Government

WikiLeaks: demystifying diplomacy

Andrew Lam
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WikiLeaks: demystifying diplomacy

OPINION Compared to the kind of secret cables that WikiLeaks just shared with the world, everyday public statements from government officials are exercises in make-believe.

In a democracy, people have a right to know what their government is actually doing. In a pseudo-democracy, a bunch of fairy tales from high places will do the trick.

Diplomatic facades routinely masquerade as realities. But sometimes the mask slips — for all the world to see — and that’s what just happened with the humongous leak of State Department cables.

“Every government is run by liars,” independent journalist I.F. Stone observed, “and nothing they say should be believed.” The extent and gravity of the lying varies from one government to another — but no pronouncements from world capitals should be taken on faith.

By its own account, the U.S. government has been at war for more than nine years now and there’s no end in sight. Like the Pentagon, the State Department is serving the overall priorities of the warfare state. The nation’s military and diplomacy are moving parts of the same vast war machinery.

Such a contraption requires a muscular bodyguard of partial truths, deceptions, and outright lies. With the nation’s ongoing war efforts at full throttle, the contradictions between public rationales and hidden goals — or between lofty rhetoric and grisly human consequences — cannot stand the light of day.

Details of Washington’s transactional alliances with murderous dictators, corrupt tyrants, warlords, and drug traffickers are among its most closely guarded quasi-secrets. Most media accounts can be blown off by officialdom, but smoking-gun diplomatic cables are harder to ignore.

With its massive and unending reliance on military force — with a result of more and more carnage, leaving behind immense grief and rage in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere — the U.S. government has colossal gaps to bridge between its public relations storylines and its war-making realities.

The same government that devotes tremendous resources to inflicting military violence abroad must tout its humane bona fides and laudable priorities to the folks back home. But that essential public relations task becomes more difficult when official documents to the contrary keep leaking.

No government wants to face documentation of actual policies, goals, and priorities that directly contradict its public claims of virtue. In societies with democratic freedoms, the governments that have the most to fear from such disclosures are the ones that have been doing the most lying to their own people.

The recent mega-leaks are especially jarring because of the extreme contrasts between the U.S. government’s public pretenses and real-life actions. But the standard official response is to blame the leaking messengers.

What kind of “national security” can be built on duplicity from a government that is discredited and refuted by its own documents?

Norman Solomon is co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America.

 

The process begins

Andrew Lam
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The process begins

steve@sfbg.com

The Board of Supervisors has unanimously adopted a set of procedures for choosing a new mayor to replace Gavin Newsom when he becomes California’s lieutenant governor on Jan. 3. The board is scheduled to formally begin the mayoral selection process Dec. 7 with a discussion of what people want in a new mayor and perhaps even the first votes on nominees for the office.

If the process of approving a process was any indicator, choosing a new mayor won’t be easy. Just sorting out how supervisors will vote on nominees, which the board spent hours doing Nov. 23, illustrated the complex political dynamics and potential for parliamentary gamesmanship at play on a body with a deep ideological divide.

Progressives are on the dominant side of that divide, with Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, David Chiu, Chris Daly, Eric Mar, and Ross Mirkarimi sticking together on a pair of 6-5 procedural votes that sought to dilute their voting power, an effort led by Sup. Sean Elsbernd and supported by his moderate colleagues.

Both sides accused the other of playing games with this all-important process, but the greatest complicating factor seems to be the California Political Reform Act and related conflict-of-interests case law. Because the mayor is paid more than supervisors, board members are barred from doing anything to influence the process to become the new mayor.

That means they can’t publicly voice a desire to become mayor or lobby colleagues for votes. And once supervisors have been nominated to be mayor and they accept that nomination, they must immediately leave the room and be sequestered incommunicado until they decide to withdraw their nominations and participate in the process, after which they may not be renominated.

But the newly adopted details of exactly how that process plays out — including when the vote is called on each nominee, how it is taken, and in what order — will determine if any nominees can get the six votes they need to serve as mayor for the final year of Newsom’s term.

If the current board can’t do it, then the newly elected board — which has an ideological breakdown similar to the current board, but with slightly different personal relationships and alliances — will take up the matter when it is sworn in on Jan. 11. And that board’s challenge won’t be any easier.

Board of Supervisors Clerk Angela Calvillo and the Santa Clara County Counsel’s Office (legal counsel in the matter after our own City Attorney’s Office recused itself, largely because City Attorney Dennis Herrera wants to be mayor) proposed procedures whereby all nominees leave the room while the remaining supervisors vote.

But as Daly noted, clearing several supervisors from the room would make it unlikely that those remaining could come up with six votes for anyone. He also said the system would deny too many San Franciscans of a representative in this important decision and allow sabotage by just a few moderate supervisors, who could vote with a majority of supervisors present to adjourn the meeting in order to push the decision back to the next board.

“The process before us is flawed,” Daly said.

So Daly sought to have the board vote on every nomination as it comes up, but Elsbernd argued that under Robert’s Rules of Order, nominations don’t automatically close like that and to modify a board rule that contradicts Robert’s Rules requires a supermajority of eight votes. Calvillo, who serves as the parliamentarian, agreed with that interpretation and Chiu (who serves as chair and is the final word on such questions) ruled that a supermajority was required.

Although some of his progressive colleagues privately grumbled about a ruling that ultimately hurt the progressives’ preferred system, Chiu later told the Guardian, “I gotta play umpire as I see the rules … We need to ensure the process and how we arrive at a process is fair and transparent.”

Nonetheless, Chiu voted with the progressives on the rule change, which failed on a 6-5 vote. But Daly noted that supervisors may still refuse nominations and remain voting until they are ready to be considered themselves, which could practically have the same effect as the rejected rule change. “If we think that’s a better way to do it, we can do it. But we don’t need to fall into the trap and subterfuge of our opponents,” Daly told his colleagues.

Elsbernd then moved to approve the process as developed by Calvillo, but Daly instead made a motion to amend the process by incorporating some elements on his plan that don’t require a supermajority. After a short recess to clarify the motion, the next battleground was over the question of how nominees would be voted on.

Calvillo and Elsbernd preferred a system whereby supervisors would vote on the group of nominees all at once, but Daly argued that would dilute the vote and make it difficult to discern which of the nominees could get to six votes (and conversely, which nominees couldn’t and could thereby withdraw their nominations and participate in the process).

“It is not the only way to put together a process that relies on Robert’s Rules and board rules,” Daly noted, a point that was also confirmed at the meeting by Assistant Santa Clara County Counsel Orry Korb under questioning from Campos. “There are different ways to configure the nomination process,” Korb said. “Legally, there is no prohibition against taking single nominations at a time.”

So Daly made a motion to have each nominee in turn voted up or down by the voting board members, which required only a majority vote because it doesn’t contradict Robert’s Rules of Order. That motion was approved by the progressive supervisors on a 6-5 vote.

After the divisive procedural votes played out, Chiu stepped down from the podium and appealed for unity around the final set of procedures. He said that San Franciscans need to have confidence that the process is fair and accepted by all. So, he said, “It would be great if we have more than a 6-5 vote on this.”

As the role call was taken, Sup. Carmen Chu was the first moderate to vote yes, and her colleagues followed suit on a 11-0 vote to approve the process.

That unity isn’t likely to last long as supervisors fill an office that wields far more power than any other in city government. But both sides voiced an appreciation for what a monumental task they’re undertaking. “This is without a question the most important vote that any of us will take as a member of the Board of Supervisors and one that everyone is watching,” Elsbernd said of choosing a new mayor.

Daly called for supervisors to open the Dec. 7 meeting with a discussion about what qualities they all want to see in a mayor. “We owe it to the public, we owe it to the city, to discuss it and have it out in the open,” he said, going on to criticize the idea of a nonpolitical “caretaker mayor” and say, “I would like to see a mayor that works with the Board of Supervisors.”

But as the parliamentary jousting between Daly and Elsbernd en route to a bare-bones set of procedures shows, such high-minded ideals are likely to be mixed with some tough political brawls, back room deals, and power plays using arcane rules that guide the deliberations of legislative bodies.

In fact, when Korb was asked whether the adopted process precludes new amendments or procedural gambits, he noted that the Nov. 23 vote was probably just the beginning “given the parliamentary skills of this board.”

 

Supreme Court confirms Guardian legal victory

Andrew Lam
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Supreme Court confirms Guardian legal victory

The Bay Guardian won a decisive and final legal victory Nov. 23 in our lawsuit against SF Weekly and its chain parent when the California Supreme Court let stand a verdict now worth more than $22 million.

The ruling ends the Weekly’s appeals, which have stretched for more than two years, and confirms a landmark Aug. 11 ruling by the California Court of Appeal that protects small businesses in the state against predatory chains.

The Bay Guardian sued the Weekly and the New Times chain, now known as Village Voice Media, in 2004, charging that the Weekly had systematically sold ads below cost in an effort to harm the local, independent competitor. By taking advantage of the resources of a large company, the Weekly was able to stay in business despite losing money every year, and was using below-cost pricing as a way to take ads away from the Guardian.

“We have before us the case of an ongoing, comprehensive, below-cost pricing scheme,” the Appeals Court concluded. That sort of behavior is specifically barred by California’s Unfair Practices Act, which was designed to protect small business from big chains.

SF Weekly and VVM tried to argue in their appeals that the state law should be consistent with federal antitrust law, which sets a much higher standard for proving predatory pricing. But the Appeals Court and the Supreme Court disagreed. California, the ruling now says, has every right to provide greater protections for small business than the federal government does.

VVM is still trying to avoid paying the judgment, and the Guardian has been aggressively pursuing collection efforts.

