Employment

Endorsements 2012: State and national races

Andrew Lam
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National races

PRESIDENT

BARACK OBAMA

You couldn’t drive down Valencia Street on the evening of Nov. 4, 2008. You couldn’t get through the intersection of 18th and Castro, either. All over the east side of the city, people celebrating the election of Barack Obama and the end of the Bush era launched improptu parties, dancing and singing in the streets, while the cops stood by, smiling. It was the only presidential election in modern history that create such an upwelling of joy on the American left — and while we were a bit more jaded and cautious about celebrating, it was hard not to feel a sense of hope.

That all started to change about a month after the inauguration, when word got out that the big insurance companies were invited to be at the table, discussing health-care reform — and the progressive consumer advocates were not. From that point on, it was clear that the “change” he promised wasn’t going to be a fundamental shift in how power works in Washington.

Obama didn’t even consider a single-payer option. He hasn’t shut down Guantanamo Bay. He hasn’t cut the Pentagon budget. He hasn’t pulled the US out of the unwinnable mess in Afghanistan. He’s been a huge disappointment on progressive tax and economic issues. It wasn’t until late this summer, when he realized he was facing a major enthusiasm gap, that he even agreed to endorse same-sex marriage.

But it’s easy to trash an incumbent president, particularly one who foolishly thought he could get bipartisan support for reforms and instead wound up with a hostile Republican Congress. The truth is, Obama has accomplished a fair amount, given the obstacles he faced. He got a health-care reform bill, weak and imperfect as it was, passed into law, something Democrats have tried and failed at since the era of FDR. The stimulus, weak and limited as it was, clearly prevented the recession from becoming another great depression. His two Supreme Court appointments have been excellent.

And the guy he’s running against is a disaster on the scale of G.W. Bush.

Mitt Romney can’t even tell the truth about himself. He’s proven to be such a creature of the far-right wing of the Republican Party that it’s an embarrassment. A moderate Republican former governor of Massachusetts could have made a credible run for the White House — but Romney has essentially disavowed everything decent that he did in his last elective office, has said one dumb thing after another, and would be on track to be one of the worse presidents in history.

We get it: Obama let us down. But there’s a real choice here, and it’s an easy one. We’ll happily give a shout out to Jill Stein, the candidate of the Green Party, who is talking the way the Democrats ought to be talking, about a Green New Deal that recognizes that the richest nation in the history of the world can and should be doing radically better on employment, health care, the environment, and economic justice. And since Obama’s going to win California by a sizable majority anyway, a protest vote for Stein probably won’t do any harm.

But the next four years will be a critical time for the nation, and Obama is at least pushing in the direction of reality, sanity and hope. We endorsed him with enthusiasm four year ago; we’re endorsing him with clear-eyed reality in 2012.

UNITED STATES SENATE

DIANNE FEINSTEIN

Ugh. Not a pleasant choice here. Elizabeth Emken is pretty much your standard right-wing-nut Republican out of Danville, a fan of reducing government, cutting regulations, and repealing Obamacare. Feinstein, who’s already served four terms, is a conservative Democrat who loves developers, big business, and the death penalty, is hawkish on defense, and has used her clout locally to push for all the wrong candidates and all the wrong things. She can’t even keep her word: After Willie Brown complained that London Breed was saying mean things about him, Feinstein pulled her endorsement of Breed for District 5 supervisor.

It’s astonishing that, in a year when the state Democratic Party is aligned behind Proposition 34, which would replace the death penalty with life without parole, Feinstein can’t find it in herself to back away from her decades-long support of capital punishment. She’s not much better on medical marijuana. And she famously complained when then-mayor Gavin Newsom pushed same-sex marriage to the forefront, saying America wasn’t ready to give LGBT couples the same rights as straight people.

But as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Feinstein was pretty good about investigating CIA torture and continues to call for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. She’s always been rock solid on abortion rights and at least decent, if not strong, on environmental issues.

It’s important for the Democrats to retain the Senate, and Feinstein might as well be unopposed. She turns 80 next year, so it’s likely this will be her last term.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, DISTRICT 8

NANCY PELOSI

The real question on the minds of everyone in local politics is what will happen if the Democrats don’t retake the House and Pelosi has to face two more years in the minority. Will she serve out her term? Will her Democratic colleagues decide they want new leadership? The inside scuttle is that Pelosi has no intention of stepping down, but a long list of local politicians is looking at the once-in-a-lifetime chance to run for a Congressional seat, and it’s going to happen relatively soon; Pelosi is 72.

We’ve never been happy with Rep. Pelosi, who used the money and clout of the old Burton machine to come out of nowhere to beat progressive gay supervisor Harry Britt for the seat in 1986. Her signature local achievement is the bill that created the first privatized national park in the nation’s history (the Presidio), which now is home to a giant office complex built by filmmaker George Lucas with the benefit of a $60 million tax break. She long ago stopped representing San Francisco, making her move toward Congressional leadership by moving firmly to the center.

But as speaker of the House, she was a strong ally for President Obama and helped move the health-care bill forward. It’s critical to the success of the Obama administration that the Democrats retake the house and Pelosi resumes the role of speaker.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, DISTRICT 9

BARBARA LEE

Barbara Lee represents Berkeley and Oakland in a way Nancy Pelosi doesn’t represent San Francisco. She’s been a strong, sometimes lonely voice against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a leader in the House Progressive Caucus. While Democrats up to and including the president talk about tax cuts for businesses, Lee has been pushing a fair minimum wage, higher taxes on the wealthy, and an end to subsidies for the oil industry. While Oakland Mayor Jean Quan was struggling with Occupy, and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee was moving to evict the protesters, Barbara Lee was strongly voicing her support for the movement, standing with the activists, and talking about wealth inequality. We’re proud to endorse her for another term.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, DISTRICT 12

JACKIE SPEIER

Speier’s an improvement on her predecessor, Tom Lantos, who was a hawk and terrible on Middle East policy. Speier’s a moderate, as you’d expect in this Peninsula seat, but she’s taken the lead on consumer privacy issues (as she did in the state Legislature) and will get re-elected easily. She’s an effective member of a Bay Area delegation that helps keep the House sane, so we’ll endorse her for another term.

State candidates

ASSEMBLY DISTRICT 13

TOM AMMIANO

Tom Ammiano’s the perfect person to represent San Francisco values in Sacramento. He helped sparked and define this city’s progressive movement back in the 1970s as a gay teacher marching alongside with Harvey Milk. In 1999, his unprecedented write-in mayoral campaign woke progressives up from some bad years and ushered in a decade with a progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors that approved landmark legislation such as the universal healthcare program Ammiano created. In the Assembly, he worked to create a regulatory system for medical marijuana and chairs the powerful Public Safety Committee, where he has stopped the flow of mindless tough-on-crime measures that have overflowed our prisons and overburdened our budgets. This is Ammiano’s final term in the Legislature, but we hope it’s not the end of his role in local politics.

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 19

PHIL TING

Phil Ting could be assessor of San Francisco, with a nice salary, for the rest of his life if that’s what he wanted to do. He’s done a good job in an office typically populated with make-no-waves political hacks — he went after the Catholic Church when that large institution tried to avoid paying taxes on property transfers. He’s been outspoken on foreclosures and commissioned, on his own initiative, a study showing that a large percentage of local foreclosures involved at least some degree of fraud or improper paperwork.

But Ting is prepared to take a big cut in pay and accept a term-limited future for the challenge of moving into a higher-profile political position. And he’s the right person to represent this westside district.

Ting’s not a radical leftist, but he is willing to talk about tax reform, particularly about the inequities of Prop. 13. He’s carrying the message to homeowners that they’re shouldering a larger part of the burden while commercial properties pay less. He wants to change some of the loopholes in how Prop. 13 is interpreted to help local government collect more money.

It would be nice to have a progressive-minded tax expert in the Legislature, and we’re glad Ting is the front-runner. He’s facing a serious, well-funded onslaught from Michael Breyer, the son of Supreme Court Justice Breyer, who has no political experience or credentials for office and is running a right-wing campaign emphasizing “old-style San Francisco values.”

Not pretty. Vote for Ting.

SENATE DISTRICT 11

MARK LENO

Mark Leno wasn’t always in the Guardian’s camp, and we don’t always agree with his election season endorsements, but he’s been a rock-solid representative in Sacramento and he has earned our respect and our endorsement.

It isn’t just how he votes, which we consistently agree with. Leno has been willing to take on the tough fights, the ones that need to be fought, and shown the tenacity to come out on top in the Legislature, even if he’s ahead of his time. Leno twice got the Legislature to legalize same-sex marriage, he has repeatedly gotten that body to legalize industrial hemp production, and he’s twice passed legislation that would give San Francisco voters the right to set a local vehicle license fees higher than the state’s and use that money for local programs (which the governor finally signed). He’s also been laying an important foundation for creating a single-payer healthcare system and he played an important role in the CleanPowerSF program that San Francisco will implement next year. Leno will easily be re-elected to another term in the Senate and we look forward to his next move (Leno for mayor, 2015?)

 

BART BOARD DISTRICT 9

 

TOM RADULOVICH

San Francisco has been well represented on the BART Board by Radulovich, a smart and forward-thinking urbanist who understands the important role transit plays in the Bay Area. Radulovich has played leadership roles in developing a plan that aims to double the percentage of cyclists using the system, improving the accessibility of many stations to those with limited mobility, pushing through an admittedly imperfect civilian oversight agency for the BART Police, hiring a new head administrator who is more responsive to community concerns, and maintaining the efficiency of an aging system with the highest ridership levels in its history. With a day job serving as executive director of the nonprofit Livable City, Radulovich helped create Sunday Streets and other initiatives that improve our public spaces and make San Francisco a more inviting place to be. And by continuing to provide a guiding vision for a BART system that continues to improve its connections to every corner of the Bay Area, his vision of urbanism is helping to permeate communities throughout the region

BART BOARD, DISTRICT 7

ZACHARY MALLETT

This sprawling district includes part of southeast San Francisco and extends all the way up the I-80 corridor to the Carquinez Bridge. The incumbent, San Franciscan Lynette Sweet, has been a major disappointment. She’s inaccessible, offers few new ideas, and was slow to recognize (much less deal with) the trigger-happy BART Police who until recently had no civilian oversight. Time for a change.

Three candidates are challenging Sweet, all of them from the East Bay (which makes a certain amount of sense — only 17 percent of the district’s population is in San Francisco). Our choice is Zachary Mallett, whose training in urban planning and understanding of the transit system makes up for his lack of political experience.

Mallett’s a graduate of Stanford and UC Berkelely (masters in urban planning with a transportation emphasis) who has taken the time to study what’s working and what isn’t working at BART. Some of his ideas sound a bit off at first — he wants, for example, to raise the cost of subsidized BART rides offered to Muni pass holders — but when you look a the numbers, and who is subsidizing who, it actually makes some sense. He talks intelligently about the roles that the various regional transit systems play and while he’s a bit more moderate than us, particularly on fiscal issues, he’s the best alternative to Sweet.

Dick Meister: Let’s count our blessings on Labor Day!

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

OK, it’s time to celebrate Labor Day, time to celebrate the labor movement that won a wide range of benefits for working people. That includes, of course, a paid day off on Labor Day and other holidays or extra pay for working on the holidays. But there’s much more than that. Much more.

We can also thank unions for:

* The eight-hour workday with meal and rest breaks.

* Forty-hour work weeks and three-day holiday weekends.

* Overtime pay and paid vacations, sick leave and maternity leave.

 * Major help in the enactment of anti-child labor law laws and increased public education funding.

* Medicare and retirement and disability benefits.

* Job security and other workers’ rights.

* A strong political voice for unions that helped enact Social Security, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, health and safety and minimum wage laws and has helped elect pro-worker office holders.

* Important help in the passage of key civil rights and civil liberties laws that have particularly helped political dissidents, women and minorities and military veterans.

Certainly not every worker enjoys all the union-backed benefits. But even the non-union workers who make up the vast majority of working people these days have many of the benefits. And, thanks to the efforts of unions, they have the opportunity to win all of the benefits.

You can be sure that on this Labor Day, as on all others, political candidates will have lots to say about unions.  You can expect, however, that not much will be heard from Republicans. Their usual ranting in behalf of their moneyed backers about the evils of “Big Labor” and “union bosses” will be muted, lest they offend potential blue-collar supporters. Democrats undoubtedly will voice their usual support for union members and workers generally, many sincerely, some simply in hopes of gaining blue-collar support.

Union opponents seem to forget that unions are democratic organizations, whose members generally have a strong voice in their unions’ activities.  Union officers are elected, after all, and so are answerable to their members.

Union positions on political candidates and issues, as well as financial contributions to candidates, are not dictated by union officers, despite what anti-union politicians assert. Union positions and union political spending are determined by the votes of union members, usually on the recommendations of their Committees on Political Education (COPE). Officers who don’t reflect their members’ position face replacement by membership vote.

Once, Labor Day meant big parades in cities nationwide. But no more. Although union numbers continue shrinking, unions are surely here to stay. They’ve fought their way into the Establishment. They still parade here and there, but no longer feel that parading is necessary to show their strength and importance.

Unions are much more likely to mark Labor Day with the political activity that has become as important to them as economic activity since their arrival into the ranks of the economically accepted.

Thus the Labor Day messages of union leaders will stress politics. That will largely include support for President Obama, despite union complaints that he has not worked hard enough to overcome congressional opposition to pro-labor reforms that he’s proposed or supported. From labor’s point-of-view, Obama is nevertheless very much preferable to Mitt Romney, just as most other Democrats are preferable to their Republican opponents.

Despite much opinion to the contrary, the union stress on politics, rather on winning broader public support for unionization, does not mean that all unions have reached a permanent, unshakeable position in society.

Nor does it mean that unions are not still fighting battles that are as almost as significant as those of the 1930s and 1940s that drew broad support from a public which sometimes frowns on unions, now that they have secured the strong position in society which the public helped them win.

Labor influence is not measured strictly by the number of union members, because of labor’s strong influence in politics and because the wages and conditions of unionized workers set the standard for all workers. Yet numbers are important, and unions generally have been struggling just to keep overall membership steady.

Currently, only about 12 percent of privately employed workers are unionized. But while their numbers have remained low, the figure for unionized public employees has grown to nearly 40 percent. That has put public employee unions in the vanguard of the labor movement, and given the movement new, badly needed strength, although also raising strong political opposition to public employee unions.

There are some fairly solid reasons for the decline in union membership overall, ironically including the unions’ loss of their position as underdogs, the widespread granting of union conditions to non-union workers and illegal employer interference in voting by workers on whether to unionize.

Perhaps the most important reason for the decline in union membership has been a fundamental change in the workforce. Once dominated by blue-collar production workers, it has come to be dominated by white-collar service workers. But organized labor sometimes has been slow to move into white-collar fields outside of public employment.

Labor Day should cause us to reflect on the great importance of the labor movement’s vital mission – its organizing of workers to win economic and political strength and helping elect pro-worker officeholders, its help in creating jobs and otherwise aiding the millions of Americans who remain unemployed or otherwise in economic distress.

So while you may not be able to see a parade on Labor Day, labor is still doing many other things well worth watching, and well worth supporting.

A footnote: Despite what the standard history books say, the first real Labor Day celebration was not held in New York City in 1882, but 14 years earlier right here in San Francisco. That was on February 21, 1868. Three thousand paraded the city’s streets by torchlight to mark enactment of the 8-hour-day law in California.

Happy Labor Day!

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Dick Meister: Green is good for us all

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Millions of American workers badly need jobs, and the owners of many thousands of commercial buildings badly need “green retrofitting” to improve their energy efficiency and thus cut operational costs while simultaneously helping clean up the environment.

The conclusion should be obvious: Let the retrofitting begin, for the benefit of everyone – those who need the work, the employers who want it done, and the rest of us , who would benefit greatly from it.

Details of what could and should be done – and why and by whom – are laid out in a new briefing paper from the well-regarded National Employment Law Project, otherwise known as NELP.

Perhaps what’s most important about green retrofitting is that it’s what NELP calls “a powerful job creation tool.”

It can indeed be that. As NELP reported, “Estimates show that a mix of tax credits, new building code requirements and loans for commercial energy efficiency upgrades would create upwards of 160,000 new jobs,” possibly hundreds of thousands more, over the next year.  That certainly would significantly lower the high unemployment rate that has plagued the country for far too long, encourage investment and otherwise jolt the lagging economy.

Construction workers have been hit particularly hard by unemployment, and it is they who have the skills and knowledge “that could be put to work cutting greenhouse gas omissions and making our cities cleaner and more efficient places to live,” notes Christine Owens, NELP’s executive director.

