when he tried to escape the chamber. Munoz Ledo now stands at AMLO’s side.

But perhaps the most comical moment in the annals of acting out during the Informe came in 1996 when a brash PRI deputy donned a Babe the Valiant Pig mask and positioned himself directly under the podium from which President Ernesto Zedillo was addressing the state of the nation and wiggled insouciant signs with slogans that said things like ‘EAT THE RICH!” Like Munoz Ledo, Marco Rascon was physically attacked, his mask ripped off like he was a losing wrestler by a corrupt railroad union official — who in turn was hammer locked by a pseudo-leftist senator, Irma “La Tigresa” Serrano, a one-time ranchero singers and, in fact, the former mistress of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz.

This September 1st, if martial law is not declared and the new Congress dissolved before it is even installed, the PRD delegation — which will no doubt be strip-searched by the Estado Mayor for incriminating banners — is sworn to create a monumental ruckus, shredding the tarnished decorum of this once-solemn event forever to protest Fox’s endorsement of electoral larceny. Some solons say they may go naked.

But no matter what kind of uproar develops, one can be secure that it will not be shown on national television, as the cameras of Mexico’s two-headed television monstrosity Televisa and TV Azteca will stay trained on the President as he tries to mouth the stereotypical cliches that is always the stuff and fluff of this otherwise stultifying seance. The images of the chaos on the floor of congress will not be passed along to the Great Unwashed.

NO PASARAN!

There is a reptilian feel to Mexico seven weeks after a discredited Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) cemented Lopez Obrador into a second place coffin by awarding the presidency to right-winger Felipe Calderon by a mere 243,000 votes out of a total 42,000,000 cast. Both Calderon and IFE czar Luis Carlos Ugalde (Calderon was best man at Ugalde’s wedding) make these little beady reptile eyes as they slither across national screens.

Those screens have been the scenes of some of the slimiest and most sordid political intrigue of late. One of the lizard kings who is fleetingly featured on Televisa primetime is an imprisoned Argentinean construction tycoon, Carlos Ahumada, who in 2004 conspired with Fox, Calderon’s PAN, and Televisa to frame AMLO on corruption charges and take him out of the presidential election. El Peje” (for a gar-like fish from the swamps of Lopez Obrador’s native Tabasco) was then leading the pack by 18 points.

Charged by Lopez Obrador, then the mayor of this megalopolis, with defrauding Mexico City out of millions, Ahumada had taken his revenge by filming PRD honchos when they came to his office to pick up boodles of political cash for his lover, Rosario Robles, who aspired to be queen of the PRD. Although the filthy lucre was perfectly legal under Mexico’s milquetoast campaign financing laws, the pick-ups looked awful on national television — AMLO’s former personal secretary was caught stuffing wads of low denomination bills into his suit coat pockets as if he were on Saturday Night Live.

Ahumada subsequently turned the tapes over to the leprous, cigar-chomping leader of Fox’s PAN party in the Senate, Diego Fernandez de Cevallos (“El Jefe Diego”) who in turn had them delivered to a green-haired clown, Brozo, who was then reading the morning news on Televisa. Then the Argentine fled to Cuba in a private plane. Televisa would air the incriminating videos day and night for months.

Apprehended in Veradero after his lover Robles was shadowed to the socialist beachfront, Ahumada spilled the beans to Cuban authorities: Interior Secretary Santiago Creel, who was then AMLO’s lead rival for the presidency, had cooked up the plot with the connivance of reviled former president Carlos Salinas, Lopez Obrador’s most venomous foe, the then attorney general, and Fox himself, to remove AMLO from the race.

The Mexican government did not ask for extradition and Ahumada’s deportation from Cuba was not seen as a friendly gesture. Within a month, diplomatic relations between Mexico and that red paradise were broken off and ambassadors summoned home. The construction tycoon has been imprisoned in Mexico City ever since he was booted out of Cuba, and was last heard from when he had his rogue cop chauffer shoot up the family SUV, a charade both Fox and Televisa tried to pin on AMLO — Ahumada had suggested he was about to release two more incriminating videos. These dubious events took place on June 6th, the day of a crucial presidential debate between AMLO and Calderon.