The Guardian’s stellar legal team includes trial lawyers Ralph Alldredge, Rich Hill, and Craig Moody, appellate specialist Joseph Hearst, and collection expert Jay Adkisson.

The lawyers who represented VVM in its unsuccessful trial efforts were H. Sinclair Kerr Jr., Ivo Labar and James Wagstaffe of Kerr & Wagstaffe. The appellate lawers were Paul Fogel, Raymond Cardozo, and Dennis Peter Maio of Reed, Smith. VVM was also represented by Don Bennett Moon. 

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
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Editor’s notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

The New York Times, the old established voice of the liberal media elite, ran a piece on Sunday looking for answers to the nation’s persistent economic crisis. Reporter David Segal interviewed prominent economists on the left and right — the likes of John H. Cochrane at the University of Chicago, James K. Galbraith at the University of Texas, even Gar Alperowitz at the University of Maryland, who’s kind of (God help us) a socialist.

The right-wingers talked about the need to cut government, the left-wingers talked about community co-ops and green technology, and all sides agreed that the situation was dire and would probably get worse. But nobody even mentioned wealth inequality.

It’s kind of mind-boggling. It’s as if the entire subject is off the table, taboo, something that doesn’t get discussed in the company of polite economists. And that’s just crazy.

Look: the 400 richest Americans today have combined assets of about $1.5 trillion. Raise that number to 5,000 and you can about double the total wealth. This is a very rich country; our prospects aren’t bleak at all. With a bit of enlightened public policy, we could profoundly improve the economic situation in just a few months.

I have no PhD. I barely escaped Wesleyan University with an economics degree in 1980, squeaking out a D in my last class by promising the (very conservative) professor that if he failed me, I’d be back next year. But it doesn’t take econometric wizardry to add up the figures. They go like this: A one-time 20 percent wealth tax on the 5,000 richest Americans — including many people who have pledged to give away half their wealth anyway — would generate about $600 billion. Nobody would miss any meals; no families would lose their homes, or even their second or third homes, or their personal jets. Expand the pool a little and you could easily reach $1 trillion.

With that money, you could immediately create 7 million jobs (at an average of $50,000 a year) and fund them for three years. That would cut the unemployment rate in half. What would those people do? Plenty. They could rebuild the country’s roads and highways and bridges, and build high-speed rail systems, and work in health care clinics, and teach art and music and writing, and clean up environmental messes … there’s loads of work in this country. And even with a modest estimate of the economic multiplier, those 7 million public sector jobs would create another 3 million private sector jobs, and all of a sudden, the country’s booming again. And a lot of those people who were hired by the government could now transition to private business. (And those very rich people would do well in the boom, as they always do, and might even make most of their money back.)

Raise taxes on the top 5 percent of the nation’s wage earners and corporations and you would generate enough money to keep the program going until the private economy could pick up the slack. Then eliminate the Social Security tax on the first $25,000 of income and expand it to cover all income up to $250,000 and suddenly — a huge incentive for small businesses to hire new workers and a stable retirement system for the next two generations.

It’s not that hard. It’s not a socialist revolution. Nobody really gets hurt, and a lot of people benefit. I mean, it seems to me that it ought to be part of the discussion. Maybe that’s why I was such a lousy economics student.

 

The biggest fish

Andrew Lam
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The biggest fish

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Shortly after Larry Ellison, the billionaire CEO of Oracle Corp. and owner of the BMW Oracle Racing Team, won the 33rd America’s Cup off the coast of Valencia, Spain, in February 2010, a reception was held in his honor in the rotunda at San Francisco City Hall.

The event drew members of Ellison’s sailing crew, business and political heavyweights such as former Secretary of State George Schultz, and other VIPs. Attendees posed for photographs with the tall, glittering silver trophy at the base of the grand staircase.

As part of the celebration, Ellison helped Mayor Gavin Newsom into an official BMW Oracle Racing Team jacket, and Newsom granted Ellison a key to the city, a symbolic honor usually reserved for heads of state and the San Francisco Giants after they won the World Series. Shortly after, the mayor and the guest of honor, whom Forbes magazine ranked as the sixth-richest person in the world, sat down for a face-to-face.

That meeting marked the beginning of the city’s bid to host the 34th America’s Cup in San Francisco in 2013. Since securing the Cup, Ellison has made no secret of his desire to stage the 159-year-old sailing match against the iconic backdrop of the San Francisco Bay, a natural amphitheater that could be ringed with spectators gathered ashore while media images of the stunningly expensive yachts are broadcast internationally.

Newsom and other elected officials have feverishly championed the idea, touting it as an opportunity for a boost to the region’s anemic economy. The city’s Budget & Legislative Analyst projects roughly $1.2 billion in economic activity associated with the event — the real prize, as far as business interests are concerned. It would also create the equivalent of 8,840 jobs, mostly in the form of overtime for city workers and short-term gigs for the private sector.

While the idea has won preliminary support from most members of the Board of Supervisors, serious questions are beginning to arise as the finer details of the agreement emerge and the date for a final decision draws near.

Ellison and the race organizers would be granted control of 35 acres of prime waterfront property in exchange for selecting San Francisco as the venue for the Cup and investing $150 million into Port of San Francisco infrastructure. But the event would result in a negative net impact to city coffers.

Hosting the event and meeting Ellison’s demands for property would cost the city about $128 million, according the Budget & Legislative Analyst, just as city leaders grapple with closing a projected $712 million deficit in the budget cycle spanning 2011 and 2012.

Part of the impact is an estimated $86 million in lost revenue associated with rent-free leases the city would enter into with Ellison’s LLC, the America’s Cup Event Authority (ACEA). In exchange for selecting San Francisco as a venue and investing in port infrastructure, ACEA would win long-term control of Piers 30-32, Pier 50, and Seawall Lot 330 — waterfront real estate owned by the Port of San Francisco, with development rights included. Seawall Lot 330, a 2.5-acre triangular parcel bordered by the Embarcadero at the base of Bryant Street, would either be leased long-term or transferred outright to ACEA.

The most vociferous opponent of the America’s Cup plan is Sup. Chris Daly, who has voiced scathing criticism of the notion that the city would subsidize a billionaire’s yacht race at a time of fiscal instability. “The question is whether or not the package that San Francisco’s putting together is good or bad for the city,” Daly told the Guardian, “and whether or not it’s the best deal the city can get.”

 

THE CREW

According to a Forbes calculation from September 2010, Ellison’s net worth is $27 billion, making him several times wealthier than the City and County of San Francisco, which has a total annual budget of about $6 billion. Ellison reportedly spent $100 million and a decade pursuing the Cup.

As soon as Ellison expressed interest in bringing the Cup to San Francisco, Newsom began charting a course. Park Merced architect and Newsom campaign contributor Craig Hartman of the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was tapped to reimagine the piers south of the Bay Bridge as the central hub for the event, and soon Hartman’s vision for a viewing area beneath a whimsical sail-like canopy was forwarded to the media.

The mayor also issued letters of invitation to form the America’s Cup Organizing Committee (ACOC), a group that would be tasked with soliciting corporate funding for the event. ACOC was convened as a nonprofit corporation, and it’s a powerhouse of wealthy, politically connected, and influential members.

Hollywood mogul Steve Bing, who’s donated millions to the Democratic Party and funded former President Bill Clinton’s 2009 trip to North Korea to rescue two imprisoned American journalists, is on the committee. So is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, billionaire, and former mega-yacht owner who was once dubbed “the Captain of Capitalism” by 60 Minutes. George Schultz and his wife, Charlotte, are members. Thomas J. Coates, a powerful San Francisco real estate investor who dumped $1 million into a 2008 California ballot initiative to eliminate rent control, also has a seat. Coates resurfaced in the November 2010 election when he poured $200,000 into local anti-progressive ballot measures and the campaigns of economically conservative supervisorial candidates.

Billionaire Warren Hellman, San Francisco socialite Dede Wilsey, and former Newsom press secretary Peter Ragone are also on ACOC. There are representatives from Wells Fargo, AT&T, and United Airlines. One ACOC member directs a real estate firm that generated $2.5 billion in revenue in 2009. Another is Martin Koffel, CEO of URS Corp., an energy industry heavyweight that made $9.2 billion in revenue in 2009. There’s Richard Kramlich, a cofounder of a Menlo Park venture capital firm that controls $11 billion in “committed capital.” And then there’s Mike Latham, CEO of iShares, which traffics in pooled investment funds worth about $509 billion, according to a BusinessWeek article.

There’s also an honorary branch of ACOC composed of elected officials including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and others. Their role is to help the Cup interface with various governmental agencies to control air space, secure areas of the bay exclusively for the event, set up international broadcasts, and bring foreign crew members and fancy sailboats into the United States without a hassle from immigration authorities.

ACOC is expected to raise $270 million in corporate sponsorships for the America’s Cup. That money will be funneled into the budget for ACEA. It’s unclear whether the $150 million ACEA is required to invest in city piers will be derived from ACOC’s fund drive.

The city also anticipates that ACOC would raise $32 million to help defray municipal costs. “However,” the Budget & Legislative Analyst report cautions, “there is no guarantee that any of the anticipated $32 million in private contributions will be raised.”

A seven-member board, chaired by sports management executive Richard Worth, will direct the ACEA, according to Newsom’s economic advisors, but the other six seats have yet to be filled. ACEA’s newly minted CEO is Craig Thompson, a native Californian who previously worked with a governing body for the Olympics and has helped coordinate major sporting events internationally. In an interview with sports blog Valencia Sailing, Thompson provided some insight on why major corporations might be inspired to donate to the cause. Basically, the Cup is the holy grail of networking events.