She says many construction workers, as well as other workers, also are needed to improve existing commercial buildings “in a common-sense way while also meeting the challenges of climate change.” NELP says more than three-fourths of all the electricity produced in the United States is used to operate the buildings, “making improved energy efficiency an increasingly recognized part of reducing the nation’s greenhouse gases.”

Simply providing jobs would not be enough.  NELP argues that government policy makers supporting green retrofitting and the jobs it creates should make certain they are “good jobs with strong workplace standards and fair pay and job security.” That’s an absolute necessity if jobs in the retrofit industry are to be truly sustainable. At a minimum, that would call for providing workers increased pay and better chances of being promoted to higher-paying jobs.

NELP cites three cities – Los Angeles, Seattle and Milwaukee – that have developed programs which have won the support of workers, environmentalists and commercial building owners, in large part by backing retrofitting projects that, while creating jobs, also help owners cut their costs and increase their income.

Los Angeles has adopted a city ordinance that calls for retrofits of city-owned buildings, a process for settling labor conflicts that arise during the work, and an effort to ensure that Los Angeles residents have access to training for retrofitting work.

In Seattle, the city has an agreement with retrofit contractors on setting pay and providing job training for their employees.

Milwaukee has a new energy-efficiency program that offers building owners the chance to qualify for financial aid in exchange for using contractors committed to hiring local workers and “adhering to quality workplace standards.”

It’s now time for other cities nationwide to take action. There’s no legitimate reason for inaction. We have a great need to modernize and expand our infrastructure, diminish environmental pollution and provide work for the jobless. We have shown it can be done.  So let’s do it!

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

 

The end of work as we know it

Zelda Bronstein
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The end of work as we know it

I read Player Piano in high school, when all of us were suburban kids were discovering Vonnegut. (We were also discovering Herman Hesse, for reasons I will never understand, and we talked about Slaughterhouse Five and The Glass Bead Game as if we were some sort of intellectuals. I read a couple of the Hesse books and found them dry and pointless. I loved Vonnegut, particularly God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.)

At any rate, even in the 1970s, Player Piano didn’t seem that far away, and it was one of the formative books of my crazy political consciouness of the time, and it got me thinking, years later, about unemployment. When I was first out in San Francisco, all of my friends were busy — and not many of them were working for pay at a traditional job. And I thought, as the nation went into a deep recession and everyone talked about creating jobs, that what people really needed was money, not jobs. For almost everyone I knew — people involved in politics and art and theater and writing and troublemaking — a job was just a way to pay the rent. And if we didn’t have to work to make ends meet, so much the better. We all had a lot to do, much of which would never earn us any money; get rid of the damn jobs and we could do it all a lot better.

Yes, as Vonnegut made very clear, people got, and get, a lot of their self-worth from what they do for a living, particularly if it’s skilled work. But maybe that’s not the way it always ought to be — particularly if the day when robots take over almost all manufacturing is rapidly approaching.

John Markoff of the New York Times has a mind-bending piece about robots taking over jobs that even a few years ago were too complicated to be done by machines:

 The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the Machine.” In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.

The “debate” can go on as long as you want, but the reality is that a lot of what we now call “work” will soon be done by machines — sooner than a lot of us think — and that will mean, if nothing else changes, a nightmarish society where the gap between the rich and poor is even worse and the middle class is in a free-fall collapse. Consider:

In one example, a robotic manufacturing system initially cost $250,000 and replaced two machine operators, each earning $50,000 a year. Over the 15-year life of the system, the machines yielded $3.5 million in labor and productivity savings.

So who gets that $3.5 million? Not to be all Marxist or anything, (heaven forbid), but right now, under modern industrial capitalism, none of it goes to the displaced workers. In theory, the robots could allow them to do something else with their lives — teach, or mentor kids, or paint, or learn to speak a couple new languages, or build a new house to retire in, or whatever. The robots don’t need to be paid, and that “productivity savings” could go directly to the wealth of society as a whole, making life better for all of us. But it won’t — the whole $3.5 million is kept by the factory owner, and the displaced worker gets nothing — except depression, a lower standard of living, and the opportunity to scramble for a job that takes less skill and pays less.

If we’re going to survive as a stable society, two things are going to have to happen. We’re going to have to accept that “work” in the traditional sense is not going to be the only, or even main, source of people’s income — and that’s okay. And the only way that’s going to work is if we mandate that the saving from more efficient technology go to everyone, not just the elite.

Pretty radical shit, huh? I must be out of my mind. Kind of like that ol’ Commie Kurt was in 1952, when he saw this coming.

 

 

 

Dick Meister: The billionaire’s bill of rights

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Billionaire corporate interests and other well financed anti-labor forces are waging a major drive to stifle the political voice of workers and their unions in California that is certain to spread nationwide if not stopped – and stopped now.

At issue is a highly deceptive measure, Proposition 32, on the November election ballot, that its anti-labor sponsors label as an even-handed attempt to limit campaign spending. But actually, it would limit – and severely – only the spending of unions while leaving corporations and other moneyed special interests free to spend as much as they like.

Unions would be prohibited from making political contributions with money collected from voluntary paycheck deductions authorized by their members, which is the main source of union political funds.

 But there would be no limits on corporations, whose political funds come from their profits, their customers or suppliers and the contributions of corporate executives. Nor would there be any limit on the political spending of the executives or any other wealthy individuals. What’s more, corporate special interests and billionaires could still give unlimited millions to secretive “Super PACs” that can raise unlimited amounts of money anonymously to finance their political campaigns.

The proposition would have a “devastating impact” on unions, notes Professor John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, writing in  the Hill’s Congress blog.  As he says, it would likely all but eliminate political spending by unions while greatly increasing political spending by business interests and wealthy individuals.

 Anti-labor interests are already outspending unions nationwide by a ratio of more than $15 for every $1 spent by unions. Between 2000 and 2011, that amounted to  $700 million spent by anti-labor forces, while unions spent just a little more than $284 million.

 Proposition 32 would even restrict unions in their communications with their own members on political issues. That’s because money raised by payroll deductions pays for the preparation and mailing of communications to union members, including political materials.

Unfortunately, there’s even more – much more –to Proposition 32. It also would prohibit unions from making contributions to political parties and defines public employee unions as “government contractors” that would be forbidden from attempting to influence any government agency with whom they have a contract.

That restriction applies not only to unions. It also would cover political action committees established by any membership organization,  “any agency or employee representation committee or plan,” such as those seeking stronger civil rights or environmental protections.

Proposition 32 seeks to weaken, that is, any membership group which might seek reforms opposed by wealthy individuals or corporations and their Republican allies.  It’s no wonder the measure is actively opposed, not only by organized labor, but also by the country’s leading good-government groups, including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.

Yet the proposition’s sponsors have the incredible gall to bill their measure as genuine campaign finance reform. They obviously hope that claim, which Common Cause accurately describes as a “laughable deception,” will win over the many voters who have been demanding reforms and who, in their eagerness, will fail to recognize the measure’s true nature.

“This is not genuine campaign finance reform,” as San Francisco State’s John Logan says, “but a bill of rights for billionaires.”

The losers would include teachers, nurses, police, firefighters and other union members and those who benefit from the essential services they provide – students, the elderly, and the ailing, the poverty stricken, those who work and live in unsafe conditions and other needy citizens, and consumers, environmentalists and others who also are neglected by the profit-chasing corporate interests that dominate political and economic life.

Make no mistake: Lots of money is being funneled into the Proposition 32 campaign by some of the same wealthy backers who bankrolled such anti-labor efforts as the campaign that blocked the massive attempt to recall virulently anti-labor GOP Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin this year.

Should the anti-union forces also prevail, it will undoubtedly lead to what Logan says “will promote a tsunami of ballot initiatives in 2013 at the local level and in 2014 at the state level designed to drive down working conditions in both the public and private sectors.”

Logan adds, “Lacking the ability to oppose these reactionary measures under the new election rules, California’s workers could soon face the weakest labor standards in the country”. But if the measure is rejected, it “may slow the momentum behind other attempts to increase the corrosive impact of money in politics.”

It’s true that some states already have laws and regulations seriously limiting labor’s influence. But it’s certain that victory by the anti-labor forces in California will slow any attempts at reform in other states and lead as well to attempts to impose anti-union measures elsewhere, as well as expanding those that already exist.

The stakes are huge. If the 1 percent have their way in California, the country’s largest state, other states are certain to follow.

For more from John Logan, check his piece in the East Bay Express, “If you liked Citizen United, you’ll love Prop 32.” http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/if-you-liked-citizens-united-youll-love-prop-32/Content?oid=330613

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

The parking fee’s too low

Andrew Lam
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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is reviewing its policy on neighborhood parking, which is a positive step: The current system has been in place for more than 30 years and has become an unwieldy mess. But the agency needs to do more than just aggregate districts and set uniform rules; it needs to adjust the concept of preferential parking, meters, and prices to reflect the reality that San Francisco can’t afford (and shouldn’t promote) free parking.

Since 1976, the city has issued permits allowing residents of certain neighborhoods to park for as long as 72 hours on streets that otherwise offer only two-hour parking. The idea was to keep out-of-town commuters from parking near, say, a BART line and leaving their cars all day. The zones also protect neighborhood privileges near busy shopping districts and employment centers.

The zones are designated only when a majority of property owners request it. The fees for the permits are set at $104 a year.

The Examiner reported Aug. 13 that the system is in line for “a major overhaul.” And the first thing the MTA needs to do is look at the price.

Renting a garage in most city neighborhoods runs close to $300 a month. Paid parking in even outlying areas can be as much as $10 a day. A Muni fast pass costs $74 a month.

But the neighborhood parking permits in effect give a piece of the city’s streets — public property — to some residents for $8.60 a month, or about 28 cents a day. At a time when Muni can’t afford to keep its buses rolling, that’s ridiculous.

Easy, cheap on-street parking encourages more residents to buy cars, which is in direct contrast to official city policy. It’s true that the permits also allow people to leave their cars behind and take transit to work — but the cost is so low that the rest of the city’s residents, particularly the lower-income people who pay for Muni rides, are subsidizing car owners.

If the MTA could double the annual fee, it would bring in an additional $6.5 million a year, which could be dedicated to improving Muni. And at $208 a year, the permits would still be an phenomenal bargain. Car owners have been saving money for years (at great cost to the state) from the Schwarzenegger-era reduction in the Vehicle License Fee; paying some of that money back to the city wouldn’t exactly be a brutal hardship.

It’s not easy — the state mandates that local fees be set at the cost of administering the program. But if nothing else, the MTA ought to ask Sacramento for an exemption — and look for creative ways to link subsidized parking to supporting Muni. (Maybe the parking zones get all-day meters that residents can pay for in advance. Maybe create a parking benefit district. There are so many ways around this.)

The MTA screwed up badly the last time it tried to change neighborhood parking rules (in that case, meters), and any new rules will require extensive community outreach. But everyone needs to understand that free on-street parking in a crowded city with far too many cars is not some god-given right. The neighborhood parking program has a lot of benefits and we agree that it helps discourage car commuters from clogging residential streets. But the people who benefit from it ought to pay a fair fee.

 

If you want my advice

Andrew Lam
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If you want my advice

CAREERS AND ED In July, the unemployment rate in California was 11 percent. Which got us thinking: what’s the smart way to job hunt these days? We’re not the only ones — this month, the Commonwealth Club is hosting a series of lectures and workshops called “The Future of Work.” We tapped two of the series’ experts for email interviews, asking Marty Nemko, author of Cool Careers For Dummies, and Joel Garfinkle, Oakland-based career coach, for their takes on the matter. They offered two points of view on today’s dreary job market. Upside? Nemko, who spoke on August 1, is positive that more workers will be needed to implement upcoming immigration reform. Of course, he also foresaw growth in “bio-chemical terrorism.” Oh, the future.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Tell us about your Commonwealth Club event.

Marty Nemko: [My focus was] on which careers are likely to burgeon [in] the result of [an] Obama win — which ones polls and Intrade [a speculative, crowd-sourced website] betting suggest will occur. I’ll also talk about how to survive and even thrive during what may be America’s decline and fall.

Joel Garfinkle: Working hard and being good at what you do is not enough to attain the level of success you truly deserve. So what exactly makes one person more successful than another? The answer: leveraging and applying perception, visibility, and influence better than anyone else.

SFBG: What kinds of issues are older workers facing in terms of getting new jobs?

MN: It’s very tough to convince an employer that a 40-year old with no experience is better than a 25-year old with experience. In this job market, the employer doesn’t have to settle.

JG: Mid-life career transitions occur because after years of success, many of my clients find that they lack fulfillment. Success isn’t enough anymore to satisfy them. [But] it’s difficult to make a mid-life career transition due to the lack of financial stability that exists when making the change. Learning of new skills in a different profession can be a daunting and intimidating task.

SFBG: What are some place that are still proving fruitful for job searchers?

MN: Some of my predicted areas for growth are auditing for corporations, the US Treasury, and the IRS; immigration-related bureaucrats that will be needed after Obama gets comprehensive immigration reform after the election; health care advocates to help people get the health care they need as ObamaCare is implemented; and bio-chemical terrorism. Anything mandated will be the last sort of employment to get cut. Lastly, multicultural marketers to address the tastes of the fastest-growing ethnic groups.

JG: Information technology is still growing. About two-thirds of hiring manages have been adding staff this year and will continue to add headcount to the IT departments. Health care is still pretty in-demand due to rising ages in the US. And many employers have had difficulty finding and hiring enough engineers.

SFBG: Should people still be striving for their dream job? Is that idea still relevant?

MN: It’s in the Bay Area’s drinking water. If there was a motto on the San Francisco flag, it would be “Do what you love and who cares if the money follows. My parents will support me.”

JG: The increase in collective desire to love one’s job comes from something missing in a person’s life. Statistics over the years have stayed consistent in stating that over two-thirds of Americans are unhappy in their jobs. The task is to recognize that people are uniquely special, have something to give, have a talent no one else shares in quite the same way.

MARTY NEMKO: “KEYS TO BEATING THE ODDS IN STARTING A BUSINESS”

(next lecture) Thu/9 6pm, $20

Commonwealth Club 

595 Market, Second Floor, SF

JOEL GARFINKLE: “GETTING AHEAD AND TAKING YOUR CAREER TO THE NEXT LEVEL”

Aug. 30, 7pm, $15 

Silicon Valley Bank

3005 Tasman, Santa Clara

(415) 597-6700

www.commonwealthclub.org

 

Survivor recounts life of rape and abuse by Your Black Muslim Bakery leader

Sasha Cuttler
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Editor’s Note: This story is part of the Chauncey Bailey Project, a collaboration of Bay Area media outlets (including the Guardian) to investigate Bailey’s murder by members of Your Black Muslim Bakery.

By Louise Rafkin, Center for Investigative Reporting

 In 2002, five years before journalist Chauncey Bailey was murdered by members of Your Black Muslim Bakery, a woman identified only as Jane Doe 1 stepped forward to report decades of sexual abuse, welfare fraud and violence by the bakery’s leader, Yusuf Bey Sr.

She was prepared to hand over to Oakland police DNA from three of her children evidence that Bey had impregnated her, the first time when she was 12 years old.

Given the history of violence by members of Your Black Muslim Bakery, this was a risky move. But the woman was fueled by a mother’s anger. Her daughter, then 18, alerted her that Bey was trying to abuse her – his own daughter.

Now a devout Christian, Jane Doe 1 has decided she no longer wants to be the nameless whistle-blower. Her name is Kowana Banks and, in her first public interview, she said she made the decision to come forward to help other children trapped in similar situations. She hopes to publish a book about her experiences.

“Abused people go one of two ways: Either they are going to self-destruct or they’re going to make a difference,” said Banks, 44. “I’m going to make a difference.”

The violent saga of Your Black Muslim Bakery is fading into Oakland history, but wounds remain among Bey’s victims and family members today marks the fifth anniversary of the murder of Bailey, the Oakland Post editor who had been investigating the bakery’s finances.

The facts behind Banks’ story have been outlined in court proceedings and depositions, but her decision to come forward allows her to detail her unique insider’s perspective as a victim and survivor.

Today, Banks is an optimistic, composed woman who has moved on as best she can. One of her three children by Bey, Yusuf V, 25, is in San Quentin State Prison for his part in the 2007 kidnapping of two Oakland women, one who was tortured, a crime related to the bakery’s demise. The other two are doing well.

Banks considers the three to be the “blessing out of what happened to me.”

Married for 18 years to a man she met after leaving the bakery, Banks says the bitterness and anger that grew from her childhood abuse dissolved when she fell in love. The couple have two children together.

“But it’s difficult to look back and know I was just a child then and that no one cared,” she said.

Throughout her childhood at the bakery, Banks said she felt abandoned by the social welfare system, invisible even to those at local hospitals where she – and many other underage girls at the bakery compound – gave birth to multiple children while still children themselves.