Then last week, Ahumada abruptly resurfaced — or at least his videotaped confession to Cuban authorities did. Filmed through prison bars, he lays out the plot step by step. Yes, he affirms, the deal was fixed up to cut AMLO’s legs out from under him and advance the fortunes of the right-wing candidate who turned out to be Felipe Calderon and not the bumbling Creel. The conspiracy backfired badly as his supporters rallied around him and Lopez Obrador’s ratings soared.

The origins of the confession tape, leaked to top-rung reporter Carmen Aristegui, was obscure. Had Fidel dispatched it from his sick bed to bolster Lopez Obrador’s claims of victory as the PAN and the snake-eyed Televisa evening anchor Joaquin Lopez Dorriga hissed? The air grew serpentine with theories. There was even one school that speculated Calderon himself had been the source in a scheme to distance himself from Fox (there had always been “mala leche” between them) and Creel, now the leader of the PAN faction in congress.

AMLO advanced a variant of this explanation — the specter of Ahumada had been resuscitated to divert attention from the evidence of generalized fraud the Coalition had submitted to the TRIFE and the panel’s impending verdict that Calderon had won the election.

Perhaps the most nagging question in this snakepit of uncertainty is what happened during the partial recount of less than 10% of the 130,000 ballot boxes ordered by the TRIFE to test the legitimacy of the IFE’s results. Although the recount concluded on August 13th, the judges have released no numbers and are not obligated to do so — their only responsibility is to certify the validity of the election.

Although AMLO’s reps in the counting rooms came up with gobs of evidence — violated ballot boxes, stolen or stuffed ballots, altered tally sheets and other bizarre anomalies — only the left-wing daily La Jornada saw fit to mention them. The silence of the Mexican media and their accomplices in the international press in respect to the Great Fraud is deafening — although they manage to fill their rags with ample attacks on Lopez Obrador for tying up Mexico City traffic.

According to AMLO’s people, 119,000 ballots in the sample recount cannot be substantiated — in about 3500 casillas, 58,000 more votes were cast than the number of voters on the voting list. In nearly 4,000 other casillas, 61,000 ballots allocated to election officials cannot be accounted for. The annulment of the casillas in which these alterations occurred would put Lopez Obrador in striking distance of Calderon and in a better world, would obligate the TRIFE to order a total recount.

But given the cheesy state of the Mexican judiciary this is not apt to happen; one of the judges who will decide the fate of democracy in Mexico is a former client of El Jefe Diego for whom the PANista senator won millions from the Mexico City government in a crooked land deal.

Meanwhile, thousands continue to camp out in a hard rain for a third week on the streets of Mexico City awaiting the court’s decision. They have taken to erecting shrines and altars and are praying for divine intervention. Hundreds pilgrimage out to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, some crawling on their knees, to ask the Brown Madonna to work her mojo. “God doesn’t belong to the PAN!” they chant as they trudge up the great avenue that leads to the Basilica. “AMLO deserves a miracle” Esther Ortiz, a 70 year-old great grandmother comments to a reporter as she kneels to pray before the gilded altar.

At the Metropolitan Cathedral on one flank of the Zocalo, a young worshipper interrupts Cardinal Norberto Rivera with loas to AMLO and is quickly hustled off the premises by the Prelate’s bouncers. The following Sunday, the Cathedral’s great doors are under heavy surveillance, and churchgoers screened for telltale signs of devotion to Lopez Obrador. Hundreds of AMLO’s supporters mill about in front of the ancient temple shouting “voto por voto” and alleging that Cardinal Rivera is a pederast.

AMLO as demi-god is one motif of this religious pageant being played out at what was once the heart of the Aztec theocracy, the island of Tenochtitlan. The ruins of the twin temples of the fierce Aztec war god Huitzilopochtli and Tlahuac, the god of the rain, is adjacent to the National Palace against which AMLO’s stage is set. Lopez Obrador sleeps each night in a tent close by.