“It’s a very difficult economic situation we are going through, and it’s not the best time to be looking for sponsors for a major event,” Thompson acknowledged. “On the other hand, the America’s Cup is one of the very few activities … that offer access to really top-level individuals in terms of education or economic situation. The America’s Cup is a unique platform for a lot of companies that want access to those individuals that are very difficult to reach under normal circumstances. I can tell you for example that Oracle is very pleased with the marketing opportunity the America’s Cup has presented to them. They invite their best customers and are very successful in turning the America’s Cup into a platform for generating business. The same thing can be true for a lot of different companies that need access to wealthy individuals.”

But should San Francisco taxpayers really be subsidizing a networking event for the some of the business world’s richest and most powerful players?

 

TRANSFORMING THE WATERFRONT

Over the past four months, Newsom’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) has been negotiating with race organizers to hash out a Host City Agreement outlining the terms of bringing the America’s Cup to San Francisco.

The proposal will go before the Board of Supervisor’s Budget & Finance Committee on Dec. 8, and to the full board Dec. 14. A final decision on whether San Francisco will host the race is expected by Dec. 31. ACEA and ACOC will each sign onto the agreement with the City and County of San Francisco.

From the beginning, the event was envisioned as “the twin transformation,” according to OEWD — the America’s Cup would be transformed by attracting greater crowds and heightened commercial interest while San Francisco’s crumbling piers would be revitalized through ACEA’s $150 million investment in port infrastructure.

The plan paints downtown San Francisco as the “America’s Cup Village” during the sailing events, and a study produced by Beacon Economics estimates that the financial boost would come primarily from hordes of visitors flocking to the event — more than 500,000 are expected to attend. The city expects a minimum of 45 race days, including one pre regatta in 2011 and one in 2012 (or two in 2012 if the one in 2011 doesn’t happen), a challenger series in 2013, and a final match in 2013.

The transformation of the city’s waterfront would be dramatic. In addition to the rent-free leases for Piers 30-32, 50, and Seawall Lot 330, ACEA would be granted exclusive use of much of the central waterfront, water, and piers around Mission Bay, and water and land near Islais Creek during the course of the event. Under the Host City Agreement, race organizers would have use of water space spanning Piers 14 to 22 ½; Piers 28, 38, 40, 48, and 54, a portion of Seawall Lot 337, and Pier 80, where a temporary heliport would be sited.

Seawall Lot 330, a 2.5-acre parcel valued by the Port at $33 million, lies at the base of Bryant Street along the Embarcadero and has a nice unimpeded view of the bay. Piers 30-32 span 12.5 acres, and Pier 50 is 20 acres.

The Budget & Legislative Analyst’s study predicts that the ACEA could opt to build a 250-unit condo high-rise on Seawall Lot 330, deemed the most lucrative use. Under the Host City Agreement, the city would be obligated to remove Tidelands Trust provisions from Seawall Lot 330, which guarantee under state law that waterfront property is used for maritime functions or public benefit. Tweaking the law for a single deal would require approval from the State Lands Commission, but Newsom, in his new capacity as lieutenant governor, would cast one of the three votes on that body.

The combination of construction, demolition, lost rent revenue, police and transit, environmental analysis, and other event costs would hit the city with a bill totaling around $64 million, according to the Budget & Legislative Analyst study. Since city government would recoup around $22 million in revenue from hosting the Cup, the net impact would be around $42 million. That doesn’t include the potential $32 million assistance from ACOC.

At the same time, the city would stand to lose another $86.2 million by granting long-term development rights to 35 acres of Port property for 66 to 75 years without charging rent, bringing the total cost to $128 million. OEWD representatives played down that loss in potential revenue, saying past attempts to redevelop piers hadn’t been successful because none could handle the upfront investment to revitalize the crumbling piers.

The Host City Agreement has raised skepticism among Port staff and the Budget Analyst that tempered initial enthusiasm for the event. “The terms of the Host City Agreement will require significant city capital investment and will result in substantial lost revenue to the Port,” a Port study determined. Faith in that plan seems to be eroding and it may be scrapped for an alternative plan that’s cheaper for the city.

The Northern Waterfront alternative substitutes Piers 19-29 as the primary location for the event and eliminates the Mission Bay piers from the equation. Under this scenario, ACEA would invest an estimated $55 million, instead of $150 million. In exchange, it would receive long-term development rights to Piers 30-32 and Seawall 330 on “commercially reasonable terms,” according to a Port staff report.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu requested that the Port explore that second option more fully, and the Port report notes that it would reduce the strain on Port revenue. The Northern Waterfront plan would cost the Port a total of $15.8 million, instead of $43 million, the report notes. Port staff recommended in its report that both the original agreement and the alternative be forwarded to the full board for consideration.

 

PHANTOM BIDS?

Under the competition’s official protocol, Ellison, as defender of the Cup, has unilateral power to decide where the next regatta will be held. Race organizers have said it’s a toss-up between San Francisco and an unnamed port in Italy — though it’s anyone’s guess how seriously a European site is being considered by a team headquartered at the Golden Gate Yacht Club, a stone’s throw from the Golden Gate Bridge.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle article published in early September, Newsom issued a memo stating that San Francisco was competing against Spain and Italy to become the chosen venue. Valencia was said to be offering a “generous financial bid,” and a group in Rome was rumored to have offered some $645 million to bring the Cup to Italian shores, the memo noted. It was a call for the city to present Ellison with the most attractive deal possible to compel him to pick San Francisco.

Speaking at an Oct. 4 Land Use Committee hearing, OEWD director Jennifer Matz told supervisors: “San Francisco was designated the only city under consideration back in July. Now we are competing against the prime minister of Italy and the king of Spain.”

However, the veracity of those claims came into question in mid-November. Daly, incensed that the Mayor’s Office never communicated with him about the Cup despite wanting to hold it in his sixth supervisorial district, launched his own personal investigation. He fired off an e-mail to Team Alinghi, a prior America’s Cup winner, and began communicating with other European contacts until he got in touch with someone in Valencia’s municipal government.

“I got a call back from a representative who basically said I should know something,” Daly recounted. Valencia, his source said, never submitted a bid to host the Cup. At a Nov. 13 press conference, Valencia’s mayor Rita Barbera confirmed this claim, according to a Spanish press report, expressing disappointment that the city had been eliminated from consideration as a host venue. “There was no formal bidding process,” she charged. She also denied reports that any money had been offered.

Meanwhile, the Budget Analyst was unable to find any concrete evidence that other host city bids had been submitted. “We have nothing to confirm that other offers have been made,” Fred Brousseau of the Budget Analyst’s office told the Guardian.

In response to Guardian queries about whether the Mayor’s Office had evidence that Italy had indeed submitted a bid, Project Manager Kyri McClellan of the OEWD forwarded a one-page resolution from the Italian prime minister assuring race organizers that there would be tax breaks, accelerated approvals, and other perks guaranteed if the Cup came to Italy. However, an Italian journalist who looked over the resolution told the Guardian that the document didn’t appear to be a formal bid, merely a response to a query from race organizers.

Daly has his doubts that either Valencia or the Italian port were ever seriously considered. “I think they were phantom bids,” he said, “created by either Larry Ellison or the Newsom administration … to place pressure on the Board of Supervisors.”

A representative from OEWD told the Guardian that officials have no reason to doubt that the European bids, and accompanying offers of money, were real. However, the city wasn’t privy to race organizer’s discussions about possible European venues. A final decision is expected before the end of the year.

Daly hasn’t held back in voicing opposition to the America’s Cup and blasted it at an Oct. 5 Board meeting. “This tacking around Sup. Daly will not get you in calmer waters,” Daly said. “I told myself I was not going to make a yachting reference. But I will bring a white squall onto this race and onto this Cup, and I will do everything in my power starting on Jan. 8 to make sure these boats never see that water.”

 

WIND IN WHOSE SAILS?

The America’s Cup would undoubtedly bring economic benefit to the area and create work at a time when jobs are scarce. Police officers would get overtime. Restaurant servers would be scrambling to keep up with demand. Construction workers seeking temporary employment would get gigs. Hotels would rake it in. Pier 39 would be booming. However, the Budget Analyst report cautioned: “It is unlikely that any labor benefits would remain in the years after the America’s Cup event is completed.”

Certain small businesses would catch a windfall. John Caine, owner the Hi Dive bar at Pier 28, didn’t hesitate when asked about his opinion on the city hosting the Cup. “Please come fix our piers. It’s a shout-out to Larry Ellison,” he said. Caine said he supports the America’s Cup bid 100 percent, and is excited about the boost it could give his business. The Hi Dive would not be required to relocate under the proposal, he added.

At the same time, other small business would be negatively affected, particularly those among the 87 Port tenants who would be forced to relocate to make way for the America’s Cup. The Budget Analyst’s report also notes that retail businesses in the area whose services had no appeal to race-goers might suffer from reduced access to their stores, since crowding and street closures would shut out their customers.

The sailing community has rallied in support of the Cup, and Newsom has received hundreds of e-mails from yachting enthusiasts from as far away as Hawaii and Florida promising to travel to San Francisco with all their sailing friends to watch the world-famous vessels compete.

Ariane Paul, commodore of a classic wooden boat club called the Master Mariners Benevolent Association, told the Guardian that she was excited about the opportunity for the America’s Cup to showcase sailing on the bay. “In the long term, it’s a win-win,” Paul said. “It would be great to have that boost.” As for the financial terms of the deal, she remained confident, saying, “I don’t think that the city is going to let Larry Ellison walk all over them.”

