Elections

Standing up to the mayor

-
0

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom spent a fair amount of time this winter on the presidential primary — but he’s gearing up to spend far more time on the local supervisorial elections this fall. He’s showing a much more aggressive attitude toward the board, particularly President Aaron Peskin, and will be looking for ways to either embarrass or undermine the progressive majority over the next few months. Then he’ll push hard for his more moderate slate this fall.

That’s what this whole flap over Peskin calling Port of San Francisco director Monique Moyer and berating her over a policy disagreement is about. Remember: the incident she’s complaining about happened more than five months ago. Moyer’s letter went to the city’s Department of Human Resources, which took it as a complaint against a city employee and kept it strictly confidential. The City Attorney’s Office also said it was a confidential personnel matter and wouldn’t release it. But Moyer copied Phil Ginsberg, the mayor’s chief of staff, on the letter, and Newsom’s office doesn’t deny that it was the source of the leak.

We aren’t excusing Peskin’s behavior; if he was abusive to Moyer or her staff, that’s a problem. (He says he called and yelled at her over the Port’s development plans, and we don’t doubt he could have been more diplomatic.) But it hardly seems to rise to the level of a major political scandal.

It is, however, plausible payback for Peskin’s very public attack on the mayor’s dubious budget moves (including the diversion of money from Muni to pay for mayoral office staffers) and for the board’s attempt to remove two of Newsom’s public utilities commissioners from office.

With this kind of pressure (and nastiness) coming from the Mayor’s Office, some of the supervisors may be tempted to avoid conflict with the still-popular Newsom, but that would be a mistake: the board needs to fight back on several key fronts.

For starters, the supervisors need to stand up to the increasingly intense lobbying campaign and vote Feb. 12 to remove Dick Sklar and Ryan Brooks from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. The stakes are immense, with public power and the city’s energy future on the line, and Brooks and Sklar have been on the wrong side of the key issues. The lobbying effort to save Sklar and Brooks has been unprecedented: Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, who is still officially undecided, told us that "in all my seven years on the board, I’ve never seen such intense lobbying on anything, including multibillion-dollar development projects." Sklar has pulled out all the stops, and at one point his supporters offered to have US Sen. Ted Kennedy speak to the supervisors on his behalf. It will take eight votes to oust Sklar and Brooks — and the vote will be close — but the supervisors should ignore the pressure and stand up to Newsom.

And the PUC should hold off on any decision on general manager Susan Leal until new commissioners are in place.

The board needs to keep pushing on the Muni money and Mayor’s Office staffing too — and take a hard look at the three people Newsom wants to put on the Municipal Transportation Agency. Since the mayor has fired three sustainable-transportation advocates, including Bicycle Coalition director Leah Shahum, the board should insist that the mayor or one of his top deputies appear at a hearing and explain the administration’s long-term plans for the MTA and public transit in San Francisco.

All quiet at City Hall

-
0

San Francisco City Hall — normally a beehive of activity on election nights — is nearly empty. One reporter (Rick Knee, stringing for AP), a couple of political junkies … and that’s about it. The Department of Elections doesn’t even have its usual display screen for election results.

Frankly, nobody’s paying attention to the local election. California’s a big deal tonigh, and the state primary is huge news; municipal elections are lost in the whirlwind. (Of course, let’s remember that the state’s delegate total, which is what really counts, will probably be split pretty close to even, whoever “wins” the state; Paul Hogarth has a good analysis here.

But there IS a local election, and there are results, and we can pretty much call the three ballot measures now.

Prop. A, the parks bond, needs 66 percent of the vote, and has 64.9 percent in the (generally conservative) absentees. That should pass. Prop. B, the police retirement plan, is a slam dunk and will probably get 70 percent of the vote. The rather wacky Prop. C, the Alcaraz “peace center,” is toast, with 73 percent voting no.

An interesting note the the local vote: Hillary Clinton’s absentee-vote effort had paid off, big time. 65,000 people voted absentee, and Clinton is ahead in those votes, 53-38. I think we’re going to see this statewide — Obama will probably win on election day, but Clinton has a huge bank of absentees that he will have to overcome.

TRAGIC COUNT/COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS REPORT

-
0

*Novye Izvestia*
No 17
February 5, 2008

*TRAGIC COUNT*

Author: Yevgenia Zubchenko

*COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS IS CRITICAL OF THE STATE OF AFFAIRS WITH FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN RUSSIA*

Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) presented its latest report titled Attacks On The Media (2007). At least 65 journalists were murdered worldwide in the line of duty, almost half of them in Iraq. The state of affairs with freedom of expression in Russia was castigated as unacceptable.
CPJ, an international non-governmental organization with headquarters in New York, has been drafting these reports for years. Authors of the latest indicate that 2007 became the worst year since 1994 when 66 journalists had been killed. Iraq is branded in the document as “a slaughterhouse for the press”: over 170 journalists and technicians of media outlets perished in this country since March 2003. China on the other hand is the leader in the number of imprisoned journalists (29 editors and journalists). According to CPJ, 127 journalists were imprisoned throughout the world by December 1, 2007.
Authors of the report analyze the situation in Russia and point out that the recent parliamentary campaign included “certain events disturbing for the media and civil society.” CPJ experts are convinced that media outlets and non-governmental organizations in Russia with the temerity to criticize the regime are put under pressure or closed altogether. “The Russian authorities made use of the charges of extremism and bureaucratic means of punishment,” the report stated. Still, the authors did comment on “certain progress” made in investigation of assassinations of Igor Domnikov, Yuri Schekochikhin, and Anna Politkovskaya (all of them Novaya Gazeta journalists).
CPJ analysts also commented on the new trends in the relations between the powers-that-be and the media. “Regional authorities used fabricated charged in connection copyright violations or the use of piratical software to shut down independent or oppositionist media outlets on the eve of elections,” experts said. The report made a reference to Sergei Kurt-Adjiyev, Novaya Gazeta (Samara) editor charged with the use of unlicensed software.
As for assassinations, the CPJ report only mentions the death of Ivan Safronov, military observer of Kommersant. According to the Glasnost Protection Foundation in the meantime, 8 journalists including Safronov perished in Russia in 2007. “They mostly concentrate on whatever deaths foment scandals or whatever, while a great deal of journalists killed in the provinces are never even mentioned,” Glasnost Protection Foundation President Aleksei Simonov said. On the other hand, data always differ depending on the criteria used by the compiling organization. Reporters Without Frontiers, for example, claims that 86 journalists were killed in 2007 while the International Journalistic Organization compiled a list of 100 (but this structure does not differentiate between journalists and their assistants).
In any event, specialists tend to agree with CPJ’s conclusions on the state of affairs with freedom of expression in Russia. “They say true,” Igor Yakovenko, General Secretary of the Russian Journalistic Union, said. “Most media outlets accepted the rules of the game forced on them by the authorities. By and large, there is nobody left to apply pressure to.” “Most journalists are trying to revert to the double-think practiced in the Soviet Union,” Yakovenko said.
Simonov agrees that journalists in Russia gave in. “Freedom of expression exists only in several newspapers, one radio broadcaster, and one program on REN-TV channel,” Simonov said. “All others play one and the same tune.”

Money for nothing

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

Nedir Bey, a close confidant of the late Your Black Muslim Bakery founder Yusuf Bey, received public funds for his anemic 2002 run for the Oakland City Council but faced little scrutiny from election officials for suspect political contributions and spending.

The discovery appears to be one more example of the Bey empire’s alleged scams and schemes uncovered by the Chauncey Bailey Project since the eponymous journalist’s August 2007 murder, which law enforcement sources have linked to the bakery.

For five years the Fair Political Practices Commission in Sacramento sat on a request to investigate alleged campaign finance irregularities committed by Nedir Bey — who owes the city of Oakland $1.5 million in another matter — then dropped the probe because too much time had elapsed.

Bey ran for the Oakland City Council’s District 4 seat in March 2002 but got only 268 votes. He received $14,178 in public matching funds for his campaign despite questions raised by the head of Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission about the sources of the candidate’s contributions.

In August 2007, however, the FPPC sent a letter to Bey announcing it would not be taking any action against him, “given the age of this case and our current enforcement priorities.” Bey refused to comment on any of the main points in this article.

FPPC spokesperson Roman Porter said he could not say why the investigation lagged as long as it did, other than to say that a former enforcement official refrained from pursuing the case. Porter said the official closed a large number of cases to decrease a backlog, but Bey’s wasn’t one of them.

A new chairman and enforcement team came on board last year, but by that time the statute of limitations had already expired on two of the matters contained in Oakland’s complaint and there wasn’t enough time left to investigate the third matter before the statute of limitations ran out, Porter said.

Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission executive director, Dan Purnell, passed the case to Sacramento instead of completing the investigation locally. City law gives the Public Ethics Commission the sole authority for civil enforcement of the Limited Public Financing Act, which contains regulations for disbursing matching funds.

Purnell suspected irregularities in Bey’s campaign expenditures as early as January 2002, 10 months before he asked the state FPPC to initiate an investigation.

The March 2002 election was the first in Oakland to offer public financing to candidates who agreed to abide by voluntary spending limits. Candidates in the election could qualify for up to $14,700 in matching public funds from a special account established by the city to help defray the cost of running for office.

Matched contributions had to be $100 or less. The Committee to Elect Nedir Bey reported it had raised a total of $14,517, of which $14,178 was eligible for matching funds. The campaign reported it spent a total of $39,741 on the election.

Documents obtained from the FPPC through a public records request show that of 145 contributions, 123 were made with $99 money orders with sequential numbers, all apparently purchased from the same location over a four-day period between Jan. 14 and 18, 2002. Only 22 donations to Bey’s campaign were written on personal checks.

Purnell asked Bey prior to disbursing the matching funds if the money orders were purchased at the same time in bundles and if anyone other than the donor had purchased them. Bey declined to comment for this story, but he explained to Purnell at the time that the donors were transported to the store en masse to buy the money orders, and he promised no one else had obtained them for the donors.

Bey also assured Purnell that the listed contributors were adults who gave their own money, as required by law, although 26 donors listed their addresses as either 5832 or 5836 San Pablo, locations used at that time by Your Black Muslim Bakery.

Once Bey got the money, he stopped filing required campaign finance statements with the city. When he eventually filed them in September 2002, the forms offered no detailed accounting of the $39,741 worth of expenditures. Nor did Bey explain the gap between the amount spent on his campaign and the contributions received, which came to $28,695, including the public matching funds.

Often the bulk of election costs come from fees paid to consultants, printed campaign materials, fundraising events, and office rental. Bey’s committee paid all but $500 to a person by the name of Vaughan Foster, who provided no address or further identification. Foster reportedly received $27,000 for salary, $11,000 for circuutf8g petitions, $241 for voter registration, and $1,000 for phone banking.

Bey’s birth name is Victor Foster.