Many hearts were ripped out smoking on these old stones and fed to such hungry gods before the Crusaders showed up bearing the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

AMLO is accused by right-wing “intellectuals” (Enrique Krauze and the gringo apologist George Grayson) of entertaining a Messiah complex. Indeed, he is up there every day on the big screen, his craggy features, salt and pepper hair, raspy voice and defiantly jutted jaw bearing more of a passable resemblance to a younger George C. Scott rather The Crucified One. AMLO’s devotees come every evening at seven, shoehorned between the big tents that fill the Zocalo, rain or shine. Last Monday, I stood with a few thousand diehards in a biblical downpour, thunder and lightening shattering the heavens above. “Llueve y llueve y el pueblo no se mueve” they chanted joyously, “it rains and rains and the people do not move.”

The evolution of these incantations is fascinating. At first, the standard slogan of “Voto Por Voto, Casilla por Casilla!” was automatically invoked whenever Lopez Obrador stepped to the microphone. “You are not alone!” and “Presidente!” had their moment. “Fraude!” is still popular but in these last days, “No Pasaran!” — they shall not pass, the cry of the defenders of Madrid as Franco’s fascist hordes banged on the doors of Madrid, 1936 — has flourished.

In this context, “No Pasaran!” means “we will not let Felipe Calderon pass to the presidency.” AMLO, who holds out little hope that the TRIFE will decide in his favor, devotes more time now to organizing the resistance to the imposition of Calderon upon the Aztec nation. Article 39 of the Mexican constitution, he reminds partisans, grants the people the right to change their government if that government does not represent them. To this end, he is summoning a million delegates up to the Zocalo for a National Democratic Convention on Mexican Independence Day September 16th, a date usually reserved for a major military parade.

Aside from the logistical impossibility of putting a million citizens in this Tiananmen-sized plaza, how this gargantuan political extravaganza is going to be financed is cloudy. Right now, it seems like small children donating their piggy banks is the main mode of fund-raising. Because AMLO’s people distrust the banks, all of which financed Calderon’s vicious TV ad campaign, a giant piggy bank has been raised in the Zocalo to receive the contributions of the faithful.

Dreaming is also a fundraiser. Some 10,000 raised their voices in song this past Sunday as part of a huge chorus assembled under the dome of the Monument to the Revolution to perform a cantata based on the words of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi. This too is a form of civil resistance, Lopez Obrador commended his followers.

The first National Democratic Convention took place behind rebel lines in the state of Aguascalientes in 1914 at the apogee of the Mexican Revolution when the forces of Francisco Villa and his Army of the North first joined forces with Zapata’s Liberating Army of the Southern Revolution. The second National Democratic Revolution took place 80 years later in 1994, in a clearing in the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation wedded itself to the civil society in an uprising that rocked Mexico all throughout the ’90s; eclipsed by events, the EZLN and its quixotic spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos have disappeared from the political map in the wake of the fraudulent election.

What this third National Democratic Convention is all about is now being debated in PRD ruling circles and down at the grassroots. Minimally, a plan of organized resistance that will dog Felipe Calderon for the next six years, severely hampering his ability to rule will evolve from this mammoth conclave. The declaration of a government in resistance headed by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is one consideration. The National Democratic Convention could also result in the creation of a new party to replace a worn-out PRD now thoroughly infiltrated by cast-offs from the PRI.

The Party of the Democratic Revolution has always functioned best as an opposition party. With notable exceptions (AMLO was one), when the PRD becomes government, it collapses into corruption, internecine bickering, and behaves just as arrogantly as the PAN and the PRI. No Pasaran?

Seven weeks after the July 2nd electoral debacle, Mexico finds itself at a dangerously combustible conjunction (“coyuntura”) in which the tiny white elite here is about to impose its will upon a largely brown and impoverished populous to whom the political parties and process grow more irrelevant each day. “No Pasaran!” the people cry out but to whom and what they are alluding to remains to be defined.
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John Ross’s ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible – Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006 will be published by Nation Books this October. Ross will travel the Left Coast this fall with both ZAPATISTAS! and a new chapbook of poetry BOMBA! and is still looking for possible venues; send suggestions to johnross@igc.org