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is often politically aligned with Daly, but not when it comes to the issue of the America’s Cup. As a kid growing up on the island of Jamestown, a tiny blue-collar community located off the coast of Rhode Island, Mirkarimi learned to sail and occasionally spent summers working as a deckhand. Every few years, the America’s Cup would come to nearby Newport, transforming the area into a bustling hub and bringing the locals into contact with famous sailors. It left an everlasting impression. When the BMW Oracle Racing Team secured the 33rd Cup off the coast of Valencia, Mirkarimi did a double-take when he saw a photograph of the winning team — his childhood friend from Rhode Island was on the crew.

Mirkarimi told the Guardian he supports bringing the Cup to San Francisco because of the economic boost the area will receive — if the Cup continues to return to San Francisco as it did for 53 years in Newport, he said, the city could look forward to a free gift in improved revenue associated with the event, and that could help quiet the tired annual debates over painful budget cuts.

At the same time, he acknowledged that the Budget Analyst report had prompted what he called healthy skepticism. “I think the onus is on the city and Cup organizers to make sure the benefits far, far outweigh the investment,” Mirkarimi said. “This effort is not just about making one of the wealthiest men in the United States that much more wealthy … That can’t be the case,” he said. “It has to be about what will the Cup do in order to be a win-win for the people of San Francisco.” Mirkarimi said he expected scrutiny of the details of the agreement at the Dec. 8 Budget and Finance Committee hearing: “Naturally, in this time of economic downturn … people want to know, what’s the outlay of cost, and what are we going to get in return?” 

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
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0
Editor’s notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

The pollsters like to call it the Santa Claus effect, and we’ve seen it over and over in surveys of California voters in the past few months. I think of it more as some sort of deep political pathology, a schizophrenia combined with delusions that underlies the state’s inability to get anything done.

Here’s what the data shows:

California voters don’t want cuts to higher education; in fact, they want to see more money spent on the University of California system, the California State University system, and local community colleges. They don’t want cuts to K-12 education either. Nor do they want to shut down state parks, release prisoners early, close public hospitals, stop building high-speed rail, reduce state support of local government … or do anything else that would save a significant amount of money.

And they don’t want tax increases.

If you ask people how they think the state should balance the budget, they talk about cutting waste — even though the current Republican governor admits there’s not that much waste left to cut.

I could spend hours talking about how we got here, how decades of corruption and bad governmental priorities soured people so much on the public sector that they don’t believe the state can be trusted to spend their money properly. But part of the issue is that the news media (which love to find a little waste here and there to trumpet) are very bad at presenting the choices.

Nobody in Sacramento’s going to do anything serious about the budget until Jerry Brown takes office; that’s just how it is. So this psycho-financial nightmare is going to fall in his lap — and I wonder sometimes if he ought to force us all to make the choices we want to avoid.

Maybe Brown ought to call a special election in February or March and put two — and exactly two — measures before the voters. Both would balance the state budget. One would do it almost entirely with cuts, and those cuts would be clearly defined: public schools would shut down all over the state. Class size would rise to 40 or more kids. UC would close half its campuses and admit half the number of qualified students it does today. At least 100,000 prisoners would be released as several prison are mothballed. The entire state park system would be shuttered. And that’s just the start. Consumer protection agencies would be abolished, public health devastated — there wouldn’t be a single thing that Californians take for granted that would survive.

Because that’s what a cuts-only, no borrowing budget would look like.

The other proposition would save those services by closing tax loopholes that benefit big business and raising income taxes on the wealthiest people in the state. Brown would have to travel up and down the state and make it clear: these are the choices we face. You can’t solve a $20 billion budget crisis without either tearing the state apart or raising taxes.

No more ducking. No more pretending. No more looking around for Santa Claus. Make the choice, folks: accept new taxes on a small percentage of the population, or give up on the state.

It’s a scary thought, but it may have to come to that.

 

Why selling state buildings is so dumb

Zelda Bronstein
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18
Why selling state buildings is so dumb

To stem the massive hemorrhaging in the budget, the state of California has authorized the sale of 24 state-owned office buildings across the state to private investors. The state would then rent back the office space.


It’s a classic case of short-term thinking: In the end, the state will end up paying more money in rent than it will gain from the sales. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office reported in April that over the next 30 years, the lease payments will likely cost $5  billion more than if the property had stayed in the state’s possession.


But it would provide an immediate injection of $1.2 billion into the state’s general fund.


But there’s an interesting twist that hasn’t been reported on: The state buildings are currently exempt from local property taxes. Once they’re in private hands, county assessors can put them on the tax rolls.


And the way the deal is structured, the state — that is, the taxpayers — will be subsidizing the private owners to cover the local property tax bills. In effect, the deal means that the state will be shifting more money from its general fund to local government — a good thing for counties, but not a terribly good deal for Sacramento.


According to Eric Lamoureux, spokesperson for the Department of General Services, if the local cities decide to tax the new owners, the rent state agencies pay would increase to make up the difference. The private owners would pay nothing.
“The [cost of the tax] is built into lease terms. Ultimately, the state would be paying that.” Lamoureux said.


And while San Francisco City Attorney’s office is still unsure of the exact terms of the sale-lease back agreement, they plan on looking out for the city’s best interests.


 “The city attorney is going to be extremely diligent with the recorder-assessor to collect all the taxes that are owed,” Matt Dorsey, press spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, told us. And by collecting property tax, the local city governments would get a nice boost in revenue.


The sale to California First LLC, a partnership between Hines Interests and Antarctica Capital, has already been met with opposition including a lawsuit and an injunction trying to prevent the deal.

Caretaker mayor concept blasted by Daly

Sasha Cuttler
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18
Caretaker mayor concept blasted by Daly

There’s been much talk about naming a “caretaker mayor” to replace Mayor Gavin Newsom in January – most of it coming from downtown-oriented politicians, advocates, and publications, who are in the minority on the Board of Supervisors – but Sup. Chris Daly offered a full-throated denunciation of the idea this week.

At the end of Tuesday’s long debate on adopting a procedure for choosing a successor mayor, Daly appealed to his colleagues, “Can we please spend a minute talking about what we’d like to see in the new mayor of San Francisco?” And in his remarks that followed, he focused on shooting down the notion that a caretaker mayor is what this troubled city needs.

The idea behind a caretaker would be to choose a technocrat who would pledge not to run for reelection in the fall, thus keeping any prospective candidate from gaining an advantage from incumbency. Names most frequently cited by moderate politicians and media voices are SFPUC head Ed Harrington, Sheriff Michael Hennessey, and City Administrator Ed Lee. Some more progressive caretaker names that get dropped include former Mayor Art Agnos and SF Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin.

But Daly – publicly sounding a perspective that’s been widely discussed in progressive circles, who question why the board’s progressive majority would purposefully punt away the chance to lead – said the idea is fundamentally flawed: “You would be putting someone in office who is necessarily weak and hamstrung.”

While Daly acknowledges that he’d like to see a progressive in Room 200 and that “the political divide is real” between progressives and moderates, he said the flaws in installing a caretaker mayor should be apparent to everyone. To deal with a $400 million deficit and other structural budget issues, the new mayor is going to have to show leadership and have a base of support, which a caretaker mayor wouldn’t.

Although the Hearst-owned Chronicle has been promoting the idea of a caretaker mayor now, Daly noted that the Hearst-owned Examiner editorialized against the idea last time the city was in this position, in 1978 after Mayor George Moscone was assassinated and the board picked Dianne Feinstein to become mayor. “The City should not have to accept a “caretaker” mayor invested with only a thin veneer of authority,” editorialized the Examiner.

“It would be a colossal mistake,” Daly said of choosing a caretaker mayor. “We need to do better than just someone who knows the inner workings of city government.”

But the fear that the board’s progressive majority would put a progressive in office – or even a moderate politician with some progressive inclinations and connections – seems to be downtown’s greatest fear right now. The fun begins Dec. 7 when the board resumes its discussion of the issue and could start taking nominations.

Critical care

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Critical care

Sarah@sfbg.com

A complex and controversial project that would involve five San Francisco hospitals — including building a huge showcase facility for the wealthy atop Cathedral Hill — has prompted a debate about what average city residents need from the health care system.

California Pacific Medical Center, an affiliate of Sutter Health, proposes to downsize St. Luke’s Hospital, which primarily serves a low-income population in the Mission District, as part of a $2.5 billion proposal to renovate and retrofit three existing medical campuses, close another one, and build housing and a megahospital on Cathedral Hill that would draw patients from around the country.

CPMC’s grandiose plan was being considered strictly as a land use decision, despite its far-reaching impact on the city’s health care system. So Sup. David Campos created legislation calling for the city to create a citywide health services master plan and to use that as another tool for gauging future medical projects.

Debate over that legislation left some activists on both sides unhappy, with progressives disappointed that it won’t be able to stop a CPMC project they see as neglectful of the poor, and moderates wary of creating a new way to challenge development projects in the face of widespread unemployment in the construction industry.

But it struck a fine enough balance to win 8-3 approval by the board Nov. 16, enough to override a threatened mayoral veto. “I’m really happy and excited about the passage of this legislation,” Campos told the Guardian after the vote.

The legislation has a two-part mandate, with the first part kicking in as soon as it has final approval. It requires the Planning Department, with input from the Department of Public Health, to prepare a health care services master plan to identify current and projected needs for health care services and where they should be provided.

The second part, which begins in 2013, requires Planning to determine whether medical projects are consistent with the findings of this plan. That delay is credited to a last-minute amendment Campos granted during a Nov. 15 committee hearing after the hospital industry complained that the process could jeopardize its ability to meet state-mandated seismic retrofitting deadlines for projects already in the planning pipeline.