The Public Ethics Commission received a complaint and ultimately voted in August 2002 to forward the matter to the state FPPC after a stormy hearing during which Bey told the commissioners he was “not a professional politician,” as the Contra Costa Times reported. He also told the commission he “would not bow down to [them].”

In an Oct. 10, 2002, letter to state authorities, Purnell wrote, “The commission believes this matter is important because the commission relies on the content and accuracy of campaign statements to help administer its matching fund program.”

The FPPC has moved to subpoena bank records and other materials during the intervening years. But in August 2007, nearly five years after Purnell’s initial request and four years after he forwarded hundreds of pages of documentation from the campaign to Dan Schek, an FPPC investigator, Bey received a letter declaring the case closed.

Jean Quan, the District 4 incumbent who ran against Bey in 2002, said she didn’t recall him stumping widely or knocking on doors in the area’s neighborhoods. She was surprised he raised $15,000 from private donors to begin with and said he didn’t appear to spend much of it on campaign signs.

“I ran into a few fliers of his,” she said, “but nothing that would cost $30,000.”

According to the city’s municipal code governing elections, the Public Ethics Commission is supposed to “promptly advise” the city attorney in writing, as well as the “appropriate prosecuting enforcement agency,” of any evidence of criminal violations.

The law states, “any person who knowingly or willfully misrepresents his or her eligibility for matching funds … is guilty of a misdemeanor.”

The law also gives the local commission broad latitude to recover the funds, including penalties and fines not to exceed $1,000 per violation, and authorizes the commission to sue the candidate.

But none of that was done in Bey’s case, Purnell said. The matter was referred to the state because the Ethics Commission does not have the authority to enforce state elections laws, which at that time appeared to be Bey’s most obvious violation, Purnell said.

“To make a criminal complaint we have to prove intent,” Purnell said.

He said he was never pressured by anyone to refer the matter to the state instead of local authorities. Back then he had no idea who Bey was, that he was connected to Your Black Muslim Bakery, or that he had defaulted on a $1.1 million economic revitalization loan from the city of Oakland just a few years before running for the Oakland City Council, Purnell said.

“I didn’t know Nedir Bey from Adam,” Purnell said, adding that he later learned of Bey’s background from a November 2002 article in the East Bay Express.

“What I recall him telling me was that it was a big grassroots effort on his part, that many of his contributors were poor and lived in a complex and he organized them to go down there [to buy the money orders],” Purnell said. “It sounded plausible.”

The city’s original public financing ordinance was less restrictive regarding matching contributions than it is now, partly because of the Bey case. Contributions made by money order are no longer eligible for matching funds and now must be made on two-party checks drawn on the bank account of the contributors.

In the past, Bey has represented himself as a “spiritual adviser” to the late Antar Bey, who was briefly head of Your Black Muslim Bakery. Other bakery associates face numerous criminal charges in Alameda County, including torture, kidnapping, real estate fraud, and the Aug. 2, 2007, killing of Oakland journalist Bailey, who was working on stories about the Bey empire.

Most recently Nedir Bey served as president of the school site council for Fruitvale Elementary School.

Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles, said the understaffed FPPC couldn’t investigate every small-time municipal election.

But, he said, “when the ethics commission realized the FPPC wasn’t acting on the case quickly, then Oakland really should have begun looking at it.”

Cecily Burt is a staff writer for MediaNews, one of the Guardian‘s partners in the Chauncey Bailey Project. For more information and to read past stories, go to www.sfbg.com/news/chaunceybailey.

Life of the party

-
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Amid the much-hyped speculation about whom Democratic and Republican party voters will choose as their respective presidential nominees this year, California members of the Green Party will vote for their representative Feb. 5.

Candidates Jared Ball, Kent Hesplay, Jesse Johnson Jr., Cynthia McKinney, and Kat Swift met for their only planned debate Jan. 13 at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, addressing a near-capacity crowd and laying out platforms that are decidedly more aggressive in tackling environmental and social problems than any proposed by the major-party candidates.

The candidates echoed one another on plans for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and shifting funding from the Pentagon into domestic programs for education, health care, and jobs. All professed grave concern about the environment, with Johnson calling the coal-mining method of mountaintop removal "ground zero for climate change."

By the end of the debate, Ball, a Baltimore hip-hop artist and professor in communications studies, fully endorsed McKinney, a former Democratic congressperson from Georgia. He emphasized that his greatest desire was for a strong national movement of people of all races, places, and income levels to continue what he called "incomplete revolutions" in the civil, labor, and women’s rights movements.

McKinney received the longest, most sustained standing ovation of the evening when she said, "Please unite the party. We can’t do it divided." She said the Greens represent the best hope of bringing together the large percentage of the country that’s spurned membership in both the Democratic and Republican parties. "I’ve never seen anything like I’ve seen in the Green Party," she said. "Please come together."

Also on hand — not participating in the debate but taking questions afterward — was Ralph Nader, a presidential candidate in 1996, 2000, and 2004, who hasn’t yet ruled out another run this year. Some Greens and other high-profile figures are urging him not to run and expressing concern that he’s become a polarizing figure who could hurt the party. Nader addressed the issue of party unity by saying, "I have very little to offer about how to unite the Green Party internally."

But he told the Guardian that if powerful institutional forces collude to limit his or the Green Party nominee’s access to the ballot, as he charges they did in 2004, he might run to highlight the need for greater political participation, saying, "I’ll be deciding within the next month." Nader has sued the Democratic Party, the John Kerry–John Edwards campaign, the Service Employees International Union, and a number of law firms and political action committees for allegedly conspiring to prevent him from running for president in 2004.

"Ballot access is a major civil liberties issue," Nader said. "Without voters’ rights, candidates’ rights don’t mean anything."

Yet the five announced candidates and Green Party activists on hand all seemed ready to rally around a new nominee for 2008, even as questions remain about whether the party should pool its energy and resources for national races or focus on state and municipal elections. Greens represent less than 3 percent of San Francisco’s registered voters and are outnumbered by Republicans four to one. Statewide, Greens amount to less than 1 percent. However, nearly 20 percent of California voters and 30 percent in San Francisco decline to state any party affiliation.

"I’m not sure yet that running a presidential candidate helps to grow the party, based on the experiences of the last several presidential attempts, especially in contrast to us focusing on races that can be won locally," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a Green who helped found the party in California, told the Guardian outside the debate. When asked if a national Green Party candidate trickles down attention and funding to the grassroots races, he said, "The theory is that it does. There isn’t any concrete evidence that it has coattails."

Since the Nader runs, Greens are wary of being tagged as presidential spoilers, but when that question was posed to this year’s prospects, they denied that it accurately portrays the voting landscape. As McKinney said, "When you’ve got a million black people who go to the polls … and nobody counts their votes … then don’t you dare call the Green Party spoilers."

Editors note: An earlier version of this story erroneously reported that Ralph Nader was the Green Party candidate for president in 2004. Nader ran as an independent. The Greens nominated David Cobb.

Endorsements

-
0

President, Democrat

BARACK OBAMA


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

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

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

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

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

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

And he’s always been against the war.

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

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

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

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

President, Republican

RON PAUL


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

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

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

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

President, Green

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proposition 91 (use of gas tax)

NO


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

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

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

Proposition 92 (community college funding)

YES


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

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

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

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

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

Proposition 93 (term limits)

YES


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

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

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

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

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

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

NO


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

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

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

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

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

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

Proposition A (neighborhood parks bond)

YES


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proposition B (deferred retirement for police officers)

YES


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we’ll endorse Prop. B.

Proposition C (Alcatraz Conversion Project)

NO


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

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

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

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

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

Next week: Alameda County endorsements.

The great escape

-
0

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

There are some dark clouds hovering over City College of San Francisco. The District Attorney’s Office is investigating political corruption allegations, a long-awaited audit of half a billion dollars in bond spending is just months from completion, and several infrastructure projects are running tens of millions of dollars over budget.

But Chancellor Phil Day won’t be around to clean up those messes. He’s leaving City College for a new job on the East Coast at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators as early as March 1.

Day’s announcement came just weeks before the school’s Board of Trustees Jan. 10 unveiling of the results of an internal investigation into who knew what about City College money from taxpayers being diverted to an election campaign committee that should have operated entirely independently of the school.

The investigation concludes that there was no evidence that contractors made donations to a campaign committee formed by the school’s leadership in exchange for favorable business arrangements.

But the report does confirm that two lower-level bureaucrats, Stephen Herman and James Blomquist, instructed business tenants who used school facilities — the coffer vendor Bean Scene and Bay Area Motorcycle Training — to sign rent checks over to the committee instead of to the school. Neither tenant appeared to have any intention of contributing to the committee.

The timing of the checks is also questionable. The school returned the Bean Scene’s $20,000 rent check shortly after recognizing a potential violation of the state’s Education Code, which prohibits using school funds for electioneering purposes. But officials then violated the same provision when a $10,000 rent check from the motorcycle-training outfit wasn’t returned to public coffers until a year and a half later, when the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Lance Williams began snooping around.

"The fact that an apparent misuse of public funds could be discovered, corrected, and then occur again after such a short period reveals a glaring lack of oversight of the College’s involvement in fundraising from College contractors, literally from start to finish during the campaign," the report states.

City College’s trustees and school administrators created the Committee to Support Our City College in 2005 as a campaign vehicle for convincing voters to authorize $246 million in bond projects, the third such bond election for City College in a decade.

The report’s executive summary in part downplays the significance of the Chron stories from last April that inspired the probe in the first place. Rather, it implies that the fund diversions had more to do with a poor accounting system and an 11th-hour decision to rush the bond election to voters with minimum preparation.

It’s not clear how the report will impact a DA’s investigation of the campaign committee related to the same allegations. The Guardian revealed last summer (see "Day’s Dilemma," 8/8/07) that just days before the November 2005 election, Kamala Harris’s office also requested documents stemming from the college’s $8.7 million purchase of land in Chinatown that the county determined was worth only $1.7 million for tax purposes.

We also reported that City College’s half a billion dollars in infrastructure improvements are running approximately $225 million over budget and as a result, the school has gutted projects promised to voters and reallocated about $130 million in order to sustain others (see "The City College Shell Game," 7/4/07). An expansive management audit of the school’s bond spending is due in June.

In a prepared statement, Day insists the fund diversions were an accident, and he complains that if the San Francisco Ethics Commission had notified it of the mistake sooner, the school would have corrected it. The Guardian reported that the Ethics Commission had known the Bay Area Motorcycle Training check was illegally used by the committee but waited for more than a year to notify the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission of a possible elections law violation (see "At the Crossroads," 7/18/07).

"As the chancellor and CEO of this college, I take responsibility for these mistakes," Day’s statement reads. "However, it is important to understand that these mistakes occurred innocently and inadvertently, and as soon as we learned of them, we took immediate action to rectify them."

An exasperated Day, who became City College’s chancellor in 1998, said in a phone interview that he didn’t believe the school’s troubles would make it difficult for his successor to return to the ballot and get voters to approve bond projects they’ve already partially paid for, including a stem-cell technology training center.