It’s criminal what Congress has done to the working poor

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OPINION Congress’s Republican leaders belong in prison. They have openly violated one of our most basic laws, the 68-year-old Fair Labor Standards Act. It requires Congress to set the minimum wage high enough to guarantee a standard of living necessary for health, efficiency, and general well-being.
The current rate of $5.15 an hour comes nowhere near to doing that. Even those who manage to work full-time make only $10,700 a year – $206 a week or about $900 a month, minus taxes and other deductions. They and the 15 million other Americans who are paid at or near the minimum – more than one-third of them provide the main or sole support for their families – are by any reckoning poverty-stricken and barely surviving.
The law allows states and local governments to adopt minimum-wage rates higher than the federal rate. Although California and 20 other states, San Francisco and 139 other cities and counties, and the District of Columbia have done so, the higher minimums cover only about half of the country’s workers.
Democrats have argued long and hard in the current session of Congress for a higher federal minimum, as they have in every other session since the $5.15 rate was set in 1997. But the Republicans who’ve been running Congress have higher priorities – raising their own pay and cutting the taxes that are such a burden to their wealthy supporters.
Oh yes, the GOP leaders did introduce a bill that would have raised the minimum. But the measure made that contingent on cutting the estate taxes of the very wealthy – a linkage, opposed by even some Republicans, that guaranteed the bill’s defeat.
They’ve raised congressional pay in every session since 1997, while doing nothing for the working poor. That’s added more than $31,000 to the minimum wage of congressional members, currently $165,200, with a $3,300 raise scheduled for Jan. 1. Unlike minimum-wage workers, who rarely have fringe benefits, members of Congress also get free health care, pensions, and other expensive extras.
The minimum wage for ordinary people would have risen to $7.25 an hour over the next two years under the latest Democratic proposal blocked by the GOP’s congressional leaders. Its main proponent, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, promised that the fight to raise the wage “will continue all across America.”
It is certain, in any case, that Democratic candidates will make it an issue in this fall’s election campaigns. They are well aware, certainly, of polls showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor a minimum-wage increase.
So why in the world are Republican leaders so adamantly against it?
Because their big-money backers in the restaurant business, who employ about 60 percent of all minimum-wage workers, are against it, as are many other business and corporate interests. The opponents have even formed a group, Coalition for Job Opportunities, to spread the fiction, much favored by the GOP, that a higher minimum would force employers to eliminate jobs.
Actually, the number of jobs has grown after each of the 19 times the minimum has been raised since it was initially set at 25 cents an hour in 1938.
The job growth has been spurred primarily by the increased spending of those whose pay has increased. Like all low-wage workers, they must spend virtually every cent they earn, thus raising the overall demand for goods and services and creating the need for new employees.
Think of the general benefits to society if the minimum-wage workers who now must depend on government assistance could earn enough to make it on their own.
Think of the benefits to employers. As several studies have shown, raising workers’ pay raises workers’ morale and, with it, their productivity, while decreasing absenteeism and recruiting and training costs.
Think of the benefits to small retailers. Opponents of a raise say they’d be hurt the most by a higher minimum wage, but it’s far more likely that they’d be among the greatest beneficiaries. For minimum-wage workers have no choice but to spend most of their meager earnings in neighborhood stores for food and other necessities. SFBG
Dick Meister
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based writer who has covered labor and political issues for four decades as a reporter, editor, and commentator. Contact him through his Web site, www.dickmeister.com.