The passage of Campos’ legislation comes eight months after President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Hailed by its supporters as the most significant change to the U.S. health care delivery systems in 40 years, the reform package has also been greeted with criticism on both ends of the political spectrum. Progressives complain that it relies too heavily on private insurance companies and medical providers, while Tea Party supporters says that it’s government run amok and they have vowed to “kill the bill.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) recently compared so-called Obamacare to “tyranny” in a speech to conservative legal scholars.

But here in San Francisco, the debate over Campos’ legislation — as heated and divisive as it was at times — yielded a surprising amount of consensus around the long-neglected idea that government should play a role in health care planning.

 

PULLING THE PLUG

The passage of Campos’ legislation marks the first time in 30 years that a government entity has mandated health care services planning in California. That approach West Bay Health Systems Agency, whose creation he opposed as governor of California.

Lucy Johns, a San Francisco-based health care planning consultant who wrote the only health care services master plan California has ever had, recalls what happened in the mid-1970s after President Gerald Ford signed legislation that established health system agencies nationwide.

“California established 14 health systems agencies, including the West Bay Health System Agency, which governed the nine Bay Area counties,” Johns told the Guardian. “The legislation mandated that they be established by every state, with the federal government providing the funding. So every state had to decide how many, how big, and how structured the health system agencies would be.”

Johns notes that state legislators were constrained when it came to the decisions these health service agencies made. “The governing bodies of the health systems agencies had to have a membership that was 51 percent consumer and 49 percent healthcare provider, which included doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators,” she said.

That history served as a backdrop for discussion of the Campos legislation, with the Planning Department staff report noting, “With the elimination of the West Bay Health Systems Agency in 1981, there is no longer a routine or comprehensive analysis of health service resources, needs, trends, and local impacts conducted for changes to or within medical uses.”

“It’s truly a historic moment for San Francisco,” Campos said after his legislation passed its Nov. 16 first reading (the second and final reading is set for Nov. 23, after Guardian press time). “We are the first city in the country to make sure land use decisions are aligned to our health care needs. That’s an unprecedented step that will shape the future of healthcare planning for years to come.”

Campos acknowledged that the passage of Obama’s heath reform package — which includes a mandate to purchase private health insurance beginning in 2014 — was also a catalyst for his legislation, along with the CPMC project.

“But it had more to do with seeing that the city didn’t have the tools it needed to evaluate projects in terms of whether they met the city’s healthcare needs and how they might impact people’s access to healthcare,” Campos said. “The main catalyst came from the community, which felt it was being asked to make decisions that will have long-lasting health care implications, but didn’t have any way to understand those needs. Those concerns were compounded by changes at the national level — and the recognition that these changes offer us an opportunity to engage in planning.”

Campos’ legislative victory came two months after members of the Cathedral Hill Neighbors Association joined nurses, medical workers, patients, and community groups in voicing concerns at a Sept. 23 public hearing about the draft environmental impact report for CPMC’s Cathedral Hill hospital and the other facilities that are part of its proposal.

These groups collectively expressed fear that downsizing St. Luke’s, closing the CPMC California campus, and transforming CPMC Pacific campus to an outpatient-only hospital will force low-income people to travel farther to access health care services while offering better service to the wealthy at Cathedral Hill. And neighbors worried that the proposed complex would increase traffic and require the demolition of rent-controlled apartments.

Formed in 1991 through the merger of Pacific-Presbyterian Medical Center and Children’s Hospital of San Francisco, CPMC has been affiliated with Sutter Health since 1996 and currently has four medical campuses in San Francisco: Pacific in Pacific Heights, California in Presidio Heights, Davies in the Duboce Triangle, and St. Luke’s in the Mission.

But CPMC’s longtime goal was to build a facility intended to be like the Mayo Clinic of the West Coast, a 15-story, 555-bed full-service hospital and specialty care facility at the corner of Van Ness Avenue and Geary Boulevard. Company officials have made approval for that project conditional on keeping St. Luke’s open in the face of the state’s deadline on seismic safety standards that the hospital doesn’t now meet.

“St. Luke’s Hospital was the big issue that got our attention,” Le Tim Ly, lead organizer for the Chinese Progressive Association, told the Guardian. His group has worked with residents in the city’s southeast sector around environmental justice, air quality, and pollution issues when they became aware of the threat to St. Luke’s. “All this, coupled with efforts to downsize Luke’s, left us alarmed by the disproportionate impact on an already impacted area.”

But alarm over CPMC’s plans has now revived the idea of healthcare planning.

 

MAKING A PLAN

As recently as the beginning of November, representatives for the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California — whose members include CPMC, Chinese Hospital, Jewish Home, Kaiser Permanente, Laguna Honda, St Luke’s, St. Mary’s, San Francisco General Hospital, and Veterans Affairs Medical Center — seemed opposed to any change in the way healthcare planning is done in San Francisco.

At a Nov. 1 hearing on the Campos legislation at the board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee, Ron Smith, the Hospital Council’s senior vice president for advocacy, said his organization favored maintaining the city’s current procedures. “We would like to propose that the Health Commission does the planning, the Planning Commission does the land use, and that there is a required determination process which is in the current legislation,” Smith said. “We’re proposing that that continue.”

But two weeks later, after Campos amended his legislation so projects now in the planning pipeline are exempt from having to comply with the city’s health care services master plan, some members of the Hospital Council seemed to have a change of heart.

CPMC’s Chief Executive Officer Warren Browner surprised just about everybody when he publicly stated in mid-November that CPMC supports health care planning. “We strongly support the efforts of the city — we are in favor of health planning,” Browner said at a Nov. 15 hearing on the legislation.

“That statement was extraordinary,” said Lucy Johns, recalling CPMC’s history of resisting government control. “The conversation about this legislation has already changed the discourse, at least in public.”

Linda Schumacher, chief executive officer of Chinese Hospital, a community-owned, not-for-profit facility, explained at the same hearing that her organization had been concerned that Campos’ legislation would affect her hospital’s ability to move ahead with a $150 million project that has been in the pipeline since 2003.

“We thank you for that amendment that allows the effective date to be changed,” she said.

“It shows how much progress had been made, even before this legislation goes into effect,” Campos said of the hospital industry’s apparent shift in attitude. “It’s a monumental step, something that was not expected as recently as a few months ago.”

But Ly of the Chinese Progressive Association said he believes the Hospital Council still doesn’t want to see the city getting involved. “As recently as a month ago, their folks were speaking out against any kind of legislation. But I think they started seeing the writing on the wall.”

Ly fretted about the potential negative impact of Campos’ last-minute amendments. “Sup. Campos’ plan represents a victory. But we could use that information as soon as possible. The 2013 deadline means the city will be handicapped: it will have information it can’t use yet.”

Ly ventures that the hospital industry’s approach will be to try to lessen the impact of the legislation. “As written, it still provides the Planning Commission and the board with the discretion to approve projects,” Ly said. “Ultimately, the struggle is about values. Just because there are plans and guidance doesn’t mean the healthcare needs of the community will become a top priority — it just provides us with tools to make an assessment.”

Campos counters that his bill will allow the city to create incentives for, and apply pressure on, the hospital industry. “If they truly want their projects to be expedited and approved before state-mandated seismic retrofitting deadlines kick in, they’ll propose plans that work for the community,” Campos explained.

But even as it publicly vows to be supportive, the Hospital Council continues to express concerns about the Campos legislation. “It’s the council’s job is to be supportive now that the board has approved Campos’ plan,” Smith said. “And Sup. Campos was very generous. He started talking to us in June. But we really didn’t get a handle on his proposal until much later. We think the idea of healthcare planning is very good. We still have concerns about the process, but now the board has voted on the legislation, our goal is to do our best to work with the law.”

Concerns that the legislation would be used to mire projects in repeated appeals and give too much weight to critics’ concerns was raised at the Nov. 16 hearing by Sup. Sean Elsbernd.

“Right now, if anyone has concerns, there’s a conditional use process and a CEQA [California Environmental Quality Act] process,” Elsbernd told the Guardian. “But this turns up a brand new appeal. It means the appeals are heard at the same time, but you’ve now created a third route.”

Campos responded to these concerns by amending the legislation to clarify that the board must act on consistency determination appeals at the same time it acts on other related appeals, so projects won’t be delayed.

Evidently this wasn’t enough to appease the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. “We cannot be supportive of that piece of legislation,” Rob Black, the Chamber’s vice president of public policy, told the Guardian after the legislation was approved. “We believe appeals should be done at the Department of Public Health in conjunction with service providers, since San Francisco provides 20 percent of service, and private organizations provide the remaining 80 percent.”

Black says the Chamber was pleased Campos amended his legislation so as not to slow down projects that are currently in the planning pipeline. But he claimed Campos’ legislation could actually limit access to healthcare services. “The Chamber is concerned that Campos’ legislation will make it harder for doctors to pool together in pods, and if we don’t do that, it won’t make healthcare more available because services will be more expensive,” Black said. “But we absolutely think” the city should analyze gaps in providing health care to San Franciscans.

Campos’ aide Hillary Ronen confirmed that Black is correct in saying that anyone can appeal a hospital project’s consistency determination. “But the final analysis will revolve around asking if the proposed project meets the health care needs of San Francisco,” she said. “If it doesn’t, and the board doesn’t believe there’s a compelling public policy reason to approve the project, [the board] can override the approval.”

 

PATIENTS VS. PROFITS

Mary Michelucci, a registered nurse for 40 years and a member of the California Nurses Association, is hopeful that Campos’ legislation will rein in the hospital industry.

“I hope that any plan that would favor patient care over profit would be the way to go,” Michelucci said. “Running a hospital is expensive. But with the profits that Sutter and CPMC are making, they can afford this.”