"I don’t feel like I’m leaving someone with disarray," Day told us. "It’s the people in the institution that sometimes make mistakes, not the institution itself."

Day’s departure also comes as a building inspector hired by the school in 2003 alleges in a federal lawsuit that he was wrongfully terminated last summer for blowing the whistle on illegal building code violations and for making safety complaints during facility renovations. The suit was filed Dec. 24, 2007.

Plaintiff Lawrence Lauser contends that he’d repeatedly informed his bosses at City College that building codes were being violated during construction work, but there was no willingness to fix them.

Instead of being outright fired, Lauser alleges, he was told the work had run out. "That was a complete sham," his attorney, Frank Sarro, said. "There wasn’t a lack of work at all." Lauser is also suing his union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Local 22, for refusing to request arbitration with the school on his behalf.

"He just had a strong feeling that things should be done by the book," Sarro said of Lauser. "And his bosses didn’t want to hear it."

The press: Humbled in New Hampshire

-
0

B3 comment:

As I said in my post-election blog, I liked the fact that it was the voters, not the pundits nor the pollsters, who decided the New Hampshire primary and surprised everyone.

I also liked this commentary below by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a national media watchdog group, who asked the Washington Post’s David Broder and NBC’s Tim Russert to explain their embarrassingly wrong predictions, rebuked NBC’s Chris Matthews for horserace coverage, and quoted NBC’s Tom Brokaw offering some good reporting advice, and then giving its own good advice.

FAIR to the campaign reporters: “Reporters should strive for coverage no matter what the results are.”

Brokaw: “Wait for the voters to make their judgment…”

B3 adds: “Reporters should cover the issues and the policy differences between the candidates. And work to keep the war and Bush on the front burner at all times.”

fair.gif

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3242

Media Advisory

Humbled in New Hampshire?
Press Needs to Refocus Campaign Coverage

1/11/08

Leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the storyline on the Democratic side was the disastrous state of the Clinton campaign. Her loss was a given; it seemed the only considerations were the margin of defeat and whether or not she would even continue running at all. The day of the primary, the Washington Post reported (1/8/08) that a second loss to Obama “would leave the New York senator’s candidacy gasping for breath,” and declared that Clinton’s vow to stay in the race

may be more wish than reality. By Wednesday, it may be too late. By then, Obama’s campaign may have inflicted enough damage on the woman-who-was-once-inevitable that no amount of readjusting, recalibrating and rearranging will give her the wherewithal to overcome two big losses in the first contests of the 2008 nomination battle.

Clinton, of course, won the primary–surprising the pundits and contradicting the polls that journalists unwisely use to set the tone of so much of their coverage. In the aftermath, the media were left asking what went “wrong” with the numbers. As the front page of USA Today declared (1/10/08), “For pollsters, N.H. ‘unprecedented.'” But this isn’t so; the actual USA Today story included a state pollster who noted that pre-election polls in 2000 vastly underestimated John McCain’s victory over George W. Bush. Right before the primary, the New York Times reported (1/30/00) that “a series of polls showed the two Republican front-runners in a dead heat.” Given that McCain won by 19 points, journalists and pollsters puzzling over Clinton’s showing are ignoring very recent history.

As the media mea culpas start to pile up, it’s worth considering the unspoken implication–that if the vote had gone the way the polls were predicting, then the press would have been doing a fine job of covering an election. But journalists should not be gamblers, betting that they will be vindicated by voters’ choices that are inherently unpredictable. Reporters should strive for coverage that holds up no matter what the results are.

Expectations and reality
Though they often prefer to think of themselves as mere observers of an election, the media clearly set the tone for much of the campaign, laying out expectations for various candidates and making editorial decisions about who the most “viable” contenders will be–usually long before most actual voters have been given the chance to weigh in.

But beating the expectations doesn’t necessarily guarantee good coverage. Democratic contender John Edwards defied press predictions by finishing second in Iowa, ahead of supposed front-runner Hillary Clinton. But much of the media conversation after the votes were tallied focused on the disappointing Edwards showing. By contrast, Republican John McCain had a great night in Iowa, according to many in the press– despite the fact that he finished fourth, behind Fred Thompson. The obvious difference is not how well the candidates did but how well they are liked by the press corps.

Some in the media point out that the Republican race in New Hampshire went as predicted, so it wasn’t all bad news for the press. But the campaign coverage still included its share of bizarrely confident predictions. NBC’s Tim Russert (1/4/08) declared that “only McCain or Romney can come out of New Hampshire to fight for another day in South Carolina, only one. One stays behind. It is make or break for McCain or Romney in New Hampshire.” Given that both candidates are, by all appearances, continuing to campaign, will Russert explain where his prediction came from? Or as the Washington Post’s David Broder wrote before the New Hampshire vote (1/4/08), “A second Romney loss would effectively end the former Massachusetts governor’s candidacy.”

Horse race
There’s a long trend of media hostility towards so-called “second-tier” candidates (Extra!, 9/10/03). As a recent Wall Street Journal news story put it (1/10/08), “In both parties, second-tier candidates continue to press on and siphon off votes.” But Broder and Russert were not just saying that non-frontrunners have a duty to get out of the way–they were asserting that a loss in New Hampshire would mean that Romney would no longer be a front-runner. This illustrates an important point about mainstream election coverage: Not only do journalists and pundits devote far too much attention to covering the horse race aspect of campaigns, but when they cover the horse race they generally do a poor job of it.

Primary elections and caucuses determine how a state party’s delegates are assigned; if a candidate wins enough delegates, they will almost certainly be their party’s nominee. So a reasonably helpful media would focus on this delegate count. But the mathematics of this process are obscured by the media’s obsession with “wins” and “losses” in highly visible contests.

Consider Barack Obama’s apparently monumental victory in the Iowa caucuses. The distribution of delegates, though, was hardly so dramatic: Obama won 16, Clinton 15 and Edwards 14. In a race to secure a little over 2,000 delegates, the results are of little consequence. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s dramatic comeback netted her nine delegates–the same number awarded to Obama. In the total delegate count tallied on CNN’s website–which counts a large number of party insiders awarded as “superdelegates”–Clinton has more than double the number of delegates as Obama, and Edwards is about 25 delegates behind Obama.

On the Republican side, McCain’s victory in New Hampshire gained him seven delegates; to put that in context, Romney’s second-place finish in Iowa was worth 12 delegates. And Romney’s win in the Wyoming primary–which received almost no media coverage at all–secured him eight delegates. His total delegate count still puts him ahead of all or most his competitors (depending on whether you believe CNN or ABC), though the media coverage would lead you to conclude otherwise.

Given that the process of nominating a presidential candidate is a matter of winning delegates, why does the press assign so much significance to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries? The implicit assumption is that these small states have a big role in determining the eventual party nominees, but they actually have a quite mixed record in projecting overall winners in competitive races. (Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas and Pat Buchanan were all New Hampshire winners.) Neither does losing early primaries necessarily doom a candidacy–in 1992, Bill Clinton lost the first five contests. The media’s decision to place such importance on the small number of delegates in the first two states has little to do with any actual reasonable political determination.

What do we cover now?
Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw offered some helpful commentary during the coverage of the New Hampshire primaries, suggesting to MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews that reporters put less emphasis on trying to predict outcomes and spend more time covering actual policy:

BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to do?

MATTHEWS: Yes sir?

BROKAW: Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

MATTHEWS: Well, what do we do then in the days before the ballot? We must stay home, I guess.

BROKAW: No, no we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today, what moved them to vote. You can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that have not been fully explored during all this.

Matthews’ response is illuminating. Does a political junkie who hosts two national television programs really not have any idea about how to cover politics other than talking about strategy, fundraising and polls? Do campaign journalists really have so little interest in the actual policy positions of the candidates?

As it stands now, the races for the major party nominations are remarkably close. The most valuable service journalists could provide now would be to illustrate the differences between the candidates on the major issues of importance to voters. The press corps seems chastened by their misreading of the New Hampshire electorate, and many are vowing to be more cautious in their assumptions. Will they follow through on their own advice? And will voters ever get campaign reporting that helps them make informed choices about the direction of their democracy?

Click here to subscribe!

With a two year subscription, you get a copy of Interventions, a collection of Chomsky’s essays and writings for the New York Times Syndicate, works published all around the globe, but rarely in major U.S. media, and certainly not in the New York Times. Foreword written by FAIR’s Peter Hart.

Peter Hart on 2008 primaries, Kali Akuno on New Orleans public housing (1/11/08-1/17/08)

Feel free to respond to FAIR ( fair@fair.org ). We can’t reply to everything, but we will look at each message. We especially appreciate documented examples of media bias or censorship. And please send copies of your correspondence with media outlets, including any responses, to fair@fair.org.

Sandoval to run for judge

-
0

sandoval_sm.jpg
Sup. Gerardo Sandoval tells the Guardian he will run for San Francisco Superior Court judge this June, creating the first contested judge’s race in many years. Sandoval, who is termed out this year and says he will complete his term on the Board of Supervisors, still hasn’t decided which of the 52 judges (a third of which are up for reelection this year) he will challenge, a decision he needs to make by the end of the month when he files his paperwork. But his research shows that 30 percent of the judges here are Republican, even more are politically conservative and well-connected, and there’s only one Latino on the bench. “It’s a bench that does not reflect San Francisco in any meaningful way,” he told us.
Sandoval has been a part of the progressive block of supervisors that swept into power in the year after Tom Ammiano’s run for mayor in 1999, a backlash to the powerful institutional forces that crushed that progressive populist campaign. Those same forces, led by Gap founder Don Fisher, consultant Duane Baughman, and downtown moneyman Jim Sutton, viciously attacked Sandoval during his last reelection campaign, prompting Sandoval to unsuccessfully sue them for defamation. When the judge ordered Sandoval to pay tens of thousands of dollars in the other side’s attorney’s fees — well beyond his means — Sandoval said he realized how out of touch many judges are with the average San Franciscan. “It started in part because I sued Don Fisher,” Sandoval said of the process that resulted in his decision to run for judge. Now, Sandoval is navigating the tricky judicial rules that result in almost all judges being either appointed by the governor or running in uncontested elections, a self-serving dynamic he intends to challenge: “I want to be an activist judge. I’ll be a troublemaker.”

George McGovern: Impeach Bush & Cheney!

-
0

B3 note: Good for George McGovern. Good for the Washington Post for running this important timely commentary
in its Sunday edition. Question: how many other papers will run it?

The McGovern piece reminds me of a major political point: that a big reason the Pelosi Democrats in
Washington have so cravenly caved in to the Bush initiatives, on the war and much else, is because Pelosi wrongheadly pulled the impeachment issue off the table before the last election. This meant, among other things, that the Democrats at the first bugle lost their most important bit of muscle and leverage. The result has been disastrous and the war is now surging.

It’s good that Cindy Sheehan is running against Pelosi and will force these issues into the public arena. Maybe, just maybe, Pelosi will be forced to debate Sheehan and will be forced in the November election to conduct a real campaign for the first time in her home territory to keep her Speaker of the House post.