Shackling the tax man

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Late last month, David Cay Johnston of the New York Times managed to get a story about IRS layoffs picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle and placed on page three. That’s no small challenge, even in one of the most politically charged cities in the nation. It was not a sexy story, neither to liberals nor to conservatives.
But the story’s timing was impeccable.
Johnston reported that the IRS was poised to lay off 157 of its 345 estate- and gift-tax attorneys working at agency offices throughout the country — a division of investigators that generates more revenue for the federal treasury by catching tax cheats than any other group of auditors, about $2,200 for every hour that they work.
Dismantling the estate tax has been among the most aggressive crusades taken up by the Republican Party and its friendliest contributors for at least the last decade. Leaked to the Times by IRS whistle-blowers, the story about the layoffs surfaced just days before Congress rejected for the fifth time since 2001 an attempt by fiscal conservatives to get rid of the estate tax. The legislation failed despite Republican control of both the House and Senate. Even tempting Democrats with the first federal minimum-wage hike in 10 years couldn’t do the trick.
So how could defending the estate tax and the right of the IRS to collect it survive two branches of the federal government dominated by a political party that holds most taxation in contempt? It’s because families awash in seemingly infinite wealth are the only ones who get hit by the tax — despite false claims made by the GOP that the estate tax kills small businesses.
California filed more estate-tax returns in 2001 than any other state in the country by a margin of thousands. The only state that came close was Florida, and California still filed around 6,000 more returns, according to the most recent IRS numbers.
In other words, the Golden State is filthy, stinking rich and more vulnerable to the estate tax than other states. GOP party leaders in Washington insist the issue will return in the form of a new bill, and the IRS is behaving as if the estate tax has already disappeared. If it does, the richest families in the United States — highly concentrated in California and the Bay Area — stand to collectively save billions of dollars.
The Bay Area contains within its sloping hills and mammoth upstart tech firms higher income levels and more general wealth than almost anywhere else in the country. In fact, the San Francisco metropolitan area is the fourth wealthiest in the nation, according to Merrill Lynch, and two tiny cities between here and Mountain View, where Google is based, have the highest per capita median income in the United States. Those two cities, Atherton and Hillsborough, have a combined population of about 17,000, and while many of these techie tycoons are young, the day will come when they die and pass millions of dollars on to their descendants. Will there be enough tax investigators available to audit those estates? Will there even be an estate tax?
Following Johnston’s revelations, a Times editorial suggested the layoffs were a politically motivated attempt by the Bush White House to circumvent the legislative process. What it can’t accomplish through Congress it can do by handcuffing the tax police.
“This is an election year issue,” said Jay Adkisson, a private sector tax lawyer from Laguna Niguel who documents egregious cases of fraud on his Web site, Quatloos! “They’re trying to appease Republican voters who were angry over the failure of Congress to do something about the estate tax.”
The story of the IRS layoffs didn’t just catch the attention of readers. Congress responded too. Twenty-three lawmakers — including, somewhat predictably, Democrat Tom Lantos of California’s 12th District — immediately fired off a letter to Bush-appointed IRS commissioner Mark Everson demanding to know if the agency could now effectively investigate estate-tax avoiders.
None but the most obscenely wealthy Americans pay even a dime in taxes when they earn an inheritance upon a death in the family. Estates aren’t hit with taxes until they reach a value of $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple. Only estates exceeding those amounts are assessed any tax, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
And if the family hires a savvy tax attorney or estate planner, those nontaxable values could easily rise to $10 million, according to Adkisson.
A research director at the Brookings Institution named Diane Lim Rogers opined in the Chronicle last May that because of current exemptions, about one half of one percent of dead people will actually be followed to the grave by the tax man. Besides, it’s the beneficiaries of an inheritance who pay. Despite grand claims made by Republicans that the beneficiaries of an estate will be paying half of what they’re handed in taxes, even the estates eligible for taxation see on average a 20 percent rate, according to the CBPP, which relied on the IRS for its statistics. For those who do pay estate taxes, deep discounts are available through charitable donations.
“The argument made about lots of people being ‘burdened’ by estate taxes is that they go through lots of convoluted tax-planning strategies in order to avoid the estate tax, so even if they don’t end up paying any estate tax, they are still adversely affected [burdened] by the existence of the tax,” Rogers wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian.
But even considering the cost of estate planning, Rogers said, no one would rationally spend more avoiding taxes than they would actually paying them.