She delivered the first of three children by Bey at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley at 13. A social worker questioned Banks about the paternity of her son, she said, but under the watchful eye of one of Bey’s “wives,” Banks kept silent. Later, she said she told a child protection worker that she was working long hours and not going to school.

“She told me she would check into it, and I never saw her again,” Banks said.

Bey, a self-appointed minister who gave himself the title of “Dr.,” was formerly a hairdresser. He opened Your Black Muslim Bakery in the late 1970s, espousing black self-reliance and his own interpretation of Islam, which included racist attacks on whites. Nevertheless, in his more than 30 years in North Oakland, Bey gained the support of local business leaders, clergy and politicians eager to align with the underclass.

In 2003, Bey died before facing trial, setting off the struggle for power and control that escalated into mayhem and multiple murders. Banks said she saw the violence coming.

“You cut off the head,” Banks said, “and the body will go crazy.”

Molestations began at age 8

Banks, who was born in the East Bay, said her father was a drug addict who met Bey’s followers while doing jail time for drug-related crimes. Banks can’t remember her mother, who she said abandoned her as a toddler, along with a younger brother and older sister.

In 1976, Banks’ father brought the children to live at the bakery compound, where he’d gotten a job. A hive of single-family homes, retail storefronts and apartments clustered on the corner of San Pablo Avenue and 59th Street in North Oakland, the compound housed bakery workers and Bey’s sprawling family of children and women he called his wives.

One Sunday night in 1976, Bey invited Banks to spend the night in his apartment, telling her she could play with his baby daughter. Banks was nervous and thought it strange to spend time with Bey, then 41. But her older sister had spent the night there and returned toting candy and new clothes. She said that night marked the first time Bey molested her. She was 8.

Bey told her to tell no one, she said. If she did, she would be killed.

“But he didn’t stop with me,” she said. “He told me he’d murder my whole family, everyone.”

Banks believes her father did not know about the incident, but the family moved away soon after that first molestation. They lived in Hayward for a while, and later, Banks’ father left her and her siblings with a grandmother near Monterey.

In 1978, after another arrest, her father brought them back to the bakery and left them with Bey.

Not long after, Banks said, Bey came into her bedroom above the bakery while she was sleeping, and raped her. She was 10 and remembers wearing one-piece pink zip-up pajamas. After the assault, she sought help from Nora Bey, then 23, one of the minister’s many “wives.” Banks’ father had surrendered his paternal rights so Yusuf Bey could receive welfare for their care; the court appointed Nora Bey, later known as Esperanza Johnson, as their legal guardian.

“ ‘I need you to help me because he’s trying to do things to me,’ ” Banks recalls telling Nora Bey. “And her comment was, ‘Oh, girl, he’s not going to do anything to you that he hasn’t done to anyone else.’ ”

Living in various bakery-owned homes, Banks was kept out of public school. She was smart, though, and soon became an integral part of the bakery, which sold pies and sandwiches from its San Pablo Avenue storefront. She learned bookkeeping and taught basic math and reading at the bakery’s school. Her life was regimented; she baked from 4 to 8 a.m., taught in the bakery’s combined school and day care until 6 p.m., and then wrapped bakery products until 10 p.m.

It was not until several years later that Banks even received a wage, just $25 per week.

At the time, Banks remembers not understanding why those living in the compound all were so isolated from outsiders, why they were punished for sneaking out once to see a movie, “The Wiz.”

“But as an adult, I understand now,” she said, “because he had secrets, and he didn’t want those secrets to get out.”

Learning Bey’s doctrine

In the bakery’s school, Yusuf Bey’s doctrine was drilled into the children. Girls were taught to cover their heads; everyone was addressed as “brother” or “sister.” Bey preached the superiority of men over women and of blacks over whites. Whites, he said, were “the devil” and responsible for all the world’s problems.

“The men were the ceiling, and women were the floor,” Banks said, quoting Bey.

She, however, was hardly subservient, growing into a feisty and hardheaded young woman, often chastised for speaking out against unfair treatment.

“I was known for saying whatever was on my brain,” Banks said.

Once when Banks complained about the long hours of work, she said she was forced to get up even earlier. When one of the other women found Bey with Banks in his bedroom late at night, the woman’s questions were silenced with a beating. Banks was then given a beating herself.

Banks said Bey tried to turn others against her and, because her mother was white, called her “nobody but the devil.”

But he continued to rape her repeatedly. At 13, she gave birth to the first of the three children she would have with Bey.

All the while, Banks said, Bey received – and kept for himself – welfare payments and food stamps intended for Banks, her siblings, others and eventually the children born as a result of the rapes. Bey was said to have more than 40 children and called up to 100 women his wives.

The atmosphere of fear was total, Banks said. In 1986, a young man, Peter Kaufman, who’d spoken out about having seen Bey rape a boy in the bakery’s bathroom, turned up dead on a nearby side street, shot in the head. Beatings – for both women and men in the bakery community – were commonplace.

Bey, Banks said, was a persuasive man who used intimidation, violence and a flashy lifestyle to control his mostly down-and-out followers, many of whom were parolees. There were cameras in the bakery and microphones in every room to monitor conversations. Among the women, the abuse was ubiquitous and unspoken. It was some time before Banks realized that Bey was molesting her sister, too.

Banks said she was instructed by Nora Bey not to identify him as the father of her children on their birth certificates. And Banks wasn’t allowed to choose names for her kids. Particularly painful to Banks was that her second son was named Yusuf by Nora Bey.

Banks said she had nowhere to turn. She blames racism, fear and a hands-off attitude for the lack of oversight by welfare officials and police.

“They were fed Brother Bey’s line that he was doing a lot for the black community,” she said. “No one wanted to intervene.”

Escape from bakery life

For years, Banks dreamed of leaving. But under the constant threat of violence, she waited. She planned to leave at 18, but was again pregnant. In 1988, then 20, she became romantically interested in a man her own age she met at the bakery. Bey caught wind of this and held a meeting at which he directed his other women to teach Banks a lesson by beating her.

Warned of her impending punishment, Banks made her escape that night, Aug. 28, 1988. A cousin on her father’s side agreed to pick her up. As she was collecting her children, Bey confronted her and threw her belongings at her.

“I picked up as much as I could that he threw at me and packed it into the car,” said Banks, laughing at the memory. “I don’t think he realized he was helping me.”

At first, she “felt so free” in a world outside the bakery, but soon she began to live in fear that Bey would send someone to harm her.

“My fear was a stranger that I didn’t even know would walk up to me and do something, because of course they had pictures of me,” she said.

Moving forward with her life was difficult, and keeping hold of the children she had with Bey ultimately proved too much of a challenge. Banks found work at restaurants as a server, but money was always tight. Bey wouldn’t pay child support, and the welfare she received never seemed to be enough.

“I was just a child when my kids were born,” she said. “It would be different if today I was having children, or even 20 years ago.”

Soon, Bey, exerting his power, sent for the kids, and they returned to the bakery. The boys spent most of their childhood there. Banks said her daughter, despite spending some time at the bakery and with foster families, mainly grew up with her.

At the bakery, Bey tried to turn her kids against her, Banks said, telling them she wanted them only for their welfare checks. While still a child, her oldest asked why she didn’t live with them at the bakery, like the parents of the other kids. Banks explained to him that “it wasn’t a good place” for her.

“I felt it was a better environment for men than it was for women,” she said, noting that at the time, she assumed Bey would not molest his own children.

In 1989, she met her husband through an acquaintance. The couple had their two children in the ’90s.

More than a decade passed. Banks took community college classes, found work in restaurants, earned her GED diploma and occasionally visited her boys at the bakery. There was constant intimidation; she feared retribution for leaving and was always looking over her shoulder.

Concern for daughter prompts action

Banks never told her kids about her abuse. It was hard to watch her boys be lured in by Bey’s flashy lifestyle – a Mercedes or Cadillac was always parked curbside – but Banks held out hope that she had been right, that it really was a better place for boys than it was for girls.

In June 2002, her 18-year-old daughter, who was working at the bakery but living elsewhere, told Banks a story that suggested Bey had tried to molest her. Banks was devastated, unable to even ask her daughter for details.

“I prayed, asking God who was going to stop him,” said Banks, then 34. “And then, suddenly, I knew it was me.”

With DNA testing available, she could prove Bey’s paternity. It offered the proof she had always hoped to find. In an angry phone conversation with Bey, she told him her plan.

“You, sir, are a rapist and a child molester, and let me tell you what I’m going to do to you,” she recalls saying. “First, I’m going to go to the police, and I’m going to press charges against you, and then, when I’m done, I’m going to sue you and I’m going to take all your money. And then I won’t have to ask you to help your children, my children, with anything else, because I’m going to have all your money.”

Bey, she said, told her she’d soon be “floating in a river.”

To show Bey her determination, she called him again from a phone at the Oakland Police Department. “He knew from that day forth that it was over for him,” she said.

Three months later, Bey was taken into police custody. With DNA test results in hand, Banks pressed felony criminal charges of rape and assault. Bey posted bail, but died in the hospital a year later before facing the criminal trial.

Banks was disappointed that Bey never faced a trial but took pleasure in knowing that he had at least faced the charges.

“He lived a long life of getting away with it,” she said. “By the grace of Jesus, I know he’s boiling in hell.”

Another Jane Doe revealed

Along with two other women, Banks also filed a civil suit, alleging that Alameda County did nothing to protect them. The county eventually settled with Banks and the two other Jane Does, admitting no liability.

Another of the Jane Does in the suits, a former foster child who worked at the bakery between 1994 and 1996 and was raped by Bey, also has decided to publicly identify herself for the first time.

Malikha Hardy said she reported her abuse on three occasions to a county social worker, to a guidance counselor at juvenile hall and, in 1996, to the Oakland police. No one followed up until seven years later, she said, when an Oakland detective working on Banks’ case turned up at her door.

“The people feared Bey,” Hardy, now 32, said in a recent phone interview. “He had people who would do anything for him.”

To protect the two women, California Watch is not providing information about their current whereabouts or employment. During multiple interviews for this story, a family therapist was present to provide support.

Having wrestled with low self-worth, nightmares, and other aftereffects of childhood trauma, Banks is writing a book about her life with the therapist’s help. She credits her conversion to Christianity with making it possible for her to smile again.

“I’m resilient, and I’m positive,” Banks said. “I say, ‘If people are preying on you, God has chosen you.’ ”

Banks remains in contact with her son Yusuf V, who is imprisoned at San Quentin and serving a 10-year sentence as part of a plea agreement in the kidnapping incident.

“I’m trying to reform my son’s way of thinking,” Banks said. “Him sitting in one spot is the best time for me to do it, because his mind is open.”

During a recent visit to the former bakery compound, Banks said she thinks the reign of terror is now over. Many of the buildings have been sold or renovated; little is left to indicate what went on, outside or inside. The old bakery is a beauty supply store. The former school is a martial arts studio.

As Banks walked through memorable rooms and haunted hallways, she recounted stories both benign and horrific.

“I’ve seen stuff here,” she said, “that will scare me for the rest of my life.

This story was edited by Robert Salladay and Amy Pyle and copy edited by Nikki Frick and Christine Lee.

 

This story was produced by the independent, nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting in collaboration with the Chauncey Bailey Project. For more, visit www.cironline.org and www.chaunceybaileyproject.org. Rafkin can be contacted at Louise.Rafkin@gmail.com.

 

Dick Meister: A sure path to economic health

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By Dick Meister 

Guardian columnist Dick Meister is former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom. He has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

It’s way past time to raise the pitifully low federal minimum wage. That would provide badly needed help to the millions who are living in poverty or near-poverty at the current rate of $7.25 an hour, and would help all Americans by stimulating the sagging economy.

Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa and Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois are carrying bills that would set a new minimum of $10 an hour. They’re pressing hard – as they very well should – to get the general public and their allies in Congress to fully appreciate the widespread good that would come from helping some of the country’s neediest workers.

“We’ve bailed out banks, we’ve bailed out corporations, we’ve bailed out Wall Street, we’ve tried to create sound fundamentals in the economy,” Jackson noted. “Now it’s time to bail out working people who work hard every day and still make only $7.25. The only way to do that is to raise the minimum wage.”

It’s been five years since the minimum was last raised, from $5.15 an hour to the current level. States, cities and counties are allowed to set their own minimums, as long as they at least equal the federal rate, and 18 states and several cities and counties have enacted minimums greater than the federal rate. But even their rates are below what’s needed for a decent living.

About four million workers are now paid at or below the federal minimum and obviously need help if they are to escape poverty. Even those paid at the full minimum earn a mere $15,000 a year before taxes and other deductions.  They are among some 28 million workers whose earnings – and spending  – would immediately increase under the proposed bills.

Legislation to raise the minimum has been called for repeatedly in the years since the last raise in 2007, but has gained only relatively minimal support in Congress and the White House. President Obama pledged during his election campaign to get the rate increased to $9.50 an hour by 2011, but has taken no public action. Mitt Romney, Obama’s Republican opponent in his re-election campaign this year, has wavered. He once voiced support for a raise, but later said he opposed an increase.

Polls have clearly shown strong public support for a raise. That support is likely to grow significantly if the economic benefits that a raise would undoubtedly bring to all Americans can be clearly shown – and it can.

It’s simple: Raise the pay of working people, and as the workers buy more goods and services with their new earnings, the businesses that sell them will hire more people to provide what they want to buy with the extra money they’ve earned at a higher minimum wage.

The National Employment Law Project estimates that the increased consumer spending generated by the proposed raise would create the equivalent of more than 100,000 full-time jobs. Other estimates indicate that every dollar increase in wages for workers at the minimum creates more than $3,000 in new spending after a year.

And so the cycle goes, round and round:  More pay, more spending on goods and services, more hiring of people to provide them, more important government services and the taxes to support them, a healthier and wealthier economy.

Guardian columnist Dick Meister is former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom. He has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Guardian Voices: There’s something happening here

Zelda Bronstein
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Guardian Voices: There’s something happening here

There are distinct signs of the rebirth of a grassroots  balanced-growth  movement in San Francisco, and some small indication that it’s even beginning to shift, ever so slightly,  the politics of the Board of Supervisors.  This is very good news for the vast majority of San Franciscans.

First, a little history.

Land use and the approval of major development projects lie at the very heart of San Francisco politics. Developers and their allies (the building trades, contractors, bankers, architects, land-use lawyers, consultants, and  permit expeditors) are the primary source of political money for candidates for local office. Since the freeway and urban renewal fights of the 1960s, the very definition of  progressive  politics in San Francisco has been the attempt to build a political base of  residents to resist that money.  So-called moderates are simply the political extension of the pro-development lobby using its money to consolidate developer control of the public approval process.

In most cities, land-use issues — zoning, permits, urban design — is left to elites. Not so in San Francisco. Here, land use is talked about at neighborhood meetings and on street corners. The heart the reason is our compact size: 46.7 square miles, and the prohibition of filling in any more of the Bay to create new land. There is no vacant land in San Francisco. Any new major development almost always displaces something already there.  Development is a zero sum game, with winner and losers.  And the losers  leave town.

Land-use politics is about staying here — and that creates real interest among San Francisco residents.

The funding for major development in San Francisco has dramatically changed in the 45 years since the freeway and anti-urban-renewal fights of the mid-1960s. Back then, it was public sector money that fueled development. Yet, with that money, due to the actions of  progressive politicians like Phil and John Burton and George Moscone, came its own remedy: votes to not accept the public money for freeways (Moscone) and votes creating either laws that either prohibited displacement or funded legal assistance to the poor, empowering  them to stop government agencies through litigation (the Burtons at both the state and federal level).

Since the money for freeways and urban renewal was from the government, the focus of the early balanced growth  forces was on government itself, through massive lobbying campaigns to affect officials’ votes (the freeway fight), or the use of government-funded lawyers  to protect poor people’s  interests ( the WACO and TOOR lawsuits against redevelopment).

All of that changed starting in the 1970s, when Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan deregulated oversight of urban development by creating a system of  block grants and ended funding for legal assistance for the poor.  Large-scale development was effectively privatized, moving it from being designed, funded, and approved at public meetings by government officials following regulations to being designed and funded in private — and having a Kabuki-play-like public approval process with little real oversight. With the passage of Prop 13 in 1978, which limited the main source of local government revenue — property taxes — local governments became even more reliant on private developer money to create new revenue.