Michelucci says the dispute over St. Luke’s came to a head three years ago, when nurses began to suspect that CPMC was planning to let the facility fail, suspicions that intensified when CPMC closed St. Luke’s neonatal intensive care unit 18 months ago.

“Now the babies who need neonatal special care are transported to CPMC’s California campus, which is in the Richmond,” Michelucci said. “But the moms may be discharged and most of them live in the Mission or Bayview-Hunters Point.”

Michelucchi still fears that CPMC will wage “a horrific campaign” against the California’s Nurses Association as it continues to push the plan for its megahospital. “CPMC wants to be in complete control of the registered nurses,” she said. “We, unfortunately, are their conscience, while they are a business model in the business of healthcare. The decisions they make about healthcare are not in the interests of patients or nurses, and we are the thorn in their side.”

All this is happening against the backdrop of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, and for construction workers facing high unemployment rates in San Francisco, CPMC’s megaproject clearly represents light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

“CPMC is my future,” William Hestor, a 28-year-old father of two and member of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers, said at the Nov. 15 hearing. “We worked hard on a contract and we just want to make sure our hospital is built on time.”

CPMC media spokesperson Kevin McCormack told the Guardian that the real issue between CPMC and the CNA is union membership at CPMC’s Cathedral Hill facility. “CPMC is reducing beds at St. Luke’s because the beds aren’t in use, but the facility will be able to take care of 90 percent of patients’ needs and if you need specialist care, a shuttle will take you to Cathedral Hill,” McCormack said. “This centralized arrangement is the best way to attract the best staff and equipment.”

McCormack noted that there are union members and 1,200 nonunion nurses working at CPMC facilities in San Francisco. “We are bringing together nonunion and union nurses together at this facility, and we don’t feel we have the right to force our nonunion nurses to join,” he said, adding that since the Teamsters, the Carpenters, and SEIU-United Healthcare Workers (UHW) are already unionized at the Pacific and California campuses, they’ll be allowed to unionize at Cathedral Hill.

CNA member Eileen Prendiville, who has worked in San Francisco as a registered nurse for decades, recalls the negative changes she has already seen at CPMC’s facilities, including eliminating registered nurses and specialty services.

“If you pull services, as they have, of course you’ll have fewer patients. And the physicians start leaving, so it’s a vicious cycle,” she said. “St. Luke’s was a small community hospital but now it’s all about corporate medicine.”

Sup. Eric Mar sided with those seeking to exempt current projects from the city’s health care services master plan. But Sup. Sophie Maxwell noted that the Planning Commission will take a facility’s historical role into account in determining whether projects are consistent with the city’s health care services plan.

“We believe that addressed community concerns,” Maxwell said. “St. Luke’s would never have been targeted for closure had this legislation been on the books in the past.”

Campos insists his legislation is not simply about CPMC. “Ultimately this legislation stems from a number of pleas we have heard in the last couple of years from people throughout the city,” he said. “It takes the institutional master planning process to the next level. We have tried to consolidate the appeal process under existing law. Important as the legislation is, it’s key to make sure we have the right master plan because that’s where the heavy lifting will take place.”

Meanwhile, the final EIR is being completed for the CPMC project, which should go before the Board of Supervisors for approval early next year.

Supreme Court rejects SF Weekly appeal

Zelda Bronstein
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14

The California Supreme Court let stand Nov. 23rd a landmark ruling protecting small business from predatory chains, denying without comment an attempt by SF Weekly and its chain parent to get the high court to hear the case.


The decision brings to an end more than two years of appeals by the Weekly and Village Voice Media and effectively concludes the legal case.


The Bay Guardian sued the Weekly and the New Times chain, now known as Village Voice Media, in 2004, charging that the Weekly had systematically sold ads below cost in an effort to harm the local, independent competitor. By taking advantage of the resources of a large company, the Weekly was able to stay in business despite losing money every year, and was using below-cost pricing as a way to take ads away from the Guardian.


“We have before us the case of an ongoing, comprehensive, below-cost pricing scheme,” the Appeals Court concluded. You can read that ruling here (pdf)


The Appeals Court noted that shortly after New Times bought SF Weekly in 1995, New Times Executive Editor Mike Lacey announced that he would use the chain’s deep pockets to assault the Guardian. “The essence of Lacey’s message was that he wanted to ‘put the Guardian out of business,'”he ruling states. “The sales representatives were made aware that advertising could be ‘sold below cost’ if needed ‘in order to make a sale’ and the resources of New Times would cover the loses, even over a term of many years.”


That sort of behavior is specifically barred by California’s Unfair Practices Act, which was designed to protect small business from big chains.


SF Weekly and VVM tried to argue in their appeals that the state law should be consistent with federal antitrust law, which sets a much higher standard for proving predatory pricing. But the Appeals Court and the Supreme Court disagreed. California, the ruling now says, has every right to provide greater protections for small business than the federal government does.


There are 20 other states that have laws similar the the California Unfair Practices Act.


The ruling is a victory not just for the Bay Guardian but for small business across the state. The appellate courts have made it clear that predatory pricing is a violation of law — and the ruling can now be used by any independent merchant fighting big chains. As Ralph Alldredge, one of our laywers, noted after the Appeals Court ruling: “Think of what that means for big-box retailers, which have used below-cost selling on some products to attract customers away from small, independently owned grocery, hardware, drug, and department stores.”


 


 


 


 

Sync up, time’s come for Zion I’s Atomic Clock

Andrew Lam
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0

Bay Area hip-hop heads are grateful that Zion I walks these mean streets. Emcee Zumbi and DJ Amp Live have been expanding the boundaries of what dope beats and lifted lyrics can be ever since they fled the industry culture of Atlanta and hit the Oakland scene with 1997’s underground hit Enter the Woods. Their vibe’s stayed positive while resisting major label affliation and a lot of the turf warring that plagues hip-hop in a weird, stereotype-enhancing way around some of the Bay’s venues.

We spoke with Morehouse College grad Zumbi over the phone on the cusp of the duo’s weekend-long Slim’s celebration (Sat/20 and Sun/21) in honor of new album Atomic Clock, and the gig will be the duo’s last before hitting the road on tour. Clock is a bangin’, lifted affair studded with gems like “Always” and “Girlz” featuring Martin Luther’s sweet hook — but all the same, we still found ourselves talking politics. Sheesh.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: What’s your definition of a conscious emcee? I hear a lot of people call themselves “backpack rappers” and then come out with a song telling girls to shake faster, make that money. How can you tell who the conscious rappers are? 

Zumbi: For one, I don’t think consciousness is dictated by sexuality. For instance Common is a cat who’s a pretty consistently conscious person. But then he comes out talking about getting head — I think in most of his music there’s an awareness. For me, Jacka has conscious music because he reflects on spirituality and Allah. Even though he’s got the gangster stuff he’s analyzing society and spirituality, mixing it together. It’s about the dominant sense you get from the music. I feel you though, there are people that say they’re a conscious rapper and then their album just doesn’t feel that way. For me, consciousness doesn’t make you dope necessarily, even though most of the people I respect have it. 

 

SFBG: I’ve read in past interviews that your parents attended the March on Washington and that you were at the Million Man March yourself. Can you tell me what your political beliefs are? 

Z: I don’t really think of myself as a political person. I don’t totally believe in Democrats and Republicans and voting. I’m not sold on those things. I think there’s manipulation involved in all of that, and I don’t consider myself political, because I don’t think the political system is just. I just think people should be able to get what they need, that they should be able to have a full life. That’s why I’ve chosen music: it’s a little more direct. People have to jump through hoops with politics, I see it as kind of fraternity. 

Zion I’s latest, Atomic Clock, tells the time

SFBG: But you have musical talent you can use as a forum to express your beliefs – how do people make a difference who don’t have that platform?

Z: By being present and really standing for what you believe – just show up. I don’t call myself political, but take something like Oscar Grant, I was down there at the BART station, I was at City Hall the second time, I was taking pictures and trying to get footage. I think it’s more about that: standing up and making your voice known. Your clothes, your fashion sense, riding a bike instead of driving cars. There’s a disconnect between what people want and how people live their lives. You don’t want to be a slave to the system, so why do you put on clothes you don’t want to wear and go do something that someone tells you that you don’t want to do every day of your life? That’s what life is about, what you choose to do. Living in the United States, we can pretty much say what we want to say. It’s not a country that’s overly oppressive on the intellectual level. Physically it is, but you can pretty much say what you want. Just get out there and be it instead of complaining about everything, be the change you want to see in the world.

 

SFBG: Tell me your take on Obama’s presidency so far.

Z: It’s very interesting. You couldn’t write this stuff, this is a movie in action. When he got elected there was this passion, everyone was so over George Bush. It was like we were ushering in this whole level of politics in the US. And then, because things didn’t change… for me, I voted for Obama, but I don’t think the president makes all the decisions. He’s just the face man for the government. It’s not like this guy was going to change all evils in the world! But now reality is setting in. And because he is Black, it’s encouraged this other thing, the Tea Party? That’s just ridiculous, it’s engendered this backlash, there’s this ideal that there is no racism but in reality there’s more racism than before. Michael Vick — whose dog killed a man on his property — he served two years. Obama to me is a symbol of something – I’m not sure what it is yet, some kind of transformation hopefully, but people are pushing back against what change could be because they’re frustrated, there’s no jobs – they’re looking for a way out. It’s a strange story, it’s like a movie I’m watching. 

 

SFBG: I’ve heard that in Zion I, one of you studied to be a doctor and another, a psychologist. Which is which? How’d you chose that course of study?