Personal note about McGovern: he comes from South Dakota, a state so conservative that it has outlawed abortions. Its eastern border is l7 miles or so from my northwestern Iowa hometown of Rock Rapids. I have followed him closely through the years. I still marvel that a liberal of his force and eloquence could represent South Dakota for so many years in Congress. Imagine if he were the Speaker of the House.

Why I Believe Bush Must Go

By George McGovern

The Washington Post
Sunday 06 January 2008

Nixon was bad. These guys are worse.

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have
belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is
to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach
President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign.

I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an
expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment.

The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial
partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and
statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the
chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses.

They have repeatedly violated the Constitution.

They have transgressed national and international law.

They have lied to the American people time after time.

Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country
to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world.

These are truly “high crimes and misdemeanors,” to use the constitutional
standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team’s assumption of power was the
product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially
challenged – perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed
throughout the Bush-Cheney regime.

The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous,
illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq.

That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many
times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an
estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from
the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their
country.

The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is
expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed
from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9
trillion – by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that
the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in
violation of international law.

This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional
law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic
torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon
administration.

But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the
case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election.

The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon
presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national
history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of
killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived
Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had
nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an “imminent
threat” to the United States.

The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in
the 9/11 attacks – another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I
have recalled Jefferson’s observation: “Indeed I tremble for my country
when I reflect that God is just.”

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of
fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the
invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the
illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents.

The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative
members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and
Muslim world – more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off
the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries
without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August
that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to
the country and the world.

This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the
Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran.

I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush
invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S.
influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of
their administration, their policies – especially the war in Iraq – have
increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States.

Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush
and those of his son.

When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George
H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United
Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel
Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost.

Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration
established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international
arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions.

Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten
others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military
occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil
strife.

It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James
A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all
opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral
responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the
Hurricane Katrina catastrophe.

The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: “I
have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this
situation in New Orleans.”

Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the
collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst
natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course.

But we must still urge Congress to act.

Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution
to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land.

It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some
of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to
support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray.

This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the
Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, “it wasn’t until the
most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of
hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) – and argued that, as Commander in
Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override
our country’s laws – that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as
I did during Watergate…

A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law – and
repeatedly violates the law – thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors.”

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in
the opening decade of the 21st century.

This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a
series of rational presidents and Congresses.

At age 85, I won’t be around to witness the completion of the difficult
rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I’d like to hold on long
enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have
sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as
the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II.

We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic
blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010608C.shtml

Politics as cryptography

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

In his new book, Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision (Berrett-Koehler), author and Air America radio personality Thom Hartmann offers a how-to manual for expressing political viewpoints. He says the left’s struggles are not the fault of liberalism as an ideology; the problem is that many liberal politicians simply do not know how to talk to people.

Part self-help book, part populist polemic, Code puts our country’s political discourse under the knife and dissects how master communicators like Bill Clinton, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan won elections by talking their way deep into voters’ consciousnesses. He spoke with me by phone.

SFBG The poet Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." You have a similar view of the political universe, don’t you?

THOM HARTMANN Story is the way we transmit culture. Story is the way we remember things…. The story we call politics is the story of how to best accomplish the common good.

SFBG In Cracking the Code, you trace the lineages of the modern conservative and liberal stories to two philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

TH The conservative worldview is grounded in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. You could argue that the Adam and Eve story is an early articulation of it as well. This [story] suggests that people are intrinsically evil, and because of that we have to find the most meritorious, the few who are good, and put them in charge. And small-d democracy with a lot of people participating is not such a good idea….

The liberal story came out of John Locke, but also [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau and eventually Thomas Jefferson. It says the vast majority of people are good and therefore collective wisdom can be trusted. The more people that participate in democracy the better. That’s why the liberal founders of this country put "We the People" as the first three words of the Constitution. It wasn’t "Us the meritorious few, us the ones who are in charge." It was "We the People."

SFBG You say that after Sept. 11, George W. Bush was able to get even liberals to buy into the conservative story. Do you believe it’s still a powerful enough narrative to bring another Republican into the White House?

TH Yes, I think it’s possible. Particularly if we don’t have Democrats stand up and say, "I’m not afraid anymore." I’m still waiting for a Democrat to stand up like Franklin Roosevelt did and say, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and we will not be frightened."

We’re wired for survival first and foremost. The reptile brain is the most primitive part of our brain. [It] is where fear is processed, and it’s all-powerful. So those people who motivate us with fear and danger are, over the short term anyway, typically going to have success. The problem is, it’s sort of like whipping a horse, these "moving away from pain" strategies. The more often you whip a horse, it’s going to go faster and faster until it hits a limit, and then it’s going to fall over dead…. At some point people say, "Wait a minute, you’re fearmongering. You’re the little boy who cried wolf."

SFBG You speak in the book about effective communication inducing a kind of trance.

TH If you want to teach somebody something, they have to be in a kind of trance state. And I refer to the techniques for bringing that on as "inducing the learning trance." Mostly these have to do with pacing and using different modalities as you speak.

The big mistake that John Kerry made against George [W.] Bush in 2004 was that he induced a boredom trance while Bush induced a feeling trance. Bush communicated feelings. They were clumsy, yes, but that made it more intense, frankly. Kerry communicated ideas and concepts. But people don’t vote on ideas and concepts. They vote based on their feelings.

SFBG Ronald Reagan was pretty much the master at appealing to emotion, wasn’t he?

TH Ronald Reagan, FDR, and Jack Kennedy were three of the greatest communicators that we’ve had in the White House…. What made them great was, first of all, their ability to be multimodal in their communication. They talked about their vision for America, they talked about their story of America, and they gave America a sense of what they thought it could be.

Number two, they all principally used "moving towards pleasure" strategies instead of "moving away from fear" or "pain avoidance" strategies. In other words, they held up an ideal of what we wanted to move towards as a country and made us proud of ourselves.

Number three, they communicated emotion and always used story and emotion to pass along information.

SFBG You point out how Reagan picked up one of Kennedy’s themes, which Kennedy himself picked up from John Winthrop: the "America as a city on a hill" theme. Except Reagan inserted a key word into its phrasing, didn’t he?

TH Yes, shining. He dramatically improved the "America as a city on the hill" metaphor by making us a shining city on a hill. He put that word in, and it gave the image even more power.

What’s interesting is … Reagan’s notion of America as the city on the hill was very different than Kennedy’s. John Kennedy’s idea of the city on a hill was that the entire world is looking at [America], and every single one of us in the country is the city. From the highest and best to the poorest economically, we are all part of that city on the hill, and we welcome people in to participate in it. Reagan, on the other hand, his version of the city on the hill was we’re the castle, we’re the fortress, we’re the place where Cinderella the lowly commoner hopes one day to get in and dance with the prince.

SFBG I noticed your Wikipedia page says you campaigned for Barry Goldwater in your youth.

TH When I was 13 years old, my dad was active in the local Republican Party, and I went door-to-door with him. I read [Goldwater’s] autobiography Conscience of a Conservative [Victor Publishing Co., 1960]…. I even went to a John Birch Society meeting. I was convinced that the communists had infiltrated the State Department and they were coming to get us. But within two years I had completely shaken myself out of that trance. There’s nothing like growing up, going off to college, and discovering that you’re of draft age and your government wants to kill you. Not to mention being exposed to ideas beyond what I had learned up to that point, [like] the core concepts of the Enlightenment.

SFBG So you heard a different story.

TH Exactly, and I lived a different story. I really saw America differently the first time one of my friends came back in a box from Vietnam.

SFBG My mother is a big fan of your radio show. But she lives in San Diego, and the Air America affiliate there is either going off the air or has already gone off the air.

TH It went off the air last week, actually.

SFBG Can you talk about the future of progressive media in light of that kind of setback?

TH The first two or three years that conservative talk radio was on the air, it struggled terribly. But then it reached the point where advertisers realized they were getting results and program directors realized that they had a core listenership, and it started to take off….

In the next year or few years I think there’s going to be a broad perception shift across radiodom that beyond the ongoing feast and famine of Air America, liberal talk radio is here to stay…. Right now the conventional wisdom [for program directors] is "nobody ever got fired for putting Rush Limbaugh on the air." When the conventional wisdom becomes "nobody ever got fired for putting Thom Hartmann on the air," then everything will change, and I think we’re very close to that.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

I think 2008 is going to be the year when we decide as a city if we’re serious about San Francisco.

We’re going to decide if we want this to be a place where working people can live, a place that isn’t just a playground for the rich, a place where the people who drive the buses and clean the hotel rooms and teach in the schools can get to work without commuting 50 miles.

And it’s not going to be an easy choice.

See, there’s a city charter amendment headed for the November ballot that would set aside a fairly good-size chunk of money, around $30 million per year, for affordable housing. It won’t solve the city’s housing crisis — that would take at least three times as much money, maybe more — but it will, for the first time, create a large, predictable fund of money that can be used and leveraged over the next decade to try to create the type of housing this city desperately needs.

And not entirely coincidentally (see: the subprime mortgage crisis), the voters will be considering this in a year when the city is looking pretty broke.

So the mayor, who hates this charter measure (and who won’t talk seriously about raising new revenue), is going to go all over town and tell everyone that we can’t afford it, that it will mean even more service cuts, that it’s fiscally irresponsible … that whole line. He’ll try to blame the supervisors for the cuts in Muni and the Health Department and the library — and then he’ll run his own candidates in the November board elections, all of whom will oppose the housing measure, and he’ll try to sell them as responsible managers of the city’s treasury.

And all of us will have to make some choices:

Do we recognize that if we can’t build enough low-cost housing, San Francisco will cease to exist as we know it? Are we willing to look at the long run and realize that there will always be good and bad budget years, and that saving the city’s middle-class base is actually good management? Are we willing to accept that the budget should be balanced by new taxes on the rich and not by abandoning everyone else?

God, I hope so. Happy holidays. *

Where’s Michela?

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

Michela Alioto-Pier, carpetbagger.

That’s what her Democratic primary challenger called her in 1996, when Alioto-Pier ran for the House of Representatives from the 1st congressional district, which hugs the California coastline from the town of Napa to the Oregon border.

Alioto-Pier, a San Francisco native, had spent the previous two and a half years at the White House advising Al Gore on telecommunications issues. After returning to the West Coast, the ambitious 26-year-old packed up her belongings and moved to St. Helena in Napa County, buying a home there in November 1995 and registering to vote the following month.

Her opponent, Monica Marvin, promptly attacked with a commercial showing a moving van heading across the Golden Gate Bridge alongside a photo of Alioto-Pier and a voice-over condemning outside candidates.

"I think the perception was that someone who’d lived most of her life in the district had a more comprehensive grasp of the issues and the culture reflected by those constituents," Marvin told the Guardian recently.