The popular response to this change in the development process in San Francisco was the emergence of a politics that relied on the old progressive-era reforms of the initiative, referendum, and recall. Through a series of initiatives, the community sought to impose regulations on the development process, culminating in the 1986 Proposition M, which actually limited the amount of high-rise office space developers could build, completely imposing the popular will over a supine set of local officials and politicians. Indeed, ten years earlier, again through the initiative processes, the very nature of the Board of Supervisors was changed from a developer-friendly at-large system to a district-election system. Hotly opposed by real estate and development interests, district elections in its brief three years of existence (repealed in the wake of the Moscone-Milk assassinations, even though they were both strong supporters of the system and their assassin opposed it…ironies abound in San Francisco politics) saw limits placed on condo conversions and the passage of rent control.

In each of these multi-year efforts, a citywide coalition was formed, including an ever-expanding set of communities and neighborhoods.  Common interests were defined that cut across race, class, and geography and issues of community (neighborhood) control and funding for essential services like Muni, affordable housing, childcare, and employment training were placed on the table – and developers had to address them if they wanted projects approved.

The point is that balanced growth came from community-based political forces, not elected officials.  Broad movements were built — in the end, encompassing elements of labor. These were victories won not by elected officials but by a popular movement.

In 2000, in the wake of  the dot-com bust, another balanced-growth measure, Prop. L, aimed at cutting then-Mayor Willie Brown’s power over development, was paired with the new district election system — and a broad coalition of forces including labor, community and neighborhood organizations won a major progressive victory.

Every candidate for supervisor who supported the balanced-growth measure won. Every candidate who opposed it and supported Brown lost. While Prop L narrowly lost, its policies and objectives were passed as ordinances by the new Board of Supervisors (banning live-work lofts, closing loopholes in the planning code, requiring neighborhood-based plans for the Mission, SOMA, and Potrero Hill).

But as is so often the case, the victory of 2000 led to the slow dissolution of the coalition that created it. Folks had won. Our supervisors could handle all these issues; we no longer had to. By the end of the term of the supervisors elected as the class of 2000, very little of that citywide coalition existed any more.

With the Great Recession of 2008, advances were rolled back.  Fees on local developers for affordable housing, childcare and transit were deferred in order to stimulate development.  A new era of “moderation” was announced by elected officials, led by Mayor Gavin Newsom. Desires to “attract and retain”  business saw new tax concessions in the name of “jobs” and a new willingness to use open space and public facilities for “private/public partnerships” was announced.

By 2012 any concept of balanced growth had been replaced with a new era of “cooperation” between city officials and developers.

Until recently, that is.

It should be clear to all that for the last four years, City Hall has been eager to approve any scheme presented by private developers — from the America’s Cup nonsense to highrise luxury condos on the waterfront. The siren song of the developers — more revenue if you approve our project — has been proven false again and again, as the revenue never really matches the real costs of these projects. The city’s essential services continue to shrink. Transit fees are too low to pay for the actual new costs of Muni. The affordable housing  fees are too little to actually meet the affordable housing needs of the new, poorly-paid workers employed in the retail and service industry that is always a part of these projects.

More and more of our parks and public open spaces are made available to private users, while few if any new public parks or open spaces are being created.  Indeed, the Department of Parks and Recreation often opposes new public parks — because it can’t maintain what it has.

So it is with fondness that these old eyes see the stirring of what appears to be the awakening political  giant of a new controlled-growth movement.

Here’s how it’s happening: The formation of a multi-neighborhood coalition to oppose fee increases at the Arboretum leads to a bigger coalition to oppose artificial turf  fields in western Golden Gate Park, which leads to an even-bigger coalition placing a policy statement against the privatization of Coit Tower on the ballot and winning.

These are important indications of a broad dissatisfaction with the endless private-public-partnership ( in which all the costs are public and all the profits are private) babble from Rec and Park.

The submission by a broad based coalition of more than 30,000 signatures to place the 8 Washington on the ballot — the first land-use referendum in decades — is an incredibly important achievement, and shows the popular sentiment against much of the City Hall happy talk about development on the waterfront.

But it was the unanimous ( yes, unanimous) vote by the Board of Supervisors last Tuesday to hold California Pacific Medical Center accountable for its constant shape shifting  on its massive project at Geary and Van Ness that shows, perhaps, the outline of the potential future of the balanced-growth movement in San Francisco.

Six supervisors stated their willingness to turn down the environmental impact report on the project unless Sutter/CPMC committed to a project that addressed not only the promise to keep St. Luke’s open for at least 20 years but also hired more San Franciscans, corrected the traffic nightmare predicted for Geary and Van Ness, provided more affordable housing for its own low-income new workforce, and committed  to cap the city’s health care costs as a result of CPMC’s market control the new project would create.

There is always the possibility that the two-week delay will go nowhere, but this kind of talk from this Board of Supervisors to a huge private developer simply has not occurred in the recent past.  No one from Room 200 showed up to twist supervisors’ arms in favor of Sutter.  Sutter was on its own and got rolled.

The coalition that fought Sutter to a standstill at the board, that defined the inadequacies of  the project listed by the supervisors, was a multi-neighborhood, multi-issues organization composed of community, neighborhoods, and labor. Middle class “Baja” Pacific Heights residents and low income seniors from Bernal Heights, non-profit affordable housing advocates and trade unionists, tenant organizers from the Tenderloin and Sierra Club members from the Haight-Ashbury; single moms from the Bayview and Filipino youth from the South of Market.

It was a San Francisco coalition, one that has been working together for nearly three years, blending issues, making concessions to one another and staying together.  A group like this with a set of demands such as these has not prevailed at City Hall for nearly a decade.  It still may not, indeed the chances are slim that its full demands will be achieved.

But this group moved the Board of Supervisors in a way not seen in years.  If the folks mobilized about our parks and the folks mobilized about our waterfront and the folks mobilized about CPMC get together, we have something very big happening. And it might be just in time to make a real difference.
It reminds me of an old saying: “ The people alone are the makers of world history.”

The malling of San Francisco

Andrew Lam
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110
The malling of San Francisco

steve@sfbg.com

Shopping malls filled with national chain stores and restaurants are in many respects the antithesis of San Francisco. They’re the bane of any metropolis that strives to be unique and authentic. And those just happen to be qualities that make tourism this city’s number one industry.

The logic of modern capitalism, and its relentless growth into new markets, has already placed a Target or a Walmart, and a Nordstrom, Macy’s, Ross, or a JCPenney — along with a bevy of Starbucks, Applebee’s, Jamba Juice, and McDonald’s and myriad other formulaic corporate eateries — in just about every town in the country.

Do people really need them here, too? And in a city renowned worldwide for its scenic beauty and temperate (albeit sometimes foggy) climate, do people want to shop in the enclosed, climate-controlled malls popularized in the small or suburban towns that many residents came here to escape?

For me, the answer is no. Frankly, malls have an aura of artificiality that gives me the creeps — but I freely acknowledge that not everyone feels that way. Some San Franciscans may like malls and chain stores while others don’t.

But it doesn’t really matter what any of us think. Left unchecked, it’s the market that matters — and the logic of the market gives chain stores a huge competitive advantage over the mom-and-pops. Their labor and supply costs are lower, their financial resources are more extensive and appealing to commercial landlords, and their business models are based on constantly opening new stores.

All cities have to do is just say yes. And San Francisco has been increasingly saying yes to malls and chain stores.

The economic desperation that set in since the financial crash of 2008 has overcome the trend of resistance to so-called “formula retail establishments” that had been building in San Francisco during the years before the recession.

So now, rather than dying from neglect, the Metreon mall has been brought back to life by a huge Target store set to open this fall, the second Target (the other one at Masonic and Geary) going into a city that had once eschewed such national mega-retailers.

Just down the street, in the heart of the city’s transit-rich commercial center, the CityPlace mall that had been abandoned by its previous owners after winning city approval two years ago is now being built by new owners and set to open next spring with “value-based” national chain stores like JCPenney.

Projects funded with public money aren’t immune either. The new Transbay Terminal transit center now under construction will have its own mini-mall, with 225,000 square feet of retail, much of it expected to house national chains. Even more retail will be built on the ground floor of the dozen other nearby residential and office buildings connected to the project.

And it isn’t just these new malls going in a stone’s throw from the Westerfield Mall, Crocker Galleria, San Francisco Center, and other central city malls. All over town, national chains like the Whole Foods and Fresh & Easy grocery stores are replacing Cala Foods and other homegrown markets, or going into other commercial shells like the S&C Ford building on Market near the Castro.

Just a few years ago, the approval of Home Depot on Bayshore Boulevard (since then sold and opened as Lowe’s, another national chain) was a hugely controversial project approved by the Board of Supervisors on a closely watched 6-5 vote. Now, Lennar is building an entire suburban-style complex of big box stores on Candlestick Point, hundreds of thousands of square feet — without much controversy at all.

Even Walmart — the dreaded poster child for huge corporations that use their market power to drive down wages or force local stores out of business — is reported to be actively looking to open “a couple” of stores in San Francisco (see “Walmart sets sights on San Francisco,” June 24, San Francisco Chronicle).

To Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich and others who have long encouraged San Francisco to embrace the kind of urbanism advocated by famed author and activist Jane Jacobs — which emphasizes unique, neighborhood-based development that enhances public spaces and street life — accepting the malls feels like giving up on more dynamic urban models.

“It’s sort of an admission of failure,” Radulovich said. “It’s the failure of urbanism in San Francisco.”

 

 

MID-MARKET SYMBOLISM

Mid-Market Street is a bellwether for the type of city San Francisco may become. Every mayor since at least Dianne Feinstein in the late 1970s has called for the redevelopment of Mid-Market into a more active and inviting commercial and social corridor, and few have done so more fervently than Mayor Ed Lee.

Several city studies have explored a wide variety of ways to accomplish that goal, from eliminating automobiles and transforming Market Street into a lively pedestrian promenade to using redevelopment money, tax breaks, and/or flashy lighted signs to encourage distinctive development projects unique to San Francisco.

“But the city failed, so the market filled the void,” Radulovich said.

It isn’t that all shopping malls or enclosed commercial areas are necessarily bad, Radulovich said, citing the influential work by writer Walter Benjamin on the roles the enclosed “arcades” of Paris played in public life. “They work when they are an extension of public spaces,” Radulovich said.

Yet that isn’t what he sees being built in San Francisco, where what gets approved and who occupies those spaces is largely being dictated by private developers who are more interested in their bottom lines than with the creation of a vibrant urban environment where people are valued as more than mere consumers or workers.

San Francisco isn’t alone in allowing national chains to increasingly dominate commercial spaces. In fact, Stacy Mitchell, a researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said that until recently San Francisco was one of the best big US cities in controlling the proliferation of chain stores.

But the city has lost ground since its anti-chain high water mark in 2007, when voters approved Proposition G, which expanded the controls on formula retail outlets — generally requiring them to get a conditional use permit and go through public hearings — that the Board of Supervisors had approved in 2004.

Those controls are only as good as the political will to reject a permit application, and that doesn’t happen very often. A memo prepared last July for the Planning Commission — entitled “Informational Presentation on the Status of Formula Retail Controls” — found that of the 31 formula retails applications the city received since 2007, just three were rejected by the commission, six were withdrawn, and 22 were approved.

It’s gotten even worse since then, as the two Targets and other chains have been courted and embraced by Mayor’s Lee’s administration, whose key representatives didn’t respond to Guardian interview requests by press time.

Mitchell said it’s not nearly as bad in San Francisco as it is in Chicago, New York City, New Orleans, and other iconic US cities whose commercial spaces have been flooded with chains since the recession began.

“It’s nothing compared to the no-holds-barred stuff going on in New York City right now,” Mitchell said. “Walking down Broadway now is like a repeating loop of the stores you just saw further up the street.”

It isn’t that these cities are actively courting the national chains in most cases. It’s just that in the absence of strong local controls, developers and large commercial landlords just prefer to deal with chains, for a variety of reasons.

“If you’re just going with the flow of what developers are doing,” she said, “you always end up with national chains.”

And that’s what San Francisco has started to do.

 

 

MALLS LIKE CHAINS

Stephen Cornell, the owner of Brownie’s Hardware and a board member of the nonprofit advocacy group Small Business California, said chains have a huge competitive advantage over local businesses even before either one opens their doors.

“In general, landlords tend to like chains more,” said Cornell, whose business has struggled against Lowe’s and other corporate competitors. “The landlord always worries: is this guy going to make it and do they have the funds to back it up?”

Big corporate chains have lawyers and accountants on staff, and professional systems established for everything from buying goods to opening new stores, whereas most local entrepreneurs are essentially figuring things out as they go along.

“They’re very good at selling themselves,” Cornell said. “They’re going to manipulate the system perfectly, whether it’s the city and its codes or dealing with neighborhood merchants.”

And for large malls, Cornell said the problem is even worse. Brokers that fill malls have standing relationships with the national chains — most of which are publicly traded corporations seeking to constantly expand and gain market share — and no incentive to seek out or take a chance on local entrepreneurs.

“Chains have a lot of advantages,” Cornell said.

Mitchell said there are two main ways in which malls favor national chains over local businesses. In addition to the relationship between mall brokers and national chains, malls are often built with financing from financial institutions that require certain repayment guarantees.

“What they want to see are credit-worthy clients signed onto those places, and that means national chains with a credit rating from Standard & Poors,” Mitchell said, noting how that “automatically locks out” most local businesses.

Cornell also noted that national chains have already figured out how to maximize their efficiency, which keeps their costs down even though that often comes in the form of fewer employees with lower pay — and less reliance on local suppliers, accountants, attorneys, and other professionals — which ends up hurting the local economy. In fact, big chains suck money out of the city and back to corporate headquarters.

“All those people are making money and spending money here, so you have to look at the full circle,” Cornell said.

Mitchell said there are often simple solutions to the problem. For example, she said that city officials in Austin, Texas recently required the developer of a large shopping mall to set aside a certain percentage of the units for locally owned businesses.

So rather than hiring a national broker to find tenants, the developer hired a local broker to contact successful independent businesses in the area who might be interested in expanding, and the project ended up greatly exceeding the city’s minimum requirements.

Mechanisms like that, or like the formula retail controls pioneered in San Francisco, give her some hope. But she said, “Whether the counter-trends will be enough to counter the dominant trend, I don’t know.”

 

 

PUBLIC SUBSIDIES

The increased malling of San Francisco isn’t simply the result of official neglect. Often, the city’s policies and resources are actively encouraging the influx of chain stores. A prime example is the massive redevelopment project on Hunters Point and Candlestick Point that city voters approved in 2008 after mega-developer Lennar and most San Francisco political officials pushed the project with a well-funded political campaign.

“If you’re selling the land to Lennar for a dollar, and then building all the automobile infrastructure for people to get there, then that’s a massive public subsidy,” Radulovich said of the big-box mall being built on what was city-owned land on Candlestick Point.

That public subsidy creates a cycle that makes San Francisco less intimate and livable. Creating commercial spaces on the city’s edge encourages more people to drive on congested regional roadways. These spaces are filled with national chain stores that have a direct negative impact on small, locally owned stores in neighborhood commercial districts all over the city, causing some of these businesses to fail, meaning local residents will need to travel further for the goods they once bought down the street.

“Those neighborhoods are going to be less walkable as a result,” Radulovich said, noting how the trend contradicts the lip service that just about every local politician gives to supporting local businesses in neighborhood corridors. “There’s a certain schizophrenia to San Francisco’s economic development strategy.”

Sup. Eric Mar has been working with Jobs with Justice San Francisco and other groups to tweak city policies that have allowed the chains to proliferate. Last year, Mar held high-profile hearings in City Hall on how national chains impact local businesses, which pointed to the need for additional protections (see “Battling big box,” Jan. 3).

This year, he’s working on rolling out a series of legislative initiatives designed to level the playing field between local interests and those of Wall Street and the national chains it champions.

Last month, the Board of Supervisors approved Mar’s legislation to add banks to the city’s formula retail controls, a reaction to Chase Bank and other national banks snapping up vacant stores in neighborhood commercial corridors such as Divisadero Street.

Now he’s working on legislation that would mandate minimum labor and community benefit standards for chain stores — including grocery outlets such as Fresh & Easy — and study how chains affect San Francisco’s overall economy.

“There should be good neighbor policies when they come into a neighborhood,” Mar said. “Some neighborhoods are so distressed they may want a big box grocery story coming in, but we need to try to mitigate its negative impacts.”

One of his partners in that effort is his brother, Gordon Mar of Jobs with Justice, who argues the city needs to have a clearer picture of how national chains impact local communities.

“We’ve definitely seen an increase in corporate chain stores coming into San Francisco in the last year, and nobody has really been tracking it,” he said.

While the Planning Department’s quarterly pipeline report shows that applications for retail outlets has held steady at about 3 million square feet on the way in recent years, it doesn’t break out how much of that is national chains — let alone how that impacts the city’s economy and small business sector.

The city’s Legislative Analyst is now studying the matter and scheduled to release a report later this summer, which Gordon Mar said will be helpful in countering the narrow “jobs” rhetoric that now dominates City Hall.