Keith Schiller, a respected private sector tax attorney based in Orinda, earns princely sums teaching millionaires how to take advantage of loopholes in the federal tax code. He’s not opposed to the estate tax on principle; he just wants to simplify the way his clients pay their dues.
“I do believe the estate tax serves a social function of breaking down generational dynastic wealth,” he said in a phone interview.
Schiller said the IRS is conducting nowhere near the estate-tax audits it once did and that may be the only justification for laying off auditors. Still, the knowledge required by agency investigators to analyze and understand complex estate-tax avoidance schemes is immense. About 50 estate- and gift-tax attorneys based in Southern California and the Bay Area exclusively handle returns filed for the IRS from inside the state.
David Dean, president of the San Jose–based National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) Local 238, said it’s not clear which offices will have layoffs. All 350 estate-tax auditors are being offered buyout deals that include their pensions plus up to $25,000, or $13,000 after taxes.
Dean and the NTEU, which represents the auditors and opposes the layoffs, insist the IRS isn’t entirely sure how much money is hidden from the agency each year through either elaborate trusts or simple refusals to file. It’s known as the “tax gap,” and three days after Johnston’s story appeared, the inspector general of the IRS, J. Russell George, told Congress that the agency’s estimated figures for delinquent estate taxes hadn’t been updated in years. His report described a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the IRS expressed no desire to update the figures because “consideration is being given to eliminating or reducing the number of people required to pay estate taxes.” The last estimate was about $8 billion, but that figure is for the most part unreliable, he testified.
But the law still exists, regardless of whether an anti–estate tax agenda eventually succeeds in Congress.
“If a law is on the books, you still have to close down on the cheaters,” said JJ MacNab, an estate planner who spent 18 years in the Bay Area working for tech clients. “If you don’t enforce a law on the books, no one’s going to have faith in the system.”
MacNab now lives in Washington and as a hobby assists people who buy into tax-avoidance schemes that turn out to be illegal. She said these days, it’s low-income earners who are likelier to be audited, a conclusion Johnston also came to in his 2003 best-seller, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich — and Cheat Everybody Else. The book shows how the recent layoffs are a small part of a larger movement to weaken the IRS’s investigative capabilities.
And that movement begins with those who can afford to fund it. Who are they? Well, they’re not your average farmer.
Consistently during the debate over estate taxes, the GOP has co-opted the populist language that once dominated America’s agrarian communities by claiming that the “death tax” bleeds poor farming families dry. It’s a spectacular rhetorical tool, but it’s an ugly distortion.
In fact, it’s the nation’s wealthiest families who have led the charge to dismantle the estate tax, not its small farmers, according to an April report put together by two groups, Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy. The analysis identified a handful of enormously wealthy families that stand to save more than $70 billion if their lobbying efforts succeed. And that lobbying effort, the report notes, has amounted to around $490 million in direct and indirect lobbying expenditures since 1998.
The list includes Ernest Gallo of the E & J Gallo Winery, based in Modesto, and John A. Sobrato of Sobrato Development, listed by Forbes as one of the largest commercial landlords in Silicon Valley, with a familial net worth of approximately $2 billion. The Gallo family is reportedly worth about $1 billion.
The rest of the list is in part a who’s who of America’s billionaires: Wal-Mart’s Walton family; Charles and David Koch of the nation’s largest privately held company, the Kansas-based Koch Industries (also benefactors of libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, founded in San Francisco); and the Dorrance family of the Campbell Soup Co.
Ernest Gallo’s participation in antitax measures is particularly well documented. Elected officials he has supported with contributions in the past sponsored federal legislation in the ’70s and ’80s that allowed for millions of dollars in estate-tax exemptions for the Gallo family. One bill was even dubbed by estate-tax supporters the “Gallo amendment.”
The Public Citizen report links the Gallos to anti–estate tax lobbyist Patricia Soldano and her Orange County–based Policy and Taxation Group (PTG), which has spent $4 million lobbying solely against the estate tax since 1998. While the authors are unable to pinpoint exactly how much the Gallos had given to PTG directly, both the Sobratos and the Gallos are listed as clients of the group. The Gallos have reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of their own dollars supporting individual candidates.
It’s doubtful that very many people who actually paid estate taxes last year would know how to repair a grain harvester. In 2001, Johnston of the Times famously challenged the anti–estate tax American Farm Bureau Federation and the Bush administration to find just one example of a farm estate being sold to pay the taxes on it. Johnston reported they were unable to do so.
Estate planner Schiller likened opponents of the estate tax to medieval villagers who complained of gout to prove how well nourished they were.
“People want to believe they have an estate-tax problem,” he said, “so they can feel successful.” SFBG

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