Alioto-Pier nonetheless won the primary, but she narrowly lost the general election to a Republican incumbent named Frank Riggs. He too assailed her for moving to the district just before the race.

More than a decade later, District 2 supervisor Alioto-Pier hasn’t managed to escape accusations that she’s detached from her constituents, nor has she succeeded in clearly reestablishing residency here since beginning a new political career at San Francisco’s City Hall.

THE SECOND-HOME STORY


Alioto-Pier is registered to vote at a Vallejo Street condo that she bought in 2005 for $1.9 million, and she told us that she, husband Thomas Paul Pier, and their three children make it their primary residence.

"Depending on the time of year, we spend some weekends at our St. Helena house, which is on the same street as Congresswoman [Nancy] Pelosi’s St. Helena house," she said in a written response to our questions.

An Alioto-Pier office assistant, Gene Eplett, left a voice message with the Guardian insisting that second homes are commonplace. "You probably have one as well," Eplett said.

Not exactly. Particularly not one with a taxable value of $774,793.

And in some legal documents, Alioto-Pier lists the Napa County house as her residence.

In August the supervisor formed a limited liability company for the purpose of "wine production" with Pier, called Alioto-Pier Vineyards, according to state business registration records. Both listed their home address as the three-bedroom, two-bath St. Helena home on Zinfandel Lane. Alioto-Pier paid $590,000 for the place, which sits on 2.6 acres of world-famous Napa County soil.

Within days of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s appointing her to the Board of Supervisors in January 2004, she signed a deed of trust for a $100,000 equity line of credit, again listing the Zinfandel Lane property as her home address, according to Napa County records.

In early May 2003, not long before she joined the board, former mayor Willie Brown tapped her to sit on the powerful San Francisco Port Commission. That same week she reregistered another wine-making business in Napa County she’d founded years before called Alioto Cellars, a.k.a. Alioto Winery. In the area of the original form asking for a residence, she began to list the St. Helena property but thought better of it, crossing it out and replacing it with a San Francisco address on Jackson Street that she appears to have used for at least two years, according to Napa County records.

In response to questions regarding the business registration records for Alioto-Pier Vineyards, the supervisor said neither she nor her husband signed the form and that it was filled out by their attorney.

"Alioto-Pier Vineyards LLC is a small wine producing business (approximately 250 cases per year) whose business address is more suitable to where our vineyard (approximately one acre) is located — at our St. Helena property," she wrote.

The form asks for the addresses of the company’s managers separate from the location of the principal executive office. For both Alioto-Pier and her husband, Zinfandel Lane is given as the home address.

DISTRICT ISSUES


As a supervisor, Alioto-Pier has exhibited savvy on emergency preparedness, mothers in the workplace, energy use, and the threatened demise of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission, which treats primarily low-income patients.

Mick Suverkrubbe, president of the Marina Merchants Association, said the supervisor always has a presence at the group’s meetings.

"If she doesn’t show up, one of her aides shows up," Suverkrubbe said. "She’s always been real responsive when we’ve had questions."

But some critics say Alioto-Pier appears all too willing to take direction from the Mayor’s Office, well-financed business interests, and Democratic party functionaries rather than independently arriving at positions.

"She’s like the windup doll," said one City Hall insider who asked not to be named. "It’s fair to say every time I see Sean Elsbernd [her board ally] make a decision, I know that it’s coming from a policy perspective, not someone yanking his chain. It’s the exception, not the rule, that she comes up with her own policy perspective."

"She has three more years, and hopefully they’ll be better," Bill Barnes, an aide to Assemblymember Fiona Ma who formerly worked for Sup. Chris Daly, said of Alioto-Pier’s current board term. "The point of district elections is that supervisors respond to their neighborhood. The values and concerns in District 2 are going to be more moderate and conservative than some other areas, but you still have to provide that basic level of service."

ATTENDANCE PROBLEMS


Alioto-Pier’s attendance record has also caused her trouble and made her an easy target for political adversaries.

"I see her here on Tuesday afternoons," when the board meets, one City Hall staffer said. "She probably spends a full day here when she has a committee hearing with an item. Beyond that, her office is routinely shut on Fridays."

Alioto-Pier missed 17 of 160 board and committee meetings in 2004 and 2005 — that’s only about 10 percent. But throughout her tenure as a supervisor, she’s attended barely half of the meetings of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, where each of the supervisors automatically serves as a director, according to an analysis of the $100 payments the members receive for attending meetings.

"I missed Transportation Authority meetings related to the birth of my third child and the complications of that pregnancy," Alioto-Pier told us.

Alioto-Pier noted, as did others at City Hall, that she had health problems in 2006. She was pregnant with her third child, and there were complications. Further, she said, supervisors don’t get time off for maternity.

"All city employees with the exception of members of the Board of Supervisors are allowed to take a four-month maternity leave. I was the first member of the board in the history of San Francisco to give birth while in office. As such, there were no guidelines in place, and I had to place the health and safety of my newborn first," she said.

But for many months in 2004 and 2005, before that pregnancy, she missed all or almost all of the Transportation Authority meetings.

She also missed 16 of 20 scheduled meetings, including three public hearings, during the short time in 2004 that she spent as a director for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District.

Alioto-Pier left the district before her term was set to expire after serving only six months, complaining that she didn’t have enough time for the position. In her resignation letter, she acknowledged that the bridge was adjacent to her district and "given my ongoing commitment to improving waterfront security in San Francisco, I hope in the future I will once again be able to work with you and serve as a director." She never has, but four other supervisors have served on the district’s board for years.

And she’s apparently not too busy to be running a winery in St. Helena. It’s a modest operation, but it has to take some of her time.

WHERE DOES SHE VOTE?


Alioto-Pier’s voter registration history is confusing.

She doesn’t appear to have voted at all in the November 1999 election — at least not in Napa or San Francisco counties — but, curiously, she did vote in that year’s December runoff, when Willie Brown won a second term over Sup. Tom Ammiano.

She cast a ballot as an absentee in Napa County one year later, even though she was registered at that time to vote in San Francisco under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier, public records show. She voted here in November 1998 with the last name Alioto-Pier, but she didn’t marry her lawyer husband until May 2000, county records show.

In 2002 she voted in San Francisco during the primary and general elections under the name Michela Angelina Driscol Alioto, yet she was still registered concurrently under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier.

Alioto-Pier said that she and her husband returned to St. Helena in July 2000 but moved back here in early 2001, reregistering in both places. She added that San Francisco and Napa counties were at that time slow to remove "deadwood" registrations from their rolls.

"Clearly, once one reregisters, the county has the obligation to cancel all previous registrations for that person," she said. Alioto-Pier insisted that she voted in San Francisco’s November 1999 election, but an office attendant at the Department of Elections asserted that the system "says she was eligible but she did not vote."

Her 1996 Republican opponent, Riggs, also castigated her for failing to vote in 1994 and 1995. Alioto-Pier’s explanation, according to press accounts? Her permanent residency wasn’t clear.

"As best as I can recall from the events of a decade ago, I responded to Republican Frank Riggs by saying there was a mix-up with my absentee ballots," Alioto-Pier told us.

She’s listed a string of San Francisco addresses in public records over the past two decades in addition to her St. Helena dwelling. But in 2005 she finally bought the condo on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. She didn’t file for a homeowner’s exemption on the condo in 2006, but neither has she taken advantage of the tax break on her Zinfandel Lane home during any year since 1997, according to property records.

Alioto-Pier said she was unaware of qualifying for the homeowner’s tax exemption. "However, we declare as a deduction the mortgage interest from our Vallejo Street home on our federal tax returns," she said. Taxpayers are permitted to benefit from the deduction on a second residence.

Whispers at City Hall surrounding the time Alioto-Pier spends in St. Helena and away from her District 2 constituents have dogged her increasingly since she replaced Newsom.

But she’s never faced the punishing regimen of banner headlines endured by District 4’s onetime supervisor Ed Jew. He’s also been suspended by the mayor and faces civil charges that he lied to voters about living permanently in the district he was elected to represent.

Alioto-Pier offered a few telling words in a recent robocall to San Francisco voters opposing mandated appearances by the mayor before the Board of Supervisors: "We need to get our house in order before we invite any guests."

Now, which house would that be?

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

Sup. Aaron Peskin hates billboards, and mostly I agree with him — the whole damn world feels like a commercial these days, and it’s nice to be able to walk around a few parts of the city and not be surrounded by giant illuminated ads. But as Election Day approached this fall, I felt like something was missing from San Francisco.

October in this city used to mean brightly colored campaign festoonery on lampposts, utility poles … anywhere anyone could legally stick a sign promoting or attacking a candidate or ballot measure. Yeah, it got a bit ugly, and yeah, it was one more way that people with money were able to get their message out and get a leg up on the people who weren’t well funded. And it was always a mess in late November, when the campaigns conveniently forgot to take their posters down. But it also, I think, served to remind everyone that an election was coming up.

That doesn’t matter so much when the office of the president of the United States is on the ballot, because most people at least know that’s going on. But this year only about 30 percent of voters bothered to go to the polls — and since San Francisco has elections at least twice per year and not all of them feature a high-profile race, it’s not a bad idea to do something festive to get everybody thinking about them.

So while I didn’t oppose Peskin’s ordinance banning campaign signs on public property, I’m thinking maybe we should modify it a bit. I’m not sure exactly how; maybe we set aside a small amount of money from the public campaign fund and give local artists modest grants to come up with wild and colorful posters announcing the election and encouraging people to vote. We let churches and nonprofits hang signs celebrating anniversaries and special events — why not public art celebrating our semiannual bout of obsessive democracy?

Just a thought.

And here’s another:

I have friends who are employed in the world of philanthropy (that is, they either administer grants or seek them), and we were all complaining the other day about how people like Bill Gates get to set international health policy. When Gates decides something’s a problem, it suddenly has vast resources — and his opinion about world health isn’t always shared by experts in the field.

In a better world we would tax Gates and Microsoft at a level that would provide adequate resources for our elected representatives to make choices about global problems, but these days the rich don’t pay taxes — yet they can set policy. So I had a suggestion:

What if Gates decided to give, say, a billion dollars to some needy urban public school district? I don’t know — Detroit or Jackson, Miss., … or San Francisco. My friends, who understand how these things work, said I was nuts; much of that money would immediately be lost to corruption.

Maybe — but what if it weren’t a lump sum? What if the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just doubled the annual budget of the San Francisco Unified School District for the next 10 years? What if the "project," so to speak, was to demonstrate how effective the public sector can be at educating kids if the resources are available?

And maybe after 10 years the Gates folks could do a massive public relations campaign and people would realize that higher taxes for public schools might make for a better society.

Happy Thanksgiving. *

Pay Back’s A Bitch

-
0

What’s newsworthy about Board of Supervisor President Aaron Peskin changing his vote three weeks ago on Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier charter amendment tightening laws controlling the Ethics, Elections and Sunshine Commissions?