“They are exploiting the economic recession by saying they’re bringing much needed jobs into the city and serving low-income residents,” he said. “But when you bring out the facts about the impact of these low-road retail stores on neighborhoods and small businesses, there is a net loss of jobs and a lowering of labor standards.”

 

 

VALUING MALLS

Yet the fate of those controls is uncertain at best, particularly in a tough economic environment in which the city needs revenue, people are desperate for jobs, and many residents have seen their buying power stagnate, making the cheap goods offered by Target and Walmart more attractive.

“It’s complicated stuff,” Michael O’Connor, a local entrepreneur and former member of the Small Business Commission who favors formula retail controls, told us. “Stores like Target do appeal to lower income families…The progressive agenda needs to understand that working-class families need somewhere to shop.”

O’Connor acknowledges how small businesses like those he owns, including a clothing store, often can’t compete with national chains who buy cheap goods in bulk. So he said he favors protections in some neighborhoods while allowing chains in others, telling us, “I don’t have a problem with the Target going into the Metreon.”

That argument also held sway with city officials when they considered approving the CityPlace project two years ago, which was presented as a mall filled with “value-based” stores that would be affordable to median income San Franciscans.

“At the time, the decision was around whether a value-based retail operation made sense in that location, and the answer was an emphatic ‘yes,'” Barbary Coast Consulting founder Alex Clemens, who represented the project, told us.

On a national or global level, there are good arguments against reliance on national chains selling cheap imported goods, which has created a huge trade deficit between the US and countries such as China that costs American jobs — ironically, the very things that some use as arguments for approving chain stores.

“The recession has created a climate of desperation where cities are more easily swayed by the jobs argument,” Mitchell said, noting the falsity of those arguments by pointing to studies showing that the arrival of chain stores in cities usually creates a net loss in employment. Finally, supporters of chain stores say the cash-strapped city needs the property and sales tax revenue “Because they say they’ll produce a lot sales tax revenue, they’re going to get away with all kinds of shit,” Cornell said, arguing that shouldn’t justify city policies that favor big corporations, such as tax breaks and publicly financed infrastructure. “I certainly don’t think [city officials] should be giving them any advantages.” There are few simple solutions to the complex and interconnected problems that result from the malling of San Francisco and other cities. It’s really a question of balance — and the answer of whether San Francisco can regain its balance has yet to be answered. “Given the mayor’s approach to economic development, it’s inevitable that we’ll have more coming into the city,” Sup. Mar said. “But the ’50s car culture, and the model of malls that came in the ’60s, don’t build communities or strong neighborhoods.”

Guardian voices: The labor agreement that changed SF

Zelda Bronstein
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18
Guardian voices: The labor agreement that changed SF

This year marks the 53rd anniversary of the beginnings of  negotiations between the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union and the Pacific Maritime Association over what came to be known as the “Mechanization and Modernization Agreement.”  Signed in October, 1960, after months of talks,  the “M and M agreement” transformed San Francisco’s economy forever, moving its founding industry — shipping and trans shipping — to the East Bay, opening up the land once devoted to maritime uses to real estate development, and setting off the modern political era of San Francisco.

The agreement allowed containerization to come into the San Francisco Bay, making obsolete  the finger piers along San Francisco’s waterfront and the ILWU’s “gangs” that worked on them, hand-loading “break bulk” cargo into the holds of cargo ships. The new technology of shipping cargo in a single  container that could be transported by truck, train, and ship without unloading  transformed maritime trade.

During World War II, shipbuilding and shipping were  fundamental in the effort to move billions of tons of supplies and millions of troops across the global battlefield. In both cases the  San Francisco Bay was ground zero in that in that effort.

Kaiser and Bechtel, two Bay Area-based construction companies, wildly successful in undertaking huge construction projects during the New Deal, were urged to build ships during the war. Kaiser in Richmond and Bechtel in Sausalito constructed  huge shipyards that  built cargo ships by the hundreds, bringing tens of thousands of workers to the Bay Area and changing the demographics of the region for ever. These huge industrial centers didn’t last after the war, and while they transformed who lived in the region, they didn’t really have a lasting economic impact.

But wartime changes in cargo handling did.

For as long as San Francisco had been a city, it depended on its port as the base of its economy. The Gold Rush happened here in part because we had a port and the world rushed in on ships. The enduring fortunes were made during that period by merchants and shipping companies were totally dependent on shipping and cargo handling.

At the heart of the maritime economy was the longshoreman who, by hand, loaded and unloaded ships’ holds. The demand for speed during WWII saw the then-revolutionary introduction of the fork lift truck on the piers of San Francisco, replacing hands with a machine for the first time in the history of the San Francisco waterfront.

But that was only the beginning. New ship designs and new shipping techniques were invented to meet the needs of global war. Since most of the Pacific islands that were the military objectives of the war had no ports or piers, ships were designed that could land directly on a beach and unload preloaded trucks.  Preloaded containers were simply stacked on the decks of Liberty ships, avoiding the need to load the cargo below decks.  By the Korean War these containers were in such regular use by the Army that ships were modified to carry only them, replacing below-deck cargo entirely.

Since ports and piers had been major targets during the war and required extensive rebuilding in both Europe and Asia,  new cargo handling techniques were built into these new facilities, making US ports, undamaged by the war, outmoded and old fashioned.  If US ports were to keep up they had to be modernized.  But who would pay for these new facilities: the shipping business or the government?

San Francisco was still governed by an unbroken line of Republican Mayors during this key period: the anti-New Deal, pro-Mussolini Angelo Rossi; the shipping line owner and anti- ILWU leader Roger Lapham; the pro-real-estate development Elmer Robinson; and finally, the last Republican Mayor of San Francisco, the pro-urban-renewal stalwart George Christopher. These four had no desire to rebuild the waterfront and make the ILWU even stronger. Indeed, Robinson and his successor Christopher had a vision of the waterfront as prime real estate, not working waterfront.

And so, with no commitment to the maritime industry from the city’s leadership and with technological change making the status quo impossible to maintain, Harry Bridges and the leadership of the ILWU cut the best deal they could for their existing members: the 1960 M and M agreement, which gave all existing longshore workers lifetime jobs and very good pay — but sealed the fate of San Francisco waterfront.

By 1962 the Port of Oakland had built its first container facility, and that same year, the first containership, the S.S. Elizabethport, docked and begin loading. By the mid 1970’s, the ILWU was no longer a force in the San Francesco labor movement, its leadership taken by the Building Trades unions  whose  numbers increased as the development boom, fueled by land made vacant by the loss of the maritime industry, grew.

For the rest of the Bay Area, it was San Francisco’s model of waterfront as real estate development that was followed, not Oakland’s investment in cargo shipping. By 1965, development of the Bay was so intense that the McAteer-Petris Act was passed, creating the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a regional body aimed at limiting the powers of local governments (like San Francisco) in filling and over-developing the Bay.

The 8 Washington battle, the struggle over the Hunters Point shipyard, and the looming battle over the use of a port pier for the Warriors arena all have their history deeply rooted in the 1960 M and M agreement.

In this second decade of the 21st century, our greatest challenge is creating and sustaining meaningful employment. Would our prospects be better if we had somehow been able to keep some maritime uses at the port? Would families in Bay View-Hunters Point be more able to buy homes in their own neighborhood if the same kinds of jobs that allowed their grandparents to buy theirs still existed? Would the boom-or-bust cycle of our real-estate dependent local economy been so disruptive if we had a more steady state base of a maritime sector — which kept the Great Depression from being so devastating in San Francisco in the1930s?

These questions are real — and should show that the shape of our economy is made by us and the decisions we make, locally, not solely by techological change, global trends or the far-too-palsied invisible hand of the free market.

Make it better now

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Make it better now

yael@sfbg.com

Noted queer writer and speaker Dan Savage sent a hopeful message to LGBT youth with his 2010 YouTube video, “It Gets Better.” But many queer youth in the Bay Area say they aren’t willing to wait.

“If my adult self could talk to my 14 year old self and tell him anything, I would tell him to really believe the lyrics from “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. There really is a place for us. There really is a place for you. And that one day you will have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community. And that life gets better,” Savage said.

Savage and his partner Terry Miller’s message went viral. It inspired hundreds of similar videos and eventually led to the creation of the It Gets Better Project, headquartered in Los Angeles. The videos were a response to a tragic cluster of suicides by children bullied for seeming gay, a trend that was only unusual in that the media picked up on it. And for many teens across the country, the “It Gets Better” videos provided crucial hope and support.

But last week, I was talking to Stephanie, Lolo, Ose, and Mia Tu Mutch, four Bay Area teens, about what its like to be a queer youth today. We were talking at the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (LYRIC), a center for queer youth in the heart of the Castro.

When I asked about the “It Gets Better” videos, they all had the same reaction: “Ugh. I don’t like those videos. I don’t like those at all.”

“Those videos are depressing,” Lolo said.

“Yeah. ‘Just wait ’til you’re an adult?'” Stephanie asked.

“Just wait ’til you’re an adult, and your problems will go away,” Mia said, shaking her head.

“And it’s celebrities, too,” Ose noted. “‘I got thousands of dollars, and it gets better!'”

The four of them are facilitators at LYRIC, leading weekly community-building workshops that deal with issues queer kids face. Between 17 and 21 years old, these youth are not waiting for it to get better. They’re doing it for themselves.

 

LYRIC’S OUTREACH

LYRIC definitely promotes pride and empowerment. Founded in 1988, LYRIC organizers worked to secure funding for a physical space a few years later. Since then, this purple house on Collingwood has functioned as a crucial center for Bay Area queer youth. It offers counseling, food, clothing, community building workshops that kids teach, and a safe place to hang out.

But LYRIC, like many nonprofits, has felt the impact of the severe government cuts to health and human services. As a result, its budget has suffered steady declines from approximately $1.2 million in 2008 to $954,000 this, year primarily due to shrinking government funding.

But LYRIC refuses to give up offering paid internships, a rarity in the nonprofit world.

“The City has made it clear that they no longer intend to invest significant funding into subsidized employment model programs — they want to serve greater numbers of youth at a much lower unit cost — even if we all understand that some of the most marginalized youth will no longer be getting the intensive level of support they need to make it to a successful adulthood” LYRIC’s Executive Director Jodi Schwartz told me, explaining that the organization is now growing support by more grassroots funding networks.

“We used to hire 60-70 young people per year, now it’s more like 20,” Schwartz says.

The organization still serves about 400 young people per year.

“I would guess we have 6,000 queer youth living in the city,” Schwartz said. “So we’re not reaching everyone. Not to say that all those 6,000 queer youth need a LYRIC, but they need community. We all need community.”

Youth from across the country come to San Francisco seeking that community. Often they have escaped intolerant, abusive, or dangerous situations in their families or hometowns. But when they arrive in this storied city, these youth are often disappointed.

“I was that kid who left a small town in Texas and who got to San Francisco as fast as I could,” Mia told me. “And I was like, you know, I’ll figure it out, I’ll find a job, and I’ll do this and that. And it was really hard.”

” I think that the difference is that there are more LGBT specific languages and policies, and organizations that are affirming. All of that is the best in the US, probably,” Mia said. “And there are all these cultural groups and all of that. But queerphobia and transphobia exist here just like it exists everywhere else.”

“So my big thing is how we have all these systems in place that make us a little more queer friendly,” she said. “But how do we actually get the public to stop hating people, to stop doing hate crimes, to stop bullying?”

Ose, who now lives in the Bayview, grew up closer to the city. But coming from a religious family in Modesto, he says, “I had heard things about the Castro itself. I always thought the Castro was the devil…I was a church boy.”

He remembers fear that someone he knew would recognize him in the forbidden neighborhood, that “my mom would find out and be like, what are you doing in the Castro? So I was scared to death my parents would find out I was coming to the Castro.”

That was two years ago. Now, Ose works in the Castro, and he was dressed in cut-off shorts and a slicked back Mohawk, long painted nails clicking on the table. “I’m hella gayed out,” he happily reports.

When Mia made it to San Francisco, she initially settled into the Tenderloin, rather than the gentrifying Castro.

“As a trans person, a lot of trans history is in the Tenderloin and there’s a lot of trans women who live in the Tenderloin and who work in the Tenderloin,” she explained. “So I feel more at home there. Even though it isn’t technically the gay neighborhood, it’s always been the queer ghetto and that’s where the low income and queer people of color live a lot.”

The Tenderloin is also the site of many of the services that queer youth use. Mia made some of her first local connections at Trans: Thrive, a program of the Asian Pacific Islander Center. And many of the kids at LYRIC, as well as the city’s other queer teens, benefit from Larkin Street Youth Services.

The homeless shelter oversees the only beds reserved for queer youth in the city, all 22 of them, a number Schwartz believes in inadequate. A report from Larkin Street in 2010 found that 30 percent of the homeless youth they serve identify as LGBTQQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning).

LYRIC is part of the Community Partnership for LGBTQQ Youth and the Dimensions Clinic Collaborative, which includes service organizations like the queer-specific health clinic Dimensions, the nearby LGBT Center, the Bay Area Young Positives HIV health and support nonprofit, and the city’s Department of Public Health. But LYRIC is one of only a few organizations that focuses on fun, informative community-building workshops.

 

ACCEPTANCE NOW

Savage promised queer kids that, in the distant future, they would “have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community.” But LYRIC’s workshops, largely envisioned and run by the youth themselves, show kids that they don’t need to wait: they can create those supportive networks for themselves, in the here and now.

Another such community-building effort was on display at the LGBT Center on June 15: Youth Speaks’ queer poetry slam Queeriosity. The show, which was preceded by five weeks of free poetry workshops for and by queer youth, brought together young queer people from across the Bay Area, and one could feel the love and support in the air.

“Queeriosity is important because, in the poetry scene, we have so many people with so many different backgrounds,” Milani Pelley, one of the show’s hosts and a poet who works with youth in the workshops, told me. “A lot of times people who get identified in the LGBT category, they don’t have that space where they’re front and center and it’s a space for them. It’s very important that we celebrate everyone.”

Pelley, 24, has been working with Youth Speaks since she was 16. She said the message of the It Gets Better videos might be too simple.

“Thinking about being an adult versus a teenager, adults go through the same things,” she said. “The only difference is it’s not encouraged to speak out about it, you’re supposed to act like you have it together and it’s okay.”

Mia said youthful teasing and bullying are precursors to hate crimes: “Bullying and hate crimes are related because it’s all about people not accepting you, and then violently reacting to who are. So either throwing insults or beating you up.”

On April 29, Brandy Martell, an African American trans woman, was murdered in Oakland in a likely hate crime. CeCe McDonald’s recent case has also exhibited the dangers and injustice trans women of color face. The young Chicago woman defended herself against a bigoted attacker who she ended up killing, only to spend time in solitary confinement while awaiting trial, get convicted on manslaughter, and, last week, be placed in a men’s prison to serve her sentence.

I asked the four LYRIC teachers about the campaigns of national organizations like the Human Rights Committee — such as marriage equity or LGBT soldiers — and they all shook their heads.

“There’s a huge disconnect between the national platforms of the major gay organizations and the actual realities of queer youth,” Mia said. “Like they don’t even have queer youth in the majority of their meetings, but then they act like they’re the ones fighting for our rights, you know.”

For example, she said “marriage equality wouldn’t affect me at all. Yeah, it would be okay, it would be better if it was equal across the board. But when you have people dying because of hate crimes, and dying because of bullying, and dying because they don’t have a place to stay and they’re on the streets, it’s like, I just feel like those are a lot more pressing than getting a piece of paper from the government.”

 

SETTING THE AGENDA

Mia serves on the city’s Youth Commission, where she’s designing training programs for service providers to work with LGBT youth. Ose is working with Schwartz to create programming for LGBTQ youth who don’t want to take the common path of rejecting religion and spirituality as they come to terms with other parts of their identity.

“I go to church a lot,” Ose explained. “I grew up as a Christian. And I wanted to touch base on that because a lot of times, the youth that I come across, the majority of them are being silenced…I’m still going through some issues with my own church, especially with my pastor because just recently I’ve heard that he dislikes me over the fact of the way I dress, the way I act, my feminine gestures.”

Stephanie sighed and said, “I wish there were more LYRICS around the city. One in Bayview, one in every district. And Oakland too.”

“People who provide counseling, food, clothes, water if you need it,” Lola added. “A safe space to go to, a place where you can make friends, and make connections. There need to be more places like that specifically for queer youth.”

Even in San Francisco, harassment is a reality in youth programs and schools. In 2009, the SFUSD studied Youth Risk Behavior in San Francisco’s elementary through high school public schools, and found that more than 80 percent of students reported hearing anti-gay remarks at school, and more than 40 percent said they had never heard school staff stop others from making those remarks. The survey also found that students who identified as LGBT were significantly more likely than their peers to report skipping school out of concern for their safety.