Z: (laughs) I might again, you never know, I was just looking at grad schools online. The fact that it had to do with the mind in general. In college I was undeclared for the first two years and then I was getting to that point, so I was like psychology. I like the power of the mind, what the new age thing-movement is all about now, meditation, clearing your mind, intuition,

 

SFBG: Atomic Clock has been described as “moody and emotional.” Are you guys getting moody these days?

Z: Yeah a bit. The record, we did it really quickly in two and a half, three weeks. We proposed it to the label, hoping that they’d pass on it initially but they optioned it. It was a quick sprint all of a sudden, it went from this cool idea to something we had to rush to finish it. Because of that we had a moody attitude to it, the timing added this urgent feeling. Also, like the thing about Obama, it’s where things are, everything is in this transitional period, everyone’s stressed. 

 

SFBG: What do you think of the influx of dance beats in hip hop these days?

Z: I think its cool. I n the beginning, hip hop was always dance music. Sugar Hill Gang was the first quote-unquote rap record. For cats to be doing [dance beats], it’s a natural thing. That’s a part of hip hop. In the late ’90s, early ’00s hip hop kind of left the club, and then the South brought us back into the club. This music is about celebrating, having a good time. 

 

Zion I Atomic Clock CD release parties

Sat/20: featuring Locksmith, Hold Up, Bayliens, DJ Kevvy Kev

8:30 p.m., $20-23

Sun/21: featuring Eligh w/ Scarub, Bang Data, Hold Up, Oakland Faders

8 p.m., $20-23

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

 

Reel around the practice space

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Reel around the practice space

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC It’s easy enough for Corey Cunningham, guitar player for Magic Bullets, to tell that I’m there to interview the band. Although 2200 César Chávez St. is bustling for 8:14 on a Wednesday night, I’m the only one around without an instrument. Magic Bullets practices in Secret Studios, a warehouse full of closets for bands to rehearse. “Lots of bands practice here,” Cunningham said. Through the walls I can hear the muffled sounds of different groups putting work in on something between a hobby and a dream.

We find the rest of the band crammed into its rented space, surrounded by broken amplifiers. Magic Bullets is rehearsing for a show at the Rickshaw Stop, as well as for a trip to the CMJ Music Marathon, a result of songs from its 2010 self-titled album on Mon Amie having received considerable college airplay. The trip is a new opportunity — despite making music for six years, the band had to start over after the recent departures of its drummer, keyboardist, and second guitarist.

According to Cunningham, who founded the band along with singer and lyricist Phil Benson, bringing in a new drummer was the hardest part. “There are no two drummers who sound the same,” he says. “Even if they’re playing the exact same drum beat, their drum sets sound different, the way they play sounds different. It changes your sound drastically.” Once the group decided to leave out a second guitarist, Magic Bullets’ sound, evocative of U.K. guitar pop, has become clearer. In tandem, the rhythm section is less prone to stuttering and has become more propulsive.

Some bands don’t make that transition at all, observes drummer Alex Kaiser. “If everyone leaves except you — like what happened with my old band — and you’re the only person living within 500 miles, [breaking up is] a pretty easy choice,” he said. Kaiser’s last band, Tempo No Tempo, dissolved earlier this year, with one member making the popular musician move to Brooklyn and the other deciding to pursue higher education.

“There was a month or two when we weren’t really doing Magic Bullets,” Cunningham says. The remaining members started a side project, called Terry Malts, “because we didn’t have a drummer.”

“We were like, ‘Let’s just have fun,'<0x2009>” said Benson. Nathan Sweatt, Magic Bullets’ bassist and third surviving member, qualifies Benson’s optimism: “We thought, we’re paying for this practice space, we may as well get some use out of it.” The group rents the rehearsal space monthly, out of pocket, for about the price of a room in West Oakland. And it’s not necessarily cheap.

“We’re day-jobbers,” Cunningham says. Earlier I ask (in a clichéd fashion) Magic Bullets to describe its image, and the answers veer jokingly between “regular Joes” and “cage fighters.” The former is suggested by keyboardist Sean “Shony Collins” McDonnell, the other recent addition, who splits his time away from the band studying animation and kung fu. With a tendency to quip in cartoon voices, it can be hard to take him seriously. But Benson does.

“I knew Sean from being in bands in the Peninsula,” Benson says. “He actually was the lead singer of this punk band Nathan [Sweatt], and I used to go see when I was 15 years old, Jacob Ham — the local heroes. We all kind of looked up to him, and I’ve actually taken cues from his performances. I’ve told him that before, and he’s always like ‘Aww, you.’ But it’s true.”

If the band has any claim to being working class, it comes from Benson and Cunningham (Sweatt is in education; Kaiser is an “engineer for a big-ass government lab.”) Both work retail jobs for a company that will go unnamed. Cunningham: “We try not to give them too much advertising.” Benson: “Let’s just say you can buy stuff there.”

We talk about CMJ. “[It’s] one of the only things on our bucket list we haven’t done,” Cunningham deadpans, “along with a bungee jump show.” They seem excited — the closest thing they can compare it to at this point is South by Southwest, which they played in a previous incarnation. Remembering how one blog described the group as “a noticeably drunk Magic Bullets,” they begin to theorize on the relationship between alcohol and performance. Cunningham looks embarrassed and says, “Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about this.”

While the whole band is quick to be self-effacing, Cunningham appears to be the most self-critical. On Magic Bullets’ MySpace page, a link to the Pitchfork review of its recent album is accompanied by the mood “weird” and an eye-rolling smiley. When I bring it up, Cunningham is eager to talk about it. “That was a weird one, right?” he says. “Did you notice that they gave us a good number? But you wouldn’t think they liked us at all if you read what they wrote.” He has a point. The number is decent (7.2) and the reviewer doesn’t really say a whole lot. Yet the reviewer accuses the band of ripping a riff within its song “Pretend & Descend” straight from the Smiths’ “Bigmouth Strikes Again.”

Cunningham denies this. Even going back to listen to the song, he says he can’t hear the resemblance, and I don’t press it because, personally, I don’t either. What’s likely worse than the accusation of plagiarism (which puts Magic Bullets in the fine company of the Flaming Lips, Elastica, and Joe Meek), is accusing the band of sounding like the Smiths, a familiar reference in writing about the band.

“I don’t think its a bad comparison,” Cunningham says. “I think it’s just sort of a shallow comparison because there are so many other influences that are a little more noticeable. You know that song “Lying Around”? We were listening to this song called “My Old Piano” that Chic played on. It’s a Diana Ross song. If you listen, it has a rhythmic sensibility. That sounds closer [to “Pretend & Descend”] to me than any Smiths song.”

These points of reference have their use, but they also have their limits. During a Magic Bullets show at the Knockout earlier in the year, a girl mentioned to me that they sounded like, surprise, the Smiths, only to immediately begin discussing Robert Smith. The band was on point, working the crowd into a frenzy that mirrored Benson’s ecstatic dancing as he circled around the crowded stage, singing longing lyrics about relationships that had gone awry for no good reason. Right then, surface similarities didn’t matter and the costs of a practice space seemed worth it. The most important thing with a band like Magic Bullets is that they keep giving it a shot.

MAGIC BULLETS

Dec. 10, 9 p.m.; call for price

Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

(415) 550-6994

www.myspace.com/magicbullets

www.theknockoutsf

Delta death

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Delta death

By Patrick Porgans and Lloyd Carter

news@sfbg.com

While Californians were held captive waiting for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature to agree on spending cuts and adopt a budget, state officials were throwing hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain and compounding California’s water crisis.

Water officials have wasted more than $10 billion and 35 years in extended delays in their failed attempt to carry out their legal mandates to protect the waters of the state and restore the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary. The result: water quality in the estuary is rapidly declining; fisheries are in crisis; and the proposed solution, an $11 billion bond act set for the ballot in 2012, will only make things worse.

The primary source of the water-quality crisis is a toxic mix of salt and chemicals discharged from lands irrigated by subsidized water delivered by the federal Central Valley Project to contractors farming on the arid west side of the San Joaquin Valley.

The salt comes from several sources. Irrigation water — particularly from the delta, where the water is somewhat brackish — contains salt. There also is salt and traces of much more toxic selenium in the soil. Industrial fertilizers add more dangerous chemicals to the mix. And since crops grown in the Central Valley don’t absorb much salt and the constant flushing with irrigation water leaches the selenium out of the soil, a nasty stew starts to build up.

This U.S. Geological Survey map shows a plan by federal and state regulators to divert toxic water more directly into the Sacramento Delta. All these diversion plans ignore the fact that poorly drained land isn’t suitable for farming.

If the irrigation water isn’t drained off, the salt buildup in the groundwater renders the land unusable to farming. In essence, farmers have been dumping the runoff water — laden with salt and selenium, along with mercury and boron — into the San Joaquin River, which carries it back into the delta and the bay.

All this is being done as the government declares its intent to save the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary.

How much salt are we talking about? According to a 2006 U.S. Geological Survey report, it amounts to about 17 railroad cars a day, each capable of carrying 100 tons of salt, as well as selenium and mercury. That’s 3.4 million pounds of salt a day being dumped in the lower San Joaquin River.

Of course, the river is a freshwater habitat, so all that salt damages plant and fish life.

Some experts say that part of the toxic stew is ultimately flushed out to sea, and the rest perhaps enters the aquatic food chain or at least degrades cleaner delta water.

As far back as the 1998, the state Water Board staff reported that salt loads in the valley were doubling every five years. Toxic salt-loading is not only taking its toll on the river and Bay-Delta Estuary, it’s draining the state treasury since myriad publicly funded programs for drainage, water quality improvement, fisheries restoration, and others continue to be financed with borrowed money from the deficit-ridden General Fund.