Nothing—except the real reason the Chronicle’s running dogs of the press were dragged out of their kennel this weekend to tear into Peskin’s Oct. 23 change-of-heart vote: the Gap’s Don Fisher is pissed off that he poured $185,000 into Prop. H, only to see it fail on the Nov. 6 ballot. So, now, he and his Republican allies are punishing Peskin for having the nerve to place the ultimately successful Prop. A on the ballot, thus defeating their well-heeled efforts to turn San Francisco into a giant parking lot.

Latest returns support Yes on A/No on H campaign

-
0

057-cover.web.jpg
Guardian illustration by Danny Hellman, from our Oct. 31 cover story
The big story of this election was the improbable triumph of environmentalists over car culture and grassroots activism over downtown’s money, a story being played out in the likely approval of the Muni reform measure Prop. A and lopsided defeat of the pro-parking Prop. H.
The latest elections results show Prop. A extending its narrow election night lead to a seven point margin and Prop. H being rejected by almost 64 percent of voters, despite its poll-tested simplicity and big time backing from Don Fisher and other downtown conservatives.
As expected, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s election night high of 77.46 percent of the early absentee votes has fallen to 72.47 and will probably continue its downward trend, while progressive favorite Quintin Mecke is slowly climbing out of the electoral cellar to third place with 6 percent now, a trend also likely to continue. Harold Hoogasian has 6.83 percent and Wilma Pang dropped to 5.6 – expect both to keep falling.
Prop. E, the question time measure where Newsom invested all his political capital trying to defeat, could still go either way: 48.7 percent say yes and 51.3 percent no. That will be a big test of whether Newsom has any political pull at all, capping off a string of electoral failures since he took office.
But as I said, the big story is the Yes on A/No on H campaign, which threw a jubilant party at the El Rio last night.

SF sues its elections vendor

-
0

San Francisco may have to wait weeks for election results and undergo an complicated ballot-counting procedure, but we may not end up having to pay for it. That’s because the city is suing its election vendor, ES&S, for breach for contract, City Attorney Dennis Herrera and other city officials announced this morning. His press release follows:

Low, low turnout

-
0

The traditional wisdom is the the progressives lose in low-turnout races — and turnout here looks terrible. John Arntz, the elections director, says it looks like 26 percent turnout, only around 100,000 votes. And yet, on the key progressive measures, we’re doing really well.

Who’s endorsing whom? A guide

-
0

You’re probably already acquainted with the Guardian’s 2007 endorsements for the Nov. 6 elections — but what about the city’s other hot and steaming political bodies (yes, that sounded dirty). Below are endorsements from other groups, from the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club to the San Francisco Tenants Union. (All files below are PDFs.)

San Francisco local offices

San Francisco ballot propositions

Election-night coverage

-
0

by Tim Redmond

This blog is typically crowded on election night; I’m down at City Hall posting updates as the results come in and various Guardian staffers are reporting in from the evening’s events. It will be a little calmer tonight; we’ll get one set of results, at 8:30 pm, when the Elections Department releases its count of early absentees. But since the rest of the ballots have to be counted by hand, we won’t know much beyond that until later in the week.

So you can look here for the party scene, our analysis of the early results and some other fun – but we probably won’t be able to call the election until later in the week.

** Commenting is temporarily disabled

Endorsements: Local offices

-
0

Mayor

1. QUINTIN MECKE


2. AHIMSA PORTER SUMCHAI


3. CHICKEN JOHN RINALDI


Let us be perfectly clear: none of the people we are endorsing has any real chance of getting elected mayor of San Francisco. Gavin Newsom is going to win a second term; we know that, he knows that, and whatever they may say on the campaign trail, all of the candidates running against him know that.

It’s a sad state of affairs: San Francisco has been, at best, wallowing helplessly in problems under Newsom, and in many cases things have gotten worse. The murder rate is soaring; young people, particularly African Americans, are getting shot down on the streets in alarming numbers. The mayor has opposed almost every credible effort to do something about it — he fought against putting cops on foot patrol in the most violent areas, he opposed the creation of a violence-prevention fund and blocked implementation of a community policing plan, and he’s allowed the thugs in the Police Officers Association to set policy for a police department that desperately lacks leadership. The public transportation system is in meltdown. The housing crisis is out of control; 90 percent of the people who work in San Francisco can’t afford to buy a house here, and many of them can’t afford to rent either. Meanwhile, the city is allowing developers and speculators to build thousands of new luxury condos, which are turning San Francisco into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Newsom only recently seems to have noticed that public housing is in shambles and that the commission he appoints to oversee it has been ignoring the problem.

The mayor is moving aggressively to privatize public services (including turning over the city’s broadband infrastructure to private companies), and he’s done little to promote public power. He’s cracking down on the homeless without offering adequate alternatives to long-term housing. Much of the time, he seems disconnected, out of touch with the city; he won’t show up and take questions from the Board of Supervisors and won’t even comply with the Sunshine Ordinance and release his daily calendar so the voters can see what he’s doing all day. He rarely appears in public, unless his handlers have complete control of the situation.

In fact, almost all of the significant policy discussions and initiatives that are happening in San Francisco today (including the universal health plan that Newsom likes to take credit for) have come from the Board of Supervisors.

There are good things to say about Newsom. We were among the huge number of San Franciscans who applauded when Newsom directed the city to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He did more than make a political statement, more than allow hundreds of couples to get married; he put one of the leading civil rights issues of our time on the center stage of the political agenda. And he made all of us proud to be San Franciscans. We were happy to see him stand up against the big international hotel chains and support striking hotel workers. In some ways, he’s brought modern management to the city — the 311 system, which connects callers directly to the proper city services, actually works, and sometimes works well.

But San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities, and it’s in serious trouble, and the person in charge isn’t offering much in the way of leadership — and he certainly isn’t offering the sort of progressive agenda that this city ought to be showing the nation. Newsom doesn’t deserve another term.

And yet the progressives in the city, who have come so very far since the return of district elections in 2000, were unable to field an electable candidate. We could spend pages dissecting why that happened. Matt Gonzalez should have made a decision much earlier in the process. Ross Mirkarimi should have run. The entire movement needs to be better about developing and promoting candidates for citywide office. But right now the issue on the table is this: who should the progressives, the independents, the neighborhood activists, the tenants, the people who have been dispossessed during the Newsom years, who don’t like the prospect of this mayor waltzing into another term atop a landslide majority, vote for Nov. 6?

We aren’t in the habit of endorsing for a big-league elective office people who haven’t put in their time in the minors. And Newsom’s challengers are not exactly a varsity squad. But many of them are raising important issues that Newsom has ignored, and we commend them all for taking on the difficult task of mounting a campaign against a mayor who most observers say is unbeatable. Our endorsements are, to be honest, protest votes — but we hope they’ll send a message to Newsom that there are issues, communities, and ideas he can’t just ignore after his coronation. The smaller the mayor’s margin of victory and the more votes the candidates who are pushing the progressive agenda collect, the less of a mandate Newsom will take into a second term that could be a truly frightening time.

Quintin Mecke has the strongest progressive credentials and by far the best overall approach to issues facing the city. He’s never held elective office (and had never run before), but he’s been involved in local politics for a decade. A volunteer with Tom Ammiano’s campaigns for supervisor and mayor and with Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign, Mecke went on to serve on the civil grand jury and the task force on redistricting, where he helped stave off attempts to chop up progressive supervisorial districts. He helped organize the South of Market Anti-Displacement Committee and now runs the Safety Network Partnership, a nonprofit that works to fight crime and violence in the city’s neighborhoods. He’s on the committee that monitors the city’s homeless shelters.

Mecke told the Guardian that "it’s hard to find an innovative, non-PR-type initiative out of the Mayor’s Office." He supports community policing, a progressive gross-receipts tax that would exempt small businesses, and a moratorium on market-rate housing until the city can determine how it will build enough affordable units. He complains that there’s no standard of care in Newsom’s homeless shelters. He opposes the privatization of public programs and resources.

Mecke tends a bit to bureaucratspeak; he talked about "horizontal conversations" instead of taking some issues head-on. And we’re concerned that he didn’t seem serious or organized enough to raise the modest amount of money it would have taken to qualify for public financing and mount a more visible campaign. But he’s a solid candidate, and we’re happy to give him the nod.

Ahimsa Porter Sumchai is a remarkable success story, an African American woman who grew up in the housing projects and wound up graduating from UC San Francisco’s medical school. She’s running primarily on the issue of environmental justice for southeast San Francisco — and for years has been one of the loudest voices against the flawed Lennar Corp. redevelopment project at and the reuse plan for the contaminated Hunters Point Shipyard. Sumchai says the shipyard can never be cleaned up to a level that would be safe for housing, and she suggests that much of it should be used for parks and open space and possibly maritime and green-industry uses. She’s highly critical of the low levels of affordable housing in market-rate projects all over the city, arguing that the developers should be forced to provide as many as 25 percent of their units at below-market rates. Sumchai is a physician, and she talks like one; her scientific language and approach sometimes confuse people. She suggested that one of the main causes of the homicide rate in the city is mental illness. "You can medically address people who are violent," she told us, saying the first step is to properly diagnose and treat depression in men. "Just as we looked at AIDS as an epidemic," she said, "we should look at violence as an epidemic." Which is, at the very least, an interesting approach.

Sumchai has some innovative ideas, including a universal child-care program for the city, paid for with a "fat tax" on unhealthy food. She’s a strong supporter of public power and a longtime critic of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

She can be abrasive and temperamental, but she’s talking about critical issues that almost everyone else is ignoring. She deserves support.

Chicken John Rinaldi is the political surprise of the season, an artist and showman who has managed a traveling circus, run a bar in the Mission, put on unusual performances of every kind — and somehow managed to be the only person running for mayor who could qualify for tens of thousands of dollars in public funding. On one level Rinaldi’s campaign is a joke — he told us repeatedly he has no idea what he’s doing, and that if by some wild chance he were elected, he would hire people like Mecke and Sumchai to run the city. He’s the Dada candidate, with his entire run something of a performance art piece.

But Rinaldi has a real constituency. He represents a dying breed in the city: the street artists, the writers, the poets, the unconventional thinkers with economically marginal lifestyles, who were once the heart and soul of San Francisco. It’s hard to pin him down on issues since he seems to disdain any policy talk, but in the end, the very fact that he’s running speaks to the pressure on artists and the lack of support the unconventional side of the art world gets in this increasingly expensive city.

Rinaldi is the protest candidate of all protest candidates, but he’s going to get a lot of votes from people who think San Francisco needs to stop driving some of its most valuable residents out of town — and if that leads to a more serious discussion about artist housing, affordable housing in general, arts funding, and the overall crackdown on fun under Newsom, then it’s worth giving Chicken John a place on the ticket.

There are several other candidates worthy of consideration. Josh Wolf, a video blogger, served 226 days in a federal prison rather than turn over to the authorities tape of a demonstration he was filming. It was a bold and courageous show of principle (anyone who’s ever done time knows that spending even a week, much less month after month, behind bars is no joke), and it speaks to his leadership and character. Wolf is talking about some key issues too: he’s a big supporter of municipal broadband and sees the Web as a place to promote more direct democracy in San Francisco.