Queer youth will never stop finding informal networks of support. But structured settings like LYRIC can be vital. At places like LYRIC, youth find the community, the love, and the friends that Savage promised would appear with time — before they turn 18.

“It’s easier to build relationships and to build community when its structured, when it has a little bit of structure like, hey, this is a queer specified setting, we’re going to talk to each other, we’re going to hang out, we’re gonna do this, and then you kind of build community off of that. And because it’s based on identity, you feel more comfortable to talk about that,” Mia explained. “You have to change your reality. And you have to be the one to change it for yourself. Because ain’t nobody gonna make it better for you.”

Suspended state

Andrew Lam
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Suspended state

news@sfbg.com

In May, a rip appeared in the social safety net that catches many of the people whose careers have been derailed by the continuing economic crisis when Californians lost eligibility for federal relief money under the Fed-Ed portion of the federal unemployment insurance extension program.

The news of the funding loss came to program recipients in a letter from the California Employment Development Department (EDD). According to data obtained from the EDD by the Bay Guardian, 1,994 San Franciscans were among the more than 92,000 people statewide who were cut from the unemployment roles earlier then expected, as the maximum length of benefits was reduced suddenly from 99 weeks to 79 weeks.

A nuance in the legislation that regulates state-by-state eligibly for Fed-Ed caused California’s early exit from the program, while individuals in other states with lower unemployment rates and stronger employment prospects remain eligible for longer coverage. New York state, with an unemployment rate of 8.5 percent, 2.4 points lower then California’s rate, continues to receive Fed-Ed funding.

Ironically, that’s because the recession has lingered longer here than elsewhere, and unemployed Californians are now being punished for being stuck for so long in such a slow economy.

“In order for a state to qualify for the Fed-Ed extension program you have to have a high unemployment rate and certainty California does have a high unemployment rate,” EDD Deputy Director Loree Levy told us. “It is just not 10 percent higher than what it has been over the last three years, and that is a requirement of the program. So the good news is that California’s economy is improving. It is unfortunate news for a lot of the long-term unemployed individuals who will now be doing without these extension benefits.”

In San Francisco, the economy is definitely improving. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that the San Francisco metropolitan area, which includes San Francisco and San Mateo counties, saw the second highest 12-month rise in employment nationally, creating more than 25,000 jobs, a 2.7 percent leap in employment. This big jump, the second highest nationally, reduced the city’s unemployment rate to 7 percent in April, leaving San Francisco a rare rose in a sea of briars.

But that’s little consolation to people in industries that have yet to recover, from construction to education to other government jobs.

While the city’s economy has been buoyed by tourism, technology, and a segment of pre-existing affluence that has weathered the economic crisis, the statewide the picture is much different. The state’s “improving economy” left more than two million Californians unemployed in May, 10.9 percent the state’s workforce.

When statewide unemployment ticked up slightly in April, the state’s three-month average registered as 8 percent higher than the three-year average, missing by a statistical sliver the federal program’s threshold 10 percent increase. This triggered the BLC, which tracks unemployment across the nation, to notify the California EDD that funding of the Fed-Ed program would cease.

The trouble with this metric as a benchmark for benefits dispersion is when discouraged workers self identify as having stopped looking for a job, they are no longer included in the unemployment figures used by the BLS to determine Fed-Ed eligibility. If a fraction of these workers had identified themselves as seeking work, the Fed-Ed relief would have continued to flow into California.

If the state edges back across that threshold in the coming months, Fed-Ed money will flow into the state again, but those recently cut from the unemployment roles who did not exhaust their Fed-Ed eligibility time will not qualify to be re-added to the program.

The program’s loss could have a significant impact on the state’s economy going forward.

“In the three years since Fed-Ed was passed, more than 912,00 people in California have relied on the benefits,” Levy says. “That has brought $5 billion of federal funds into the ailing state economy. It has had a tremendous impact on the economy and when you add in a multiplying effect from money spent out there from these benefits on local businesses, it can be almost a $10 billion effect on the economy.”

As the economic crisis drags on, federal stimulus and relief programs that were planned with a short downturn in mind dry up, a political climate of austerity in government spending has taken its place. Individuals caught in the fallout of the economic crisis increasingly find themselves with nowhere to turn.

Only one out of three unemployed workers statewide currently receive any unemployment benefits, and before the end of Fed-Ed, a staggering 700,000 people who had been receiving benefits during the economic crisis exhausted the previous maximum 99 weeks without finding work.

“What happens when we require people to go out and get jobs when there are no jobs? That’s a nightmare. People are being cut off with no place to turn,” Princeton professor of economics Paul Krugman said at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco last month. “Benefits that are emergency benefits should not depend on some arbitrary timeline for the individual but for the duration of the emergency. If we have a flood, you don’t say ‘We are only going to help flood victims for three days.’ We help them until the flood recedes.”

Of those Californians who still do receive an unemployment check, over half have been out of work for more than six months, the period at which normal state funding ends and federally emergency extension programs take over. The remaining federal unemployment extension program enacted during the economic crisis — the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program — is set to phase out on Dec. 23 of this year. That is bad news for Californians locked out of the labor market who have exhausted the normal six months of state funded benefits.

Responding to the release of May’s week jobs report, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-SF) said the report, “Makes clear that we have more work to do to restore security and opportunity for the middle class. The time is now for Republicans to join us in moving forward on behalf of the middle class.”

Without the renewal by Congress of federal unemployment extension deep in the presidential election cycle, another larger surge in people booted from the unemployment roles will be locked in competition for the state’s paltry offering of new job creation — a punishing musical chairs game with real life stakes.

Dick Meister: Two big tests for labor

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By Dick Meister

 Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Helping get President Obama re-elected tops organized labor’s political agenda. But for now, unions are rightly focusing on special elections this month in Wisconsin and Arizona, where other labor-friendly Democrats are being challenged by labor foes.

Coming up first, on June 5, is the Wisconsin election to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who’s been labor’s public enemy No. 1 for his blatant anti-union policies. He’s been acclaimed by anti-labor forces nationwide and as widely attacked by labor.

Both sides see the election as highly symbolic, a possible guide for those seeking to limit the union rights of public employees and other workers or, conversely, for those attempting to halt the spread of Walker-like attacks on collective bargaining in private and public employment alike.

There are many reasons for replacing Walker with his recall election opponent, Democratic Mayor Thomas Barrett of Milwaukee. The AFL-CIO has come up with about a dozen reasons, headed by Walker’s severe limiting of the bargaining  rights of Wisconsin’s 380,000 public employees – a key action that helped trigger what Obama has described as a national “assault on unions.”

The AFL-CIO also complains that Walker has:

*”Led Wisconsin to last place in the nation in job creation.”

*”Disenfranchised tens of thousands of young voters, senior citizens and minority voters with voter suppression and voter ID laws.”

*”Put the health care coverage of 17,000 people at risk with unfair budget cuts.”

*”Allowed the extremist, corporate-backed American Legislative Council to exercise extraordinary influence.”

*”Made wage discrimination easier by repealing Wisconsin’s Equal Pay enforcement law.”

*”Attacked public workers’ retirement security.”

*”Blocked the path of young workers to middle class jobs by repealing rules on state apprenticeship programs.”

*”Killed the creation of more than 15,000 jobs when he rejected $810 million in federal  funds to construct a passenger rail system between Milwaukee and Madison.”

*”Sponsored new tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations that will cost the state $2.4 billion over the next 10 years.”

*”Proposed cuts to the state’s earned income tax credit that will raise taxes on 145,000 low-income families with children.”

Despite all that – and more – polls show the recall vote could go either way, with lots of campaign funding for Walker flooding in from  corporations and other union opponents across the country.

Unions have lots of tough campaigning ahead, as they do in Arizona. There, on June 12, a special election will determine who will serve in the Congressional seat held for three terms by Democrat Gabrielle Giffords. She resigned in mid-term this year while still recovering from the serious wounds she suffered during a 2011 shooting in Tucson in which six people were killed.

Ron Barber, a Giffords’ staffer who was wounded in the Tucson attack, will challenge Republican Jesse Kelly in the race to elect a representative to serve the rest of Giffords’ term. Kelly, who ran a close losing race against Giffords in 2010 , opposes  much of what the AFL-CIO supports.

The labor federation is especially unhappy with Kelly’s support for GOP proposals in Congress “which would turn Medicare into a voucher system,” and for getting $68 million in federal stimulus funds for his family’s construction firm while at the same time attacking Obama for creating the stimulus program.

Apparently, says the AFL-CIO, “Kelly lining his own pockets with stimulus dollars is proper. Everything else is socialism.” The AFL-CIO is likewise unhappy with Kelly’s endorsement by organizations considered “extremist and racist” by civil rights groups.

Like labor, Barber is a strong supporter of Social Security and Medicare. But Kelly says that Social Security is a “giant Ponzi scheme” and that Medicare recipients are “on the public dole.”

He’s said health care is a “privilege” and so presumably should not be a government-guaranteed right, and claimed that “the highest quality and lowest cost can only be delivered without the government.”

Kelly wants to reduce the Federal Drug Administration “as much as humanly possible.” He’s also advocated an end to government food safety inspections, leaving individuals to do their own inspections rather than rely on “the nanny state” to do it for them.

No wonder labor is mounting major campaigns against Kelly in Arizona and Walker in Wisconsin. Labor victories are needed there to help protect unions, their members and many others from attempts to weaken the rights, protections and other essential aid provided through government.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Meister: Another presidential step against anti-gay bias

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

President Obama’s bold endorsement of same-sex marriage should be only the first of his key acts in behalf of gay Americans. It’s now past time for him to redeem a 2008 campaign promise to issue an executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating against gay workers.

Such discrimination is already banned in Washington, D.C., and 21 states, including California. A presidential order would cover the millions of federal contractor employees in the other states. Building roads, bridges and dams are among the many essential tasks they perform throughout the country.

Previous executive orders, first issued seven decades ago, have made it illegal for contractors to discriminate on the basis of race or religion. Recent investigations by the San Francisco Chronicle and the gay publication Metro Weekly noted that Obama made his promise to add a ban on anti-gay discrimination during a meeting with a gay rights group in Houston four years ago.

The Chronicle quoted Heather Cronk, director of the gay rights group Get Equal, as noting that a non-discrimination order “would give concrete, real-life workplace protections to people who work for federal contractors like ExxonMobil that refuse, year after year, to add those protections on their own.”

Cronk recalled that former Bay Area activist Cleve Jones recently presented Obama with a binder containing more than 40 accounts of workplace discrimination in hopes of making a decisive case for a presidential order. The president accepted the binder, Cronk said, without saying a word. But later, Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett said the president had no immediate plans to ban contractor discrimination on his own.

That was confirmed a day later by Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary. Carney claimed the president nevertheless “is committed to securing equal rights” for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. He cited Obama’s long-time support for the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would give federal protection to LGBT workers in government as well as private employment.

Instead of issuing an executive order, Carney added, the president’s plans are to take “a comprehensive approach” by pushing for passage of the non-discrimination act.

But, as the Chronicle noted, “the legislation has no chance of passing in the current Congress,” whereas congressional approval is not needed for an executive order to go into effect. In any case, there seems to be only a slight chance that Obama would suffer serious political harm for issuing an order, since polls show strong public support for him doing so.

The president has in fact been losing support because of his refusal to act. The Chronicle, for instance, noted the anger of Log Cabin Republicans, the gay rights group that led the legal fight against the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that had excluded gays and lesbians from military service. The GOP group complained that Obama has “turned his back on 1.8 million LGBT workers” and failed to deliver on a policy that has broad, bipartisan support among the American peopl

Harsh criticism came, too, from a former congressional staffer, Tico Almeida, who helped draft the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and now heads a group called Freedom to Work. He called Obama’s refusal to act “a political calculation that cannot stand” as he announced that his organization was launching a campaign to increase pressure on Obama to issue an order.

One prominent – and wealthy – activist who’s pledged to contribute $100,000 to the drive to get Obama to change his mind called his refusal to sign an order “craven election-year politics.”

Pretty strong language, but Obama’s inaction on such a vital issue rightly opens him to such harsh judgment. His endorsement of same-sex marriage took genuine political courage. It proved he has the strength, the will and the ability to take the country another step closer to granting true equality to all Americans. Now the president needs to take that next essential step.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Our 2012 Small Business Awards

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Our 2012 Small Business Awards

WOMEN IN BUSINESS

KELLY MALONE, WORKSHOP AND INDIE MART

In a tech-obsessed society, our hands navigate today’s gleaming gadgets more often than those of yesteryear: a sewing machine, say, or a manual drill. DIY goddess Kelly Malone has spent years trying to change that — and in so doing has created a business that serves as a cultural touchstone for the budding Divisadero Street corridor.

Malone’s brick-and-mortar shop is named Workshop (1798 McAllister, SF. 415-874-9186. www.workshopsf.org), and it’s a place where aspiring crafters receive hours of instruction in oft-neglected skills like sewing, knitting, and terrarium-making — all while drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and meeting new friends. After receiving an enthusiastic response from her Indie Mart (www.indie-mart.com), a handmade craft fair she started six years ago in the backyard of her Mission digs, Malone saw a need for a hub for would-be crafters.

“I wanted to create a space that was super ‘hit it and quit it,'” she says. “Where you could come in and take a class, but you didn’t necessarily need to become some expert knitter. A place for people to sit down and get their hands dirty, learn to make something, and get inspired.”

Malone started Workshop on scant funding. Instead of relying on bank loans, she looked to her immediate community for investors. “I’ve started every business without money, which has forced me to really put myself out there and grow my businesses by meeting people and being super-passionate about what I do,” she says.

Malone says having a big budget to open her businesses would have been fun, but saving her pennies and having flea markets and garage sales to pay for sewing machines gives her more street cred, DIY all the way.

And like our favorite kind of businesspeople, Malone hardly sees her enterprises as a sterile way to make a quick buck. “I’m never going to get rich off these businesses, but if I get to the point where I can have a couple people on staff like I do now, and have enough to pay bills and go get some beers, hey, that’s good enough for me.” (Mia Sullivan)

CHAIN ALTERNATIVE

SPORTS BASEMENT

Although based locally, Sports Basement (www.sportsbasement.com) is technically a chain, as it now boasts four locations: an 80,000 square-foot building at the old commissary in the Presidio, SoMa’s brick-and-wood location, a store in Sunnyvale that once mimicked the inside of a computer (look for the remaining “ESC” keyboard sign), and another nearing Mount Diablo in Walnut Creek. But beyond the fact that it offers the only real alternative to national conglomerates when it comes to one-stop athletic and outdoor gear, the retail company is fiercely dedicated to its Bay Area community. Plus, its cozy, with hand-painted cardboard signs detailing specials, comfy couches, and super-friendly staff.

Founder Eric Prosnitz came up with the Sports Basement idea in an effort to create a more personalized experience in an off-price retail outlet, something tailored more closely to Northern California’s environment. Products change every week, discounts rule, and employees are encouraged to treat customers as individuals with a continuum of outdoor lifestyle needs. And the Basement recognizes that it’s an expansive company with the power to affect various neighborhoods. Last year, its locations hosted more than 2,000 community groups at 7,000 events, averaging around four events per store per day. Ten-15% of the retail space serves as free community space. Examples: Walnut Creek holds a fundraiser in the form of a kid apparel fashion show, Sunnyvale hosts ASHA for India, an organization dedicated to providing education for underprivileged children in India; Bryant St. houses the AIDS Lifecycle organization, and Presidio is the meeting spot for Golden Gate Mother’s Group — just to mention a few.

Aaron Schweifler, Director of Operations at Sports Basement, says the staff is encouraged to be creatively autonomous, and hopes each store will provide a shopping experience that can “wow” local residents. We are wowed! (Soojin Chang)

TENANT ADVOCATE

GREG MARKOULIS, AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL CENTER

In 1975, Greg Markoulis of American Industrial Center (2345 Third St., SF. www.aicproperties.com) was scouring San Francisco to find a new home for his family’s 25-year-old shoe manufacturing company. When American Can Company, one of the city’s oldest and busiest industrial complexes, offered an attractive deal on a vacant Third Street building, Markoulis gladly took them up. The new abode reinvigorated the company, transforming it from a street corner location to a community space housing more than 285 businesses — now including graphic designers, commercial photographers, architects, light industrial manufacturers, a winery, a yoga center, a martial arts studio, and a medley of Web-based companies and art collectives. That expansive spirit soon spread, helping to reinvigorate the entire Dogpatch area, which had suffered a lengthy period of industrial decline.