Lonnie Holmes, a probation officer, has roots in the African American community and some credible ideas about violent crime. He favors extensive, direct intervention in at-risk communities and would fully fund recreation centers, after-school programs, and antiviolence education in elementary schools. He thinks a network of community resource centers in key neighborhoods could cut the crime rate in half. He’s a little conservative for our taste, but we like his energy, commitment, and ideas.

Harold Hoogasian, a third-generation florist, registered Republican, and small-business activist, is a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative and law-and-order guy who complains that the city budget has skyrocketed while services don’t seem to have improved. Yet somewhat to our surprise, he told us he supports the idea of a moratorium on market-rate housing and a ballot measure that would force developers to build housing more in tune with San Francisco’s real needs (even if he wants to start with ownership housing for cops). He supports public power, wants more sunshine in government, and opposes privatization. He also brings a much-needed critique of the remaining vestiges of machine politics in this one-party town and speaks passionately about the need for outsiders and political independents to have a seat at the table. We’re glad to have him in the race.

In the end, though, our picks in this first ranked-choice vote for San Francisco mayor are Mecke, Sumchai, and Rinaldi — on the issues, as a political statement, and to remind Newsom that his poll numbers don’t reflect the deep sense of distrust and discontent that remains in this city.

District attorney

KAMALA HARRIS


We’re always nervous about unopposed incumbents. And since Kamala Harris unseated Terence Hallinan four years ago, running as an ally of then-mayor Willie Brown with the backing of a corrupt old machine, we’ve been nervous about her.

In some ways she’s been a pleasant surprise. Harris quickly showed that she has courage and integrity when she refused to seek the death penalty for a cop killer despite the fact that the police rank and file and much of the brass excoriated her for it. She remains one of the few district attorneys in the nation who oppose the death penalty in all situations. She’s created a public integrity unit and aggressively filed charges against Sup. Ed Jew. She’s made clear to the Police Department that she won’t accept sloppy police work. She talks constantly about making crime and criminal justice a progressive issue.

But there are plenty of areas in which we remain nervous. Harris hasn’t been anywhere near as aggressive as she could be in prosecuting political corruption. She doesn’t pursue ethics violations or Sunshine Ordinance violations. The San Francisco DA’s Office could be a national leader in rooting out and prosecuting environmental and political crime, but it isn’t.

Meanwhile, the murder rate continues to rise in San Francisco, and Harris and the police are pointing fingers back and forth without actually finding a workable solution.

And lately, Harris, to her tremendous discredit, has been stepping up the prosecution of so-called quality-of-life crimes — which translates into harassing the homeless. She’s made sure there’s a full-time prosecutor in traffic court, pressing charges for things like public urination, sleeping in the park, and holding an open container of beer. That’s a colossal waste of law enforcement resources.

We expect a lot more from Harris in the next four years. But we’ll back her for another term.

Sheriff

MIKE HENNESSEY


Mike Hennessey has been sheriff for so long that it’s hard to imagine anyone else holding the job. And that’s not a bad thing: Hennessey is one of the most progressive law enforcement officers in the country. He’s turned the county jail into a center for drug rehabilitation, counseling, and education (the first charter high school in America for county prisoners is in the SF jail). He’s hired a remarkably diverse group of deputies and has worked to find alternatives to incarceration. He’s openly critical of the rate at which the San Francisco police are arresting people for small-time drug offenses ("We’re arresting too many people for drugs in the city," he told us). He took a courageous stand last year in opposing a draconian and ineffective state ballot initiative that would have kicked convicted sex offenders out of San Francisco and forced them to live in rural counties without access to support, services, or monitoring.

We’ve had some issues with Hennessey. We wanted a smaller new jail than he ultimately decided to build. And we really wish he’d be more outspoken on local law enforcement issues. Hennessey told us he wants to stick to his own turf, but if he were more visible on police reform, criminal justice, and law enforcement, the city would benefit immensely.

Hennessey’s only opponent is David Wong, a deputy sheriff who was unable to make a case for replacing the incumbent. We’re happy to endorse Hennessey for another term — but since this might be his last before retirement, we urge him to take his progressive views and push them onto a larger stage.

Endorsements: Local offices

-
0

We’re having some trouble with our Web site — until it’s fixed, here’s our complete local offices endorsements for the Nov. 6 elections. For more endorsements, please visit our 2007 Guardian Election Center, or for quick refence see our Clean Slate printout guide.

Mayor

1. QUINTIN MECKE


2. AHIMSA PORTER SUMCHAI


3. CHICKEN JOHN RINALDI


Let us be perfectly clear: none of the people we are endorsing has any real chance of getting elected mayor of San Francisco. Gavin Newsom is going to win a second term; we know that, he knows that, and whatever they may say on the campaign trail, all of the candidates running against him know that.

It’s a sad state of affairs: San Francisco has been, at best, wallowing helplessly in problems under Newsom, and in many cases things have gotten worse. The murder rate is soaring; young people, particularly African Americans, are getting shot down on the streets in alarming numbers. The mayor has opposed almost every credible effort to do something about it — he fought against putting cops on foot patrol in the most violent areas, he opposed the creation of a violence-prevention fund and blocked implementation of a community policing plan, and he’s allowed the thugs in the Police Officers Association to set policy for a police department that desperately lacks leadership. The public transportation system is in meltdown. The housing crisis is out of control; 90 percent of the people who work in San Francisco can’t afford to buy a house here, and many of them can’t afford to rent either. Meanwhile, the city is allowing developers and speculators to build thousands of new luxury condos, which are turning San Francisco into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Newsom only recently seems to have noticed that public housing is in shambles and that the commission he appoints to oversee it has been ignoring the problem.

Money and politics

-
0

› sarah@sfbg.com

The upcoming election hasn’t generated much voter interest, with only a couple of measures that seem likely to have an impact. But corporate interests in San Francisco and beyond are still spending big money — in ways that are secretive, suspicious, and sometimes contradictory — to influence the election and win the gratitude of elected officials.

Although the final preelection campaign statements were due Oct. 25, the money continues to roll in. And perhaps most ominously, many campaign committees are spending far more than they are taking in, effectively using this accrued debt to hide contributors until after the election.

And almost invariably, the person at the center of such schemes — who facilitates the most creative and unsettling spending by downtown political interests — is notorious campaign finance attorney Jim Sutton, who also serves as Mayor Gavin Newsom’s treasurer (and didn’t return our calls for comment by press time).

Political donations are supposed to be transparent and reflect popular support for some campaign. But once again, this election is showing the disproportionate influence that corporations have on local politics and the difficulties faced in trying to accurately trace that influence.

There are "No on K" billboards all over San Francisco, showing a giant image of a man’s empty pocket alongside the dubious claim that "Proposition K will cut $20 million from Muni." The signs were created and funded by Clear Channel Outdoor.

Prop. K is an advisory measure that the Board of Supervisors placed on the ballot this fall to ask whether voters want to restrict advertising on public spaces like bus stops. But it was aimed at Clear Channel Outdoor’s contract to maintain 1,100 city bus shelters and sell advertising on them, which was approved by the Board of Supervisors on Oct. 23. In exchange, the CCO agreed to pay the Metropolitan Transportation Authority $5 million annually, plus 45 percent of its annual revenues from shelter ad revenues.

Nonetheless, the measure would put city voters on record as opposing the CCO’s basic business model, so the company fought back. The "No on K — Citizens to Protect Muni Services" filing suggests that there is no citizen involvement in the No on K campaign. So far, No on K has only received donations from Clear Channel Outdoor, including $120,000 in cash and $55,750 in in-kind contributions of radio time and ad space.

Maybe Clear Channel really is trying to help Muni get more money, rather than pad its own profits. After all, its parent corporation, Clear Channel International, donated $20,000 to support Muni reform measure Proposition A — authored by Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin — on Oct. 15, just days before Clear Channel Outdoor won its big bus transit deal with the city.

Yet following the corporate money even further makes it clear that altruism isn’t what motivates corporate spending. No on K also benefited from independent expenditures by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce 21st Century Committee, a general-purpose committee created in 1999, which received major funding this year from the Gap ($10,000), Pacific Gas and Electric Co. ($7,500), Bechtel ($5,000), Catholic Healthcare West ($5,000), and Clear Channel Outdoor ($1,000).

The 21st Century Committee also spent $716 for newspaper ads opposing Prop. A, which would net the MTA at least $26 million per year from the city’s General Fund. Sutton — a former chair of the California Republican Party — and his associates effectively control the 21st Century Committee, which is also helping Newsom, his top client, avoid facing the Board of Supervisors in public. The committee has made independent expenditures opposing Proposition E, a charter amendment that would require the mayor to make monthly appearances before the board, something voters approved last year as an advisory measure. According to Newsom spokesperson Nathan Ballard, defeating that measure is the mayor’s top priority this election.

"I think he’s focused on his own race and also Question Time. There’s where he’s spending his resources," Ballard said when asked why Newsom isn’t campaigning or fundraising for the Yes on A and No on H campaigns, even though he supports those positions.

The 21st Century Committee has also made independent expenditures in support of Proposition C (which would require public hearings for measures that the board or the mayor places on the ballot), Proposition H (see "Transit or Traffic," page 18), Proposition I (which would establish an Office of Small Business), and Proposition J (Newsom’s wireless Internet advisory measure).

Each of these ballot measures has a committee dedicated to raising funds, but as of Oct. 25, only the Small Business Campaign (Yes on C) appeared to have no outstanding debts, or accrued funds, as they are called in campaign finance circles. Maybe that’s because the Small Business Campaign got $10,000 from the 21st Century Committee, $5,000 from PG&E, $2,500 from AT&T, $8,500 from the SF Small Business Advocates, and $1,000 from the Building Owners and Manufacturers Association of San Francisco’s political action committee.

Yes on C also got a $7,500 contribution from the Committee on Jobs Government Reform Fund, which has ties to Clear Channel, the MTA, and efforts to influence local transportation policy. Records show that on Nov. 4, 2005 — just before the election — the Committee on Jobs Government Reform Fund reported a $6,900 "loan" for radio airtime and production costs from Clear Channel to help defeat a measure that would have split the MTA appointments between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors.

Fast-forward to Oct. 3 of this year, when the Committee on Jobs, which reported its "loan" as accrued funds for almost two years, reported that this debt has now been forgiven. Which is odd, given that, as of Oct. 25, the Committee on Jobs had a cash balance of $778,000 — and had just received $35,000 from financier and Committee on Jobs board member Warren Hellman, $35,000 from AT&T, and $50,000 from the Charles Schwab Corp.

Equally interesting is the fact that the day after the Oct. 25 preelection filing deadline, the Committee on Jobs gave $25,000 to the Sutton-controlled No on E: Let’s Really Work Together Coalition. Such large late contributions require a notice to Ethics that can often escape notice by the media and voters.

The donation perhaps went to help balance the committee’s books; despite receiving $85,084 in monetary contributions, including $10,000 from attorney Joe Cotchett and society maven Dede Wilsey, No on E spent $110,244 before Oct. 25, leaving it with $26,610 in accrued debt.

No on E isn’t the only Sutton-controlled committee whose spending has outpaced donations received: as of Oct. 25 the Yes on H–No on A pro-parking committee and Newsom’s WiFi for All, Yes on J committee, not to mention the Gavin Newsom for Mayor campaign, were all registering large amounts of accrued debt.

Having these debts isn’t illegal. And it’s not unusual for a campaign to have a pile of unpaid bills at the time of its last preelection finance filing. But as Ethics Commission director John St. Croix told the Guardian, accrued funds "shouldn’t be used to hide who your contributors are. The idea of disclosure is to let voters know ahead of elections who is trying to influence their vote."

St. Croix points to the fact that committees are required to make reports every 24 hours in the 16 days before an election "so you know what they are spending on…. But if committees don’t report campaign contributions and people fundraise after the election, that could be a de facto way to hide who the contributors are."

And while Sutton has been characterized by many, including the Guardian (see "The Political Puppeteer," 2/2/04), as the dark prince of campaign finance, St. Croix says he doesn’t automatically suspect something is wrong just because a campaign has a lot of accrued debt.

"But if people suspect that to be the case and they file a complaint, Ethics investigates," St. Croix said, adding that for him, "really massive accrued funds would be a red flag."

Asked what he meant by massive, St. Croix said, "It depends on the office. You might expect a lot more to accrue in a mayor’s race or large campaigns that tend to do a lot of last-minute spending."

As of Oct. 25, Gavin Newsom for Mayor had received $1.1 million and spent $1.3 million, had a cash balance of $457,994 — and was reporting $97,548 in accrued debt, with $46,500 owed to Storefront Political Media, the company run by Newsom’s campaign manager, Eric Jaye.

Noting that Ethics’ job is "to get people to file on time and chase after those who don’t," St. Croix said that those who don’t file and are making major expenditures right before an election are the ones who will face the biggest fines. "They could face $5,000 per violation, which could be $5,000 for every contribution that was made to finance a smear campaign and wasn’t reported," he said.

The biggest fine the Ethics Commission has ever issued was $100,000 for Sutton’s failure to report until after the 2002 election a late $800,000 contribution from PG&E to help defeat a public power measure.

Compared to other years, the amounts of accrued debt in this election may look small, but former Ethics commissioner Joe Lynn points to a disturbing pattern in which Sutton-controlled committees were insolvent before the election, then raised funds later or, as in the case of the Committee on Jobs, magically saw their debts forgiven.

"If I am a candidate running for mayor, like Gavin Newsom, and I personally rake up $100,000 in debt and have a big financial statement, then that means there’s a creditor willing to advance me those funds," Lynn said. "But if the debt has been raked up by a ballot measure committee, then who is responsible? Why would vendors spend $10,000 for that committee unless they knew that debt was wired from the get-go?"

But the result is the same: voters don’t know who donated to the campaign until after the votes have been cast. A clear historical example of this debt scheme can be seen in the June 2006 No on D Laguna Honda campaign. In its last preelection report, No on D had $59,750 in contributions, $18,664 in expenditures — and $130,224 in debt.

But during the 16 days before the election, No on D suddenly got $110,000 in late contributions from the usual suspects downtown, including $2,500 from Hellman, $15,000 from Turner Construction, $10,000 from Wilsey, $2,000 from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and $2,500 from the Building Owners and Manufacturers Association of San Francisco.

As Lynn explains, campaign finance laws only require disclosure of contributions, not expenditures, made in the 16 days before an election — and only $64,000 worth of the contributions used to pay off No on D’s accrued expenses were disclosed, with $10,000 each from the California Pacific Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente trickling in on or after Election Day.

This year campaign finance watchdogs like Lynn note that the Sutton-controlled Yes on H–No on A committee has been hiding its contributors. In its first preelection report, filed Sept. 22, Yes on H showed $113,750 in contributions, $111,376.18 in expenditures, and $69,806.98 in accrued debt.

A month later it has doubled its contributions, tripled its expenditures — and had increased its accrued debt to $77,509. Lynn predicts that Yes on H’s accrued debt will be paid down by late contributions after the election or forgiven later on.

"The solution to the debt scheme is twofold," Lynn said. "Prosecute people doing the scheme and pass a law prohibiting campaigns from making more expenditures than they have contributions. Technically there is nothing illegal about reporting more debt that you have the cash or contributions to pay, but no businessperson regularly offers services in situations where it isn’t clear that they will be paid."

Since the Oct. 25 filing deadline, late contributions have continued to pour into No on E big-time, for a total of $59,500. That includes $25,000 from the Committee on Jobs, $2,500 from Jonathan Holzman, $6,000 from Elaine Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis, $1,000 from Chris Giouzelis, $1,000 from Nick Kontos, $1,000 from Farrah Makras, $1,000 from Victor Makras, $1,000 from Makras Real Estate, $5,000 from John Pakrais, $1,000 from Mike Silva, $1,000 from Western Apartments, $5,000 from Maurice Kanbar, and $5,000 from the San Francisco Apartment Association PAC.

The Yes on A committee hasn’t used the accrued debt scheme, but it has been the second-largest recipient of late contributions. It received $57,000 in late contributions, with donations from Engeo ($1,000), Singer Associates ($2,500), Trinity Management Services ($10,000), Elysian Hotels and Resorts ($5,000), Luxor Cabs ($1,000), Marriott International ($15,000), the SF Police Officers Association ($2,000), Sprinkler Fitters and Apprentices ($1,500), Barbary Coast Consulting ($2,500), and SEIU International ($3,397.14).

No on H (Neighbors Against Traffic and Pollution) received $4,500 in late contributions, with donations from Norcal Carpenters, Alice and William Russell-Shapiro, and Amandeep Jawa. And in what looks like a classic case of hedging bets, Singer Associates has made a $2,500 late contribution to both Yes on H and No on H.

Steven Mele, who is treasurer for Yes on A and No on H, told the Guardian, "There’s some people that time their contributions, but their names are out there, reported on public sites. A lot of corporate money comes in prior to the last deadline, then some afterwards. If campaigns are running with a lot of accrued debt, then those people must have an idea of what money is going to come in."

Unlike the campaigns controlled by the Sutton Law Firm, Mele’s committees, which work with Stearns Consulting, are not carrying massive loads of unpaid debt. Yes on A had received $302,452 and spent $279,890 and had $17,749 in debt as of Oct. 25. No on H had received $134,458 and spent $124,088 and had no debt as of Oct. 25.
Mele also believes that while campaign finance rules were written to make the money trail more transparent, "They’ve resulted in the public being inundated with so much information that they tend to glaze over."

Campaign sewer overflows

-
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

The flow of election cash is often a filthy river that you wouldn’t want to drink from, and a recent local lawsuit, coupled with a new bit of state legislation, has muddied the waters even more.

On Sept. 20, US District Court Judge Jeffery S. White granted a preliminary injunction preventing the city from enforcing key sections of its Campaign Finance Reform Ordinance.

Two local groups with a sordid history of influencing elections with large chunks of cash — the Building Owners and Managers Association and the Committee on Jobs — argued in court that campaign contribution limits violate the First Amendment by financially curbing the ability to communicate a message (see "Pressing the Scales," 8/22/07). The contribution limits of independent-expenditure committees stumping for candidates were set by the voter-passed Proposition O in 2000 after the 1999 reelection of Mayor Willie Brown, in which deep-pocketed business interests backed the mayor in exchange for preferential treatment by city hall.

Prop. O capped contributions to IEs at $500, and people and corporations are allowed to give no more than $3,000 total (e.g., $500 each to six committees).

Those caps are no longer enforceable.

Similar injunctions have been granted in San Jose and Oakland, also destroying local contribution caps in those cities. San Jose appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and is waiting for a ruling. Ann O’Leary, a lawyer in City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office, told us San Francisco is waiting to see what happens in San Jose before making the next move, though an appeal is planned regardless of that outcome. In the past the Supreme Court has ruled that the appearance of corruption in elections is sufficient grounds for restricting campaign contributions, and San Francisco’s history provides ample examples from which to draw to support that decision.

"We don’t know if it will get back to court before November 2008," O’Leary said of the case, "but it’s certainly something to watch in that election."

Meanwhile, over in Sacramento, legislators on cruise control recently passed a bill that may make it impossible for San Francisco to write its election laws anyway. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger just signed Assembly Bill 1430, and according to the legislative digest, the new law "prohibits local governments from adopting campaign finance ordinances that restrict communications between an organization and its members unless state law similarly restricts such communications, or by regulation by the Fair Political Practices Commission."

Proponents say the new law will resolve conflicting interpretations of campaign finance regulations, but opponents say it preserves wide-open loopholes in the Political Reform Act that local jurisdictions have tried to close. For example, a person may be prohibited by the city from giving more than $500 to support a certain candidate. That person can, however, give as much as $30,200 to the Democratic Party, which can then "communicate" a message of support for that candidate to its members.

A recent and egregious example: in San Diego the county Republican Party spent almost $1 million on local races in 2006.

The bill was authored by Carlsbad Republican Martin Garrick and flew through the State Assembly unopposed. Assemblymember Mark Leno told us it came to the Elections Committee, on which he sits, with no vocal opposition, so he gave it an aye. One of his aides, however, became concerned and started making calls. Eventually, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters rallied against it, but it only hit a speed bump in the State Senate. There was still too much support from the Democrats to kill it. Leno said, "It’s an uncommon situation to have the left and right supporting something that in fact runs counter to local election laws."

Only nine senators opposed the bill, including Carole Migden and Leland Yee. "She thought it was an end around campaign finance laws," Migden aide Eric Potashner told us.

San Francisco’s Ethics Commission also took a look at the bill and gave it a 5–0 thumbs-down, resolving to send a letter to both the mayor and the Board of Supervisors urging them to speak against it. Neither did. "The Mayor supports AB1430," his press secretary, Nathan Ballard, told us by e-mail. "He has some concerns about the local control issue, but ultimately those concerns are overridden by his belief that groups like labor unions and the Democratic Party should be allowed to communicate directly with their members."

The governor’s signature now makes it more difficult to pass future measures like Prop O.

Neither the injunction nor the new law seems to be affecting the Nov. 6 election — the FPPC won’t be ruling on AB 1430 until January, though the commission is holding a hearing for interested people to speak in Sacramento on Nov. 2.

Though BOMA and the Committee on Jobs stated in their filing for the injunction that the law harms their ability to raise and spend money for candidates in this November’s election, nothing on record with the Ethics Commission shows they’ve been putting up a lot of money for Newsom, Kamala Harris, or Michael Hennessey. But there’s always next year.

1...313233...37Page 32 of 37

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org