Thirty-seven years later, AIC still keeps the family ethos alive. When making executive decisions, Greg Makoulis says the company’s priorities align much more with how relatives interact with one another rather than those of a typical business. “The ideas of the oldest generation with the most experience are considered first,” says Markoulis.

As this side of town is rapidly undergoing gentrification, he could very well have sold the building to a corporation. But he sees his tenants as valuable community members, not just paychecks. Markoulis thrives on finding working solutions to accommodate his tenants, and respects the fact that people’s needs are ever-changing. Markoulis describes AIC’s priority to be “giving everyone a stable place to operate in.”

In Markoulis’ experience, one of the biggest challenges that AIC has faced over the years has to do with the cost and time for newly opening businesses to acquire permits. He hopes to see changes in San Francisco’s building and planning department, because he thinks a faster turnaround would help foster employment opportunities. (Soojin Chang)

CULTURE CHAMPION

DON ALAN, HEMLOCK TAVERN AND CASANOVA LOUNGE

“I think the challenge for San Francisco is to take care of the venues that its got,” says Don Alan of the ever-shrinking live music scene here. Alan has contributed enormously to the preservation of live rock in the City by the Bay with his raucous Hemlock Tavern space in Polk Gulch (1131 Polk, SF. 415-923-0923, www.hemlocktavernsf.com) on the site of former gay bar the Giraffe. He’s also a preservationist of dive bar ambiance, opening Mission District favorite Casanova Lounge, full to the brim of attractive indie young ‘uns on the make.

Alan got his rock start in the on community radio in Madison, WI, soon coming to SF and opening storied live bluegrass and jazz cafe Radio Valencia. “We opened the Casanova while we still had Radio Valencia and we realized that a bar format would work better for live entertainment than a cafe format,” Alan says. “We opened the Hemlock in 2001 after we closed Radio Valencia. I was really excited about having a space like this. I was very interested in having a kind of old Wisconsin tavern feel because that’s where I grew up. It was perfect for me, finding a space that had a small venue so we didn’t have to be concerned about getting 200 people in every night, so we could book the kind of music that we wanted and to have a big enough bar to support that.”

“But basically this is a subsidized entertainment operation. The money is made at the Hemlock’s bar and the culture happens in the back room with the shows. The culture wouldn’t happen without this up here.” So go buy a beer or eight, already, and then take in one of those rarer-and-rarer raging shows. (Mirissa Neff)

EMPLOYEE-OWNED BUSINESS AWARD

MANDELA FOODS COOPERATIVE

“In high school, all I wanted was there to be a place to find fruits and vegetables,” says Mandela Foods Cooperative (1430 Seventh St., Oakl. 510-452-1133, www.mandelafoods.com) worker-owner James Berk. “I never thought I’d be the one that could provide that. It’s an interesting place to be in.”

Before the store opened, Berk’s native West Oakland was a food dessert. A dependence on convenience stores for nutrition was leading to rampant bad health in his community, so when the opportunity arose to be a part of a for-profit, organic-heavy grocery store in Mandela Marketplace, he took it. Responding to the neighborhood’s request, the shop employs and is owned by community residents. These worker-owners make all the shop’s decisions in group meetings, aiming for consensus when it comes to many essential issues.

Now, nearly three years after opening its doors, Mandela Foods Cooperative is a neighborhood staple. The majority of customers live within a radius of a few blocks and come to snap up bestselling items like orange juice, coconut water, and kale (a vegetable Berk said he had never heard of before working at the store.)

Ready-made food is also popular, from full plate meals to sandwiches that neighbors drop in to buy, despite a Subway next door. Though the shop’s focus continues to be on organic, naturally-produced foods, worker-owners see a need for a greater diversity of products: cheap staples alternating with more spendy products geared towards sustainable foodies. Business is stronger than ever right now, too — Berk says the small shop is on pace to break even this year.

So how is it banding with your neighbors to bring the rest of the block ingredients for a healthy diet? About as positive as you’d imagine it to be. “There’s a unity here that I’m not accustomed to,” says Berk. (Caitlin Donohue)

ARTHUR JACKSON DIVERSITY IN SMALL BUSINESS AWARD

CHERYL BURR, PINKIE’S BAKERY AND CITIZEN’S BAND

Cheryl Burr has no idea why her first bakery boss left her 16-year old self in charge of the pastries. “I would never have let a teenager do that at my business!” she chuckles. But really, the guy was showing prescience — Burr and business partner Chris Beerman, who originally shared space in a bakery-bento retail window in Potrero Hill, opened the doors of their Pinkie’s Bakery (1196 Folsom, SF. 415-556-4900, www.pinkiesbakerysf.com) in SoMa nearly three years ago and have been tickling sweet teeth with their skills there ever since.

“I’ve always been a super-strong personality,” Burr tells us, sitting in the sunny table area of Pinkie’s. Though the Asian American breadsmith built a respectable career in high-class kitchens around the city, there came a moment when she wanted to be able to execute her own vision. “I’ve gotten to this point in my career where I didn’t want to answer to anybody.”

So she took control of her own trajectory, renting space in a commercial kitchen, starting her own hustle. Burr supplied pies to wholesale accounts, mainly friends of friends she’d met through her years in the restaurant business. Her commercial space is part of a culinary reinvigoration of the neighborhood around Seventh Street and Folsom. Pinkie’s is a stone’s throw from Bloodhound Bar, Sightglass Coffee, Radius restaurant, Terroir wine bar and more. “There is definitely a sense of community and partnership around here,” says Burr, who will sometimes refer to the strip as “Folsoma.”

Pinkie’s is also a room away from Citizen’s Band, Beerman and Burr’s freshly-sourced diner. The same customers that come for Burr’s famous levain bread and apple butter morning buns can now also order a dinner of poutine with wild mushroom gravy and crispy pork belly right next door.

“We want to continue to refine what we’re doing here,” Burr says when asked about her future business plans. Did that young woman on her first baking job envision the success of her own bread basket? She smiles. “I’m not entirely sure what I envisioned, but it’s different.” (Caitlin Donohue)

GOLDEN SURVIVOR AWARD

PHIL’S ELECTRIC

During World War II, Phil Sidari was commissioned to make artificial limbs for disabled US veterans returning home. The shortage of finished goods during wartime also prompted Sidari to begin constructing small appliances out of spare parts. Thus, 61 years ago, Phil’s Electric (2701 Lombard, SF. 415-921-3776, www.philselectric.com) was born.

Sidari passed away at the ripe old age of 103, but his friends Vicki and Bob Evans took the reins in the 1970s when Phil decided to retire. Vicki says the store has gone through quite a few changes over the years, including a relocation 28 years ago from Fillmore Street to a quiet corner near the gates of the Presidio.

The shop is intimate, homey, and entirely a family affair. Bob and Vicki’s sons Tom and Ken help their parents run the business and provide excellent customer service to their patrons. Phil’s Electric specializes in the repair of vacuums and lamps but also sells coffee makers, blenders, vacuums, razors, and a host of other small electronic items.

Yet the rise of cheap, disposable electronics has made it difficult a business that’s founded on, well, fixing things. “In the past, almost everything got repaired, but that’s changing,” says Vicki. “For example, you can buy a Cuisinart coffeemaker that, after its warranty, there are no parts for it. So you throw it out. Whereas, say 12 years ago, we would have had a part for that and fixed it for you.”

Phil’s Electric also faces stiff competition from the Internet and larger stores. But it does have some advantages. “Internet companies are working out of a warehouse somewhere, so they don’t really have any commitment to the neighborhood or the city or the community,” Vicki says. And the unique thing about San Franciscans, according to Vicki, is our interest in supporting neighborhood businesses. “If we moved this to a suburban area, I don’t know if we’d have that many loyal customers.”

Vicki’s favorite part about the business? The human aspect and her autonomy. “You can interact with your customers and really try to be flexible and meet people’s needs.” (Mia Sullivan)

SMALL BUSINESS ADVOCATE

CALIFORNIA MUSIC AND CULTURE ASSOCIATION

Two years ago, during the climax of the police and regulatory crackdown on San Francisco nightlife that we dubbed the “War of Fun,” the California Music and Culture Association (www.cmacsf.org) was formed to advocate for all the club owners, promoters, DJs, and other creatures of the night who create our urban soundtrack and culture.

Since then, CMAC has become powerful advocate on behalf of nightlife, demonstrating an influence on Mayor Ed Lee and other city leaders and promoting an understanding at City Hall of the important role played by nightlife, which a recent Controller’s Office report found accounts for $4.2 billion in annual economic activity.

“As the recent Controller’s report demonstrated, the small businesses that make up the nightlife economy have a huge impact on the overall economy, and we’re happy the city is starting to realize this,” Alix Rosenthal, co-chair of the CMAC board, told us.

Now, with the help of newly hired Executive Director Laura Hahn, CMAC hopes to move from playing defense against crackdowns and punitive legislation to playing offense by expanding its membership and developing a proactive agenda that will help nightlife and its purveyors flourish.

“Now that we don’t have our back against the wall, we’re trying to expand,” Hahn told us. “We want to bring it to even smaller business owners like individual DJs, promoters, and individual musicians — the backbone of nightlife in San Francisco.”

But not matter what new realms CMAC gets into, small business advocacy will always be at the core of its mission. As Hahn said, “We want to focus on standing up for the little guys who don’t have people fighting for them in City Hall.” CMAC will host the 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Awards, Thursday, May 31 at Mezzanine, doing even more to bring local nightlife to the fore. (Steve Jones)

GOOD NEIGHBOR

SHANNON AMITIN, FARM:TABLE

“People always ask me if I ever consider expanding,” Shannon Amitin, owner of farm:table (754 Post, SF. 415-292-7089, www.farmtablesf.com) says over the phone, although I swear I can hear his eyes twinkling. “I usually laugh and say, ‘Yes, but only if I can find a much smaller space.'”

The joke — or rather the good fortune — here is that Amitin’s bustling Tenderloin cafe and restaurant squeaks just shy of 265 square feet, with a large communal table for sharing some of the best gourmet dishes in the area. Those dishes are delectably evanescent: the three-year-old resto’s changing daily menu is Tweeted each morning for your rising and shining appetite. Featured as I write this: polenta cake + yukon potato hash + soft egg, asiago + rooftop herb frittata.

“Rooftop”? Yep, farm:table harvests most of its herbs and many greens from its roof, adding a bit of green to the neighborhood. Coming soon, another bit of green in the form of a farm:table parklet, whose funding was secured via, what else, Kickstarter. Farm:table itself has become a community hub for nightlife characters, nonprofit advocates, and office workers.

And yes, there is delicious coffee. Amitin cut his teeth dripping cups of Blue Bottle behind the original’s counter, but became disillusioned when Blue Bottle tipped from a friendly experiment into a chain-aspirational juggernaut. “I saw what I didn’t want to do,” he says. “That’s what led me to something small and personal. I have really good people working for me, in a vibrant area, with a crowd that’s open to new flavors. I want to keep that magic.” (Marke B.)

READERS’ CHOICE

PINK BUNNY

It’s been open less than a year, yet Marina luxury erotic goods boutique Pink Bunny (1772 Union, SF. 415-441-7399, www.pinkbunny.biz) has hopped into our readers’ hearts — and possibly other parts as well. Founder and CEO Serene Martinez showcases quality adult toys from the likes of Jimmyjane and gorgeous lingerie in a lovely, well-curated space. Union Street, get kinky!

 

Those rich city workers

Zelda Bronstein
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10
Those rich city workers

The Chron’s Matier and Ross celebrated May Day early by running a piece on all of those overpaid city workers who are hauling in hundreds of thousands of dollars. And indeed, it sounds shocking: Nathaniel Ford, who was ousted from his job as the head of Muni, walked away  with $567,000. That’s worse than Arlene Ackerman, who screwed up the public schools and got a $375,000 golden parachute. (Actually, the bulk of Ford’s payout was approved last summer, so it’s not really new information.)

Still: The $500K Club and all of the $200K-and-up people makes it appear that the city is just pouring the taxpayers’ hard-earned cash down the maw of those greedy public-sector workers (some of whom just happen to be in contract talks).

Imagine:

The average pay for all city workers was $93,229, plus benefits. According to the city controller, the average wage earner in the city’s private sector, on the other hand, made about $78,228.

Enough to make the average private-sector person, who lacks retirement benefits, angry at the apparent largesse.

But let’s put this in perspective.

The vast majority of the highly-paid city employees are either people with advanced degrees and skills (doctors and lawyers) who would make even more in the private sector, or people in the management ranks, or — most notably — people in the public-safety sector.

Cops and firefighters in the city make a lot of money. More than their counterparts in much of the rest of the nation. Yes, those are tough jobs, and yes, they deserve to be well paid, but should every retired chief and command-staff-level cop walk away with a pension and benefits of close to $200,000 a year, for life? That’s a fair question.

Take out the cops, firefighters, doctors, lawyers and top-dollar department heads, who get special employment contracts that nobody else gets, and you have a very different picture.

The average member of SEIU 1021 who works for the City and County of San Francisco earns $50,400 a year. That’s average — and since SEIU represents some high-skilled workers who make considerably more than that, quite a few of the city workers make less. It’s decent pay compared to a lot of nonprofit and some private-sector jobs, but for a unionized staff in an expensive city — a staff that’s taken pay cuts and furloughs for the past few years — it hardly seems excessive.

I realize how sexy these “bloated city worker salary” stories are — the Chron loves to put this stuff on the front page — but it would be nice if Matier and Ross gave a more accurate picture.

 

For your (even further) consideration: expanded short takes on SFIFF, week two

Sue Vaughan
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1
For your (even further) consideration: expanded short takes on SFIFF, week two

Ahoy! Yes, there’s still time to gorge on the 55th annual SFIFF; even if you’re just getting into movie-watching mode today, there’s a full week (plus a day) of festival madness left. Right here on Pixel Vision we’ll be posting reports from the fest as it happens (check out Sam Stander’s post here!); read on if you want to plan ahead to catch some of the best of what’s to come. (Most shows are $13 and venues are the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.; SF Film Society Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; and Sundance Kabuki Cinema, 1881 Post, SF.)

WED/25
Polisse (Maïwenn, France, 2011) Comparisons to The Wire are not to be tossed around lightly, but when the Hollywood Reporter likened Polisse to an entire season of the masterpiece cop show packed into a single film, it was onto something. Director, co-writer, and star Maïwenn (the object of desire in 2003’s High Tension) hung out with real officers serving in Paris’ Child Protection Unit, drawing inspiration from their dealings with pedophiles, young rape victims, negligent mothers, pint-sized pickpockets, and the like (another TV show worth mentioning in comparison: Law & Order: SVU). But Polisse (the title is deliberately misspelled, as if by a child) is no simple procedural; it plunges the viewer directly into the day-to-day lives of its boisterous characters, who are juggling not just stressful careers but also plenty of after-hours troubles, particularly relationship issues. Between heartwrenching moments on the job (and off), the unit indulges in massive cut-loose episodes of what amounts to group therapy: charades, dance parties, and room-clearing arguments, most of which involve huge quantities of booze. Watching Polisse is a messy, emotional, rewarding experience; no wonder it picked up the Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Wed/25, 6pm; Thu/26, 3pm, FSC. (Cheryl Eddy)

Last Screening (Laurent Achard, France, 2011) A bit of an odd duck, 30-ish, nondescript Sylvain (Pascal Cervo) is in denial over the imminent closure of the small French repertory cinema he’s operated and lived in for years. But that’s hardly his most alarming mental hang-up: in his spare time he frequently goes around stalking and killing random women for a grisly purpose that has to do (of course) with his dear, departed, thoroughly demented mother. The only horror item in this year’s slim SFIFF “Late Show” section, Laurent Achard’s pulseless genre homage tips hat to 1960’s Peeping Tom and other, less obvious cineastic objets d’amour — most conspicuously, Renoir’s 1954 French Can Can, which is playing at Sylvain’s theater — but doesn’t seem interested in suspense, or psychology, or even style. It’s coldly unpleasant yet dull. Wed/25, 9:30pm, FSC. Sat/28, 10pm, Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)

 

THU/26
Rebellion (Mathieu Kassovitz, France, 2011) The latest polemical film from the director of La Haine (1995) presents National Gendarmerie Intervention Group Captain Philippe Lejorus’ account of his experiences during the 1988 New Caledonia hostage crisis. It’s an election year in France, so all bets are off as to how the unfortunate fiasco will resolve. Striking camerawork distinguishes this tense, morally complex drama, which features Kassovitz as Lejorus, a humane negotiator in the midst of a politically charged battle for hearts, minds, and civil rights. The film is edited to embody its political context, with distancing effects such as voiceover and suddenly reframed shots that emphasize the two sides of a disagreement. Thu/26, 6pm; Tue/1, 9:45pm; May 3, 4:30pm, Kabuki. (Sam Stander)

Crulic — The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, Romania/Poland/France, 2011) As the graphic novel has made the comic book into an adult art form, so recently the animated feature has increasingly matured toward diverse, weighty, mature themes. Anca Damian’s film is the autobiography of one Claudiu Crulic (excellently voiced by Vlad Ivanov), a Romanian Everyman who recounts his luckless life from the grave. He grows up motherless, shunted around, drifting through jobs, finally scoring halfway decent employment and a girlfriend as a guest worker in Poland. Then he’s arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. Fed up after being kicked like a dog his whole life, he commences a hunger strike for justice. And at that point the hitherto delightfully droll collage of numerous low-tech animation techniques begins to drag a bit, because Damian’s style is too impish to support tragedy, let alone a dirge-like portrait of physical deterioration á la Hunger (2008). But still, this is an impressive stretch of the medium. Thu/26, 6:30pm, PFA. Sun/29, 12:30pm; May 2, 6:16pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Unfair World (Filippos Tsitos, Greece/Germany, 2011) Veteran Turkish-Greek actor Antonis Kafetzopoulos stars in this deadpan crime drama about a gullible, alcoholic police officer who falls for a duplicitous cleaning lady after a plan to prove a suspect’s innocence goes horribly awry. While the film quickly establishes a nice black-comic momentum — cop first encounters cleaner while intentionally tripping a security guard chasing her for shoplifting — a muddled storyline and glacial pace soon saps it of any vigor. What could have been a beguiling exercise in absurdity becomes a leaden misfit-character study. Still, the misfits are at least interesting: with his heavy-lidded, hangdog sadness, Kafetzopoulos is a sort of Greek Philip Baker Hall (a good thing), and it’s hard to wholly dislike a movie featuring such bon mots as “I shit on your dreams!” Thu/26, 6:30pm; Sat/28, 6:15pm, Kabuki. Sun/29, 8:15pm, PFA. (Michelle Devereaux)

 

FRI/27
Where Do We Go Now? (Nadine Labaki, France/Lebanon/Egypt/Italy, 2011) With very real, deadly sectarian conflict on their doorstep, a group of Lebanese village women are making it up as they go along in this absurdist, ultimately inspiring dramedy with a dash of musical. Once sheltered by its isolation and the cheek-to-jowl intimacy of its denizens, the uneasy peace between Muslims and Christians in this small town threatens to shatter when the outside world begins to filter in, first through town-square TV broadcasts then tit-for-tat jabs that appear ready to escalate into violence. So the village’s women conspire to preserve harmony any way they can, even if that means importing a motley cadre of Ukrainian “exotic” dancers. What results is a postdebauchery climax that almost one-ups 2009’s The Hangover — and a film that injects ground-level merriment and humanity into the headlines, thanks to director, cowriter, and star Nadine Labaki (2007’s Caramel), who has a gimlet eye and a generous spirit. Fri/27, 6:45pm, Kabuki; Mon/30, 3:15pm, Kabuki. (Kimberly Chun)

Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema (Todd McCarthy, U.S., 2007) Legendary French film publicist, programmer, director, and movie junkie Pierre Rissient gets his own filmic homage in this documentary from Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy (1992’s Visions of Light). Rissient, who will receive the Mel Novikoff Award at this year’s festival, is certainly a character — the round-faced septuagenarian oozes a puppy-dog cuddliness cut with a formidable intellect and a hint of tart, old-man pervy-ness. But this collection of talking heads interspersed with classic film clips is unfortunately a bit of a snooze. Considering said talking heads include cinematic firebrands like Werner Herzog and the late Claude Chabrol, and with a character passionate as Rissient at its center, that’s surprising. “No one in the world of cinema can tell you what he does,” Chabrol remarks. After watching the film you probably won’t be able to figure it out either. Fri/27, 4pm, FSC. Mon/30, 6:30pm, PFA. (Devereaux)

Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee, England, 2011) Grant Gee has compiled a meditation on a meditation — subtitled “A walk through The Rings of Saturn,” his documentary is an extension, if not exactly an adaptation, of the genre-defying travel narrative by the late German author W.G. Sebald. Writers and scholars expound on their particular love for the novel and its author, and the imagery featured on screen frequently echoes the startlingly spare photographs that litter its pages. The approach seems to align with the Chris Marker-esque investigative methods of its subject, traversing networks between fact and fiction, memory and the modern world. This book, as with any beloved artwork, means many things to many people, but Gee manages to capture the peculiar appeal of Rings, even if all it really leaves you with is an intense desire to read or reread the book. Fri/27, 6:30pm, PFA. Sat/28, 6:30pm, FSC. Tue/1, 9:30pm, Kabuki. (Stander)

 

SAT/28
Somebody Up There Likes Me (Bob Byington, U.S., 2012) A textbook illustration of what’s so frequently right and wrong with Amerindie comedies today, Bob Byington’s feature starts out near-brilliantly in a familiar, heightened Napoleon Dynamite-type milieu of ostensibly normal people as self-absorbed, socially hapless satellites revolving around an existential hole at the center in the universe. The three main ones meet working at a suburban steakhouse: Emotionally nerve-deadened youth Max (Keith Poulson), the even more crassly insensitive Sal (Nick Offerman), and nice but still weird Lyla (Teeth‘s estimable Jess Weixler). All is well until the film starts skipping ahead five years at a time, growing more smugly misanthropic and pointless as time and some drastic shifts in fortune do nothing to change (or deepen) the characters. Still, the performers are intermittently hilarious throughout. Sat/28, 6:45pm, Kabuki. Sun/29, 9:15pm, FSC. Tue/1, 6:15pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

 

SUN/29
Policeman (Nadav Lapid, Israel, 2011) This diptych-structured provocation explores two subsets of Jewish Israeli society — the macho nationalism of a group of police who are also dedicated family men, and the aspirations of a cadre of privileged young revolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Israeli state they see as oppressive. Neither set is particularly likeable, so the political implications of the film are somewhat ambiguous, though still entirely unsettling; the Israel-Palestine issue is a huge neon elephant in the room, occasionally acknowledged but never looked at directly. Certain moments of sudden symbolically rich violence will (and already have, in Cinema Scope) invite comparisons to Haneke, though the overall tone is something different. This is a character-driven film, and despite the unpleasantness of the personalities, the cast is uniformly stellar. Sun/29, 9pm, Kabuki. May 2, 3:45pm; May 3, 8:15pm, FSC. (Stander)

 

MON/30
Chicken With Plums (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/Germany/Belgium, 2011) Steeped in whimsy — and a longing for love, beauty, and home — this latest effort from brilliant Persian-French cartoonist-filmmaker Marjane Satrapi and director Vincent Paronnaud flaunts the odd contours of its eccentric narrative, enchants with its imaginative tangents, sprawls like an unincapsulated life, and then takes off on aching, campy romantic reverie—a magical realistic vision of one Iranian artist’s doomed trajectory. Master violinist Nasser Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric) is seeking the ineffable — a replacement for his destroyed instrument — and otherwise he’s determined to die. We trace the mystery of his passing, backward, with wanders through the life of his family and loved one along the way in this playful, bittersweet feast. Despite Amalric’s glazed-eyed mugging, which almost spoils the dish, Satrapi’s wonderfully arch yet lyrical visual sensibility and resonant characters — embodied by Maria de Medeiros, Jamel Debbouze, Golshifteh Farahani, and Isabella Rossellini, among others — satisfy, serving up so much more than chicken with plums. Mon/30, 6:15pm; May 2, 12:30pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

 

TUE/1
Hysteria (Tanya Wexler, U.S./England, 2011) Tanya Wexler’s period romantic comedy gleefully depicts the genesis of the world’s most popular sex toy out of the inchoate murk of Victorian quackishness. In this dulcet version of events, real-life vibrator inventor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is a handsome young London doctor with such progressive convictions as a belief in the existence of germs. He is, however, a man of his times and thus swallows unblinking the umbrella diagnosis of women with symptoms like anxiety, frustration, and restlessness as victims of a plague-like uterine disorder known as hysteria. Landing a job in the high-end practice of Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), whose clientele consists entirely of dissatisfied housewives seeking treatments of “medicinal massage” and subsequent “parosysm,” Granville becomes acquainted with Dalrymple’s two daughters, the decorous Emily (Felicity Jones) and the first-wave feminist Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal). A subsequent bout of RSI offers empirical evidence for the adage about necessity being the mother of invention, with the ever-underused Rupert Everett playing Edmund St. John-Smythe, Granville’s aristocratic friend and partner in electrical engineering. Tue/1, 9:30pm, Kabuki. May 3, 6pm, FSC. (Rapoport)

 

MAY 3 (Closing Night)

Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey (Ramona S. Diaz, U.S.) The director of 2003’s Imelda returns with this portrait of a way more sympathetic Filipino celebrity: Arnel Pineda, plucked from obscurity via YouTube after Journey’s Neil Schon spotted him singing with a Manila-based cover band. Don’t Stop Believin’ follows Pineda, who openly admits past struggles with homelessness and addiction, from audition to 20,000-seat arena success as Journey’s charismatic new front man (he faces insta-success with an endearing combination of nervousness and fanboy thrill). He’s also honest about feeling homesick, and the pressures that come with replacing one of the most famous voices in rock (Steve Perry doesn’t appear in the film, other than in vintage footage). Especially fun to see is how Pineda invigorates the rest of Journey; as the tour progresses, all involved — even the band’s veteran members, who’ve no doubt played “Open Arms” ten million times — radiate with excitement. May 3, 7pm, Castro. (Eddy)

Tiger woods

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0
Tiger woods

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The Tasmanian tiger wasn’t a cat at all, but a pouched marsupial resembling a ring-tailed dog, with the most fearsome steel-trap jaws imaginable. It was hunted out of existence as a menace to domestic livestock; the last one died in captivity in 1936. Nonetheless, alleged sightings persist. Like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, the tiger is kept alive at least in the imagination by the fervency of stubborn believers.

The search to prove something now-mythological to be true and extant is always a good hook for fiction. Julia Leigh’s 1999 novel The Hunter is a cool, precise yet ambiguous story — the kind that you’d classify as a “thriller” if it weren’t so pointedly detached — about a lone-gun mercenary of sorts hired by a biotech conglomerate for a top-secret mission. He’s to stalk, kill, and extract DNA of potential great pharmacological value from a last Tasmanian tiger which, purportedly, has duly been sighted.

The chimera of the tiger and its moral weight as yet another sacrifice to corporate greed interests Leigh less than the enigmatic hunter himself, a damaged soul whose past is off-limits (even to the reader), and who’s long since walled himself off by a highly efficient, methodical guardedness both professional and emotional. The current job is his exclusive focus; if someone has to be killed to ensure its completion, he won’t revel in the task, but neither will he hesitate.

His focus is disrupted, however, not just by the hostility of local loggers who assume he’s one of the tree-hugging “greenies” who obstruct their employment, but by the very messy circumstances of the household he’s forced to bunk in between outback treks. Eventually the latter demands his engagement beyond the call of duty, a lowering of self-protective reserve. But Leigh is much less comfortable with that humanizing material; her novel is most at home alone in the wilderness, suiting a protagonist who’d rather avoid contact with others of his species if he can help it.

Leigh is an interesting talent. But on the basis of that first novel, her second, Disquiet, and last year’s debut film Sleeping Beauty — which stirred controversy at Cannes because it centered on a woman who lets men have sex with her when she’s drugged unconscious — or was it because there was disagreement whether the film was more shocking than it was cold and boring? — it’s a good thing she didn’t write or direct the Hunter movie. Daniel Nettheim did both, and he’s been faithful to the source while ultimately creating a much more involving, powerful experience. Like its hero, this Hunter does what Leigh couldn’t, or wouldn’t: it realizes the value of compassion.

Willem Dafoe’s Martin — in the book he doesn’t even have a name — travels incognito to a remote area, posing as an academic researching Tasmanian devils. (That large rodent-like animal is still very much alive, albeit endangered.) Expecting ordinary accommodations, instead he finds himself staying at the hippie-ish abode of a family in crisis. The husband was an actual environmental researcher who disappeared in the woods a year ago, quite possibly killed by those antagonistic loggers. Since then his wife Lucy (Frances O’Connor) has been in a medicated stupor of grief, rarely getting out of bed, leaving their young children — assertive Sass (Morgana Davies) and apparently mute-by-choice Bike (Finn Woodlock) — to fend for themselves. Against all his instincts and professional ethics, Martin finds himself pulled into their obvious neediness.

Nothing else about The Hunter is obvious, though. Some may find it too short on back story, mystery resolution, or genre definition. (Like the book, it’s almost an action thriller.) But from the story’s spare bones Nettheim has built a narrative about overcoming isolation and adversity that is aptly chilly for a while yet finally very moving. The actors, also including Sam Neill as a local of uncertain loyalties, are economically perfect. The diverse Tasmanian scenery is both spectacular and somber in Robert Humphreys’ widescreen photography. The only element too conventional at times is the musical scoring, although it suits the final turn in emotional urgency beautifully.

Confusingly, this Hunter arrives not long after an Iranian film with the same title, one also having much to do with alienation and wild landscapes. That film was very good, but this one might be indelible.

 

THE HUNTER opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

Why free Muni for youth makes sense

Zelda Bronstein
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62
Why free Muni for youth makes sense

Supervisor Scott Wiener has gone out of his way to dis the plan to let kids ride Muni for free. His oped in the Chron April 9 argued that the city just doesn’t have the money ($8 million):

We need to increase access to transportation for low-income youth, but a new and expensive obligation for Muni – at a time when Muni cannot pay for its basic operational needs and is expanding parking meters and increasing parking fines – is a bad idea.

But that misses the point — and People Organized to Win Employment Rights is mounting a petition campaign to get Wiener back on track.

The Municipal Transportation Agency, which oversees Muni, failed to approve the plan the first time around, but the vote was tied with Commission Chair Tom Nolan absent, so it’s still possible to move it forward. And on April 17, Sup. David Campos, who proposed the plan, and his allies will try again.

Yes, Muni is (perpetually) broke, and yes, deficits and cuts mean declines in service. But Campos has identified money to pay for the program without damaging operating and maintenance funds. Oh, and the parking meters get dragged in again:

The understandable public perception is that Muni is expanding parking meters to Sundays, adding new meters, and raising ticket prices not to pay for improvements to the system but rather to fund free Muni for all youth, even those who don’t need the subsidy.

And the problem with that is … what? People with cars ought to subsidize transit riders — young, old and everything in between. It’s really not that expensive to park at a meter in San Francisco, and now that most of them take credit cards, you don’t have to carry $5 in quarters around with you. I drive a car myself, to ferry my kids around. I have no sympathy for people who pay to have a large motor vehicle in a transit-first city and don’t want to pay for the impacts.

(Besides, what are all those religious people complaining about — nobody pays to park for Sunday church anyway. They just park in the middle of the street.)

But put all of that aside for a minute and think about this: San Francisco spends all kinds of money, directly and indirectly, trying to convince people to ride Muni instead of driving. And one of the best ways to get new riders is to get kids started as transit users as soon as their parents decide they’re old enough to get on the bus.

For us, that was sixth grade, when we bought my son a clipper card and told him we weren’t leaving work early to pick him up (in the car) after school any more. I showed him how to find the Muni map on the web, showed him how to connect to NextBus on his phone, gave him a pat on the head (not really) and sent him off to explore the wonders of San Francisco public transit. It’s worked like a charm: He takes the bus to his martial arts class, takes the bus to Cards and Comics to buy Magic Cards, takes the bus to the mall and to visit friends … and now he knows more about the system than I do. He can navigate on his own anywhere in town — and he loves it. It’s freedom. Suburban kids have to wait until they’re 16 and can get a driver’s license to even begin to get that sense that they don’t need parents in tow to go where they want to go.

Most of the teenagers I know in this city don’t bother to learn to drive any more. They bike and they take the bus. That’s a wonderful thing — and San Francisco should do everything possible to encourage it.

And a great way to start is to invest a modest amount of money — less than one percent of Muni’s budget — in training kids that the way to travel is by bus and train. Make it easy; make it free. Hell, half the middle-school kids who ride Muni never pay the fare anyway; they go in the back door and pocket the money that their parents gave them for bus fare so they can buy something they aren’t supposed to have. It’s the way of the world.

This isn’t just a subsidy for kids who can’t afford Muni, although that’s a great thing and I’m all in favor. It’s an investment in the future, a cheap step toward a future day when turning 16 isn’t all about going to the DMV, and travel doesn’t mean car travel — and the streets of San Francisco are cleaner, safer, less crowded and better for all of us. Isn’t that worth the money?

Come on, Tom Nolan; you’re the swing vote. Make this happen.

 

 

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