The water quality problem was identified as a potential crisis in the 1950s and has contributed to the pollution of a significant length of the 330-mile San Joaquin River. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 215.4 miles of the river are on the list of waterways so polluted they’re unfit to swim in. And some species of fish from the river aren’t safe to eat.

On a 1999 EPA map, the valley is the single largest “more serious water quality problem — high vulnerability” area in the nation.

Water officials, drainers, and the major environmental groups forged a deal in 1995 to permit the toxic drainage to continue until October 2010, at which time the discharges were to end. But that hasn’t happened; the water boards have approved a new target date for compliance (2019) and sanctioned continued dumping of toxic drainage. The train wreck in the making will be allowed to continue dumping and pumping toxic salts every day into the waters of the state for the rest of this decade.

The tons of toxics salts being discharged into the waters of the state are only the tip of the iceberg. An unfathomable amount of toxic salts are also being stored in the soil underground, contaminating groundwater basins throughout the valley.

State and federal officials have put a lot of faith in a federal Bureau of Reclamation project known as the Grasslands Bypass, which is designed to send contaminated agricultural water through a part of the old San Luis Drain (that once led to the contamination of the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge) into a San Joaquin tributary known as Mud Slough.

The Grasslands Bypass Project, begun in 1995, is operated by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. It reroutes subsurface agricultural drainage water around wetlands on its way eastward to the San Joaquin River.

Originally the agricultural runoff traveled through Salt Slough (a San Joaquin River tributary), which passed through wetlands on the way to the river. The Grasslands Bypass Project uses the San Luis Drain to reroute that runoff around approximately 100,000 acres of land between Firebaugh and Los Banos and into Mud Slough (another tributary of the San Joaquin River).

Carolee Krieger, president of the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN), says the Grasslands Bypass Project misses the point. The best solution, she said, is to stop farming altogether on the poorly-draining western valley along the San Joaquin River.

The project protects the wetlands but hurts the river itself. Dennis Lemly, research professor of biology at Wake Forest University in Winston/Salem, N.C., confirmed in December 2009 that the continuation of the Grasslands Bypass Project will cause a 50 percent mortality among juvenile Chinook salmon and Central Valley Steelhead in the San Joaquin River. Furthermore, the state water board lists both the Carquinez Strait and Suisun Bay, both downstream from the San Joaquin River, as “impaired” for their excessive selenium content.

At best, the bypass project can only slightly mitigate the damage. The only real way to resolve the discharge of the tons of toxic salts is to stop irrigating land that has known drainage problems.

In the early 1980s, the discharge of the toxic salts into the now-closed Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, located in the San Joaquin Valley, was the site of one of the worst government-induced wildlife crises in American history. Several studies have since been conducted and numerous Band-Aid-type fixes have been implemented, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. So far officials have failed to identify a viable cost-effective solution to the toxic agricultural drainage crisis and estimate a pilot program will cost at least $2 billion.

Meanwhile, the Legislative Analyst reported in 2008 that the state and federal government have spent $5 billion on projects to improve the Delta.

This is one of the ways your tax dollars fund the destruction of the San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem.

Patrick Porgans is a Sacramento-based water-policy consultant. Lloyd Carter, a former UPI and Fresno Bee reporter, has covered water issues in California for more than 30 years. For more information, go to www.lloydgcarter.com and www.planetarysolutions.org. Additional research was done by Noah Arroyo.

How California exports water

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
How California exports water

By Patrick Porgans

In 2009, the last year of the so-called great California drought, a strange thing happened: Sacramento Valley growers produced a near record amount of rice, and down south, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (Met), the largest urban water supplier in the nation, experienced record-breaking water sales. All this despite repeated mainstream media accounts in 2009 of an economy-wrecking dust bowl water shortage.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the California rice harvest in 2009 was up 9 percent from the previous year and approached the record crop of 2004.

Rice consumes a great deal of water for its dollar value and produces little net income. According to a report by the University of California, Davis, the minimum amount of water required to grow a crop of rice is about 42 inches per acre. Unavoidable losses can add to this amount — so that the amount of water consumed (or evaporated) can be as much as 100 inches per acre, depending on the soil. That appears to be enough water to drown the tallest person on earth.

The California Rice Commission, a trade group representing 2,500 rice farmers, estimates that rice uses 2.2 million acre-feet of irrigation water yearly, about 2.6 percent of the state’s total water supply. According to records obtained from Met, that’s equal to the annual average water it supplied to all of its 19 million customers.

UC Davis data from 2008 show that California exported 52 percent of its rice production, much of it to Japan. For every pound of rice exported, about 250 gallons of embedded water used in growing and processing that rice leaves along with it, according to “Water Footprints of Nations,” a 2004 UNESCO study. (The report spawned the Web site www.waterfootprint.com.)

The rice harvest should be of great consolation to the chairman of the California State Water Resources Control Board, Charles Hoppin, who is also a rice grower, vice-chairman of the Rice Growers Cooperative, and immediate past chairman of the California Rice Industry Association. Chairman Hoppin, in a March 2010 speech in Yuma, Ariz., complained that the regulatory community, including much of his staff, doesn’t know or understand the issues facing agriculture and “doesn’t give a rat’s ass.”

According to the Environmental Working Group, rice subsidies in California totaled $2.4 billion from 1995-2009. In that period, the single largest recipient of subsidies was the Farmers’ Rice Cooperative of Sacramento, California, totaling more than $146 million.

Farm recipients of USDA subsidies in California totaled $9.1 billion from 1995-2009.According to EWG, “Washington paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009. But to characterize the programs as either a big government bailout or another form of welfare would be manifestly unfair — to bailouts and welfare.” Then there’s hay — another water-gulping product that’s getting exported, with much of it going to Japan.

Writer Melinda Burns, in a June 10, 2009 story on Miller-McCune.com, notes: “In the Imperial Valley of California, a region drier than part of the Sahara Desert, farmers have found a lucrative market abroad for a crop they grow with Colorado River water: They export bales of hay to land-poor Japan. Since the mid-1980s, this arid border region of California has been supplying hay and feed for Japan’s dairy cows and black-haired cattle, the kind that get daily massages, are fed beer, and produce the most tender Kobe beef.”

She quotes Patrick Woodall, research director at Food and Water Watch, an international consumer advocacy group with headquarters in Washington, D.C.: “There is a kind of insanity about this,” Woodall said. “Exporting water in the form of crops is giving water away from thirsty communities and infringing on their ability to deal with water scarcity.”

War on drugs rages on

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
War on drugs rages on

By Pamela A. MacLean

news@sfbg.com

The two Norton brothers thought someone was breaking into their Oakland apartment to kill them one pre-dawn day in October 2007. Instead, a couple dozen well-armed and screaming federal drug agents stormed the place, rousted the pair, and dragged them around the apartment before arresting them.

Winslow and Abraham Norton operated one of the most successful medical marijuana dispensaries in the Bay Area, the Compassionate Patients’ Cooperative of California, in Hayward. In just the first six months of 2007, the operation grossed $26 million.

But if they thought facing a federal indictment on charges of conspiracy to possess and distribute more than 1,000 kilos of marijuana and money laundering was their worst nightmare, the Norton brothers just weren’t dreaming big enough.

The pair — with all-American good looks, close-cropped beards, and infectious smiles — finish each other’s sentences when they describe their run-in with the federal justice system.

“We were 11 and 14 when medical marijuana was legalized, and we grew up in Berkeley,” Abraham said “It may be naïve, but we didn’t understand the legality. Now we know federal law a lot better.”

Abraham, 26, and Winslow, 29, played by the rules in California’s fledgling medical marijuana law. In 2005 they got an Alameda County permit to operate from the former Sheriff Charles Plummer, a seller’s permit from the state, paid taxes, and had random inspections by local police.

They even hired security guards to patrol the place to make sure patients felt safe. After abandoning a couple of security companies as “no good,” they hired a tough bunch that had former Navy SEALS, Marines, and cops in their ranks, SEAL-Mar Security. They rotated a crew of 44 different guards who patrolled outside and carried Glocks, Smith & Wessons, Sig Sauers, and Rugers to make sure no one caused trouble.

“We are very proud we were squeaky clean and examined under a microscope,” Winslow said. “We never did a deal out the back door,” Abraham insisted. They sold so much marijuana to legitimate patients “it never made sense and it would have hurt the company” to do any illegal side deals, Winslow said.

But selling marijuana is still a federal crime, and in negotiations the prosecutor insisted the brothers accept five-year minimum prison terms. They refused, offering to plead guilty to conspiracy and let U.S. District Judge D. Lowell Jensen set the sentence. Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Corrigan balked. Then, according to the Nortons and their lawyers, Corrigan upped the ante, threatening to indict their mother, who helped out in the co-op by opening up for the early shift.

“We had to tell her over a Thanksgiving,” Winslow said. “It was pretty miserable. We didn’t know what to do.”

Then, in February 2009, the government indicted their father instead, along with a coworker, and added a far more serious charge: aiding in the carrying of a firearm to further a drug crime. That charge alone carries up to life in prison, but no less than five years.

The Nortons had no guns. It was the gun-toting security team that was “aiding” in a drug conspiracy.

“It is plain and simple coercion, nothing less than that,” said Harold Rosenthal, Abraham’s attorney.

“When we heard the charge, we said ‘you must be kidding,'” says Doron Weinberg, the high-profile defense lawyer who defended record producer Phil Spector in his 2007 murder trial. “I have never before heard of a person charged with violation of a gun law because they hired a security guard.”

Although there is a new U.S. attorney, Melinda Haag, she isn’t talking. “It is an ongoing case so we have no comment,” said her spokesman Jack Gillund.

Sheriff Plummer, who retired in 2007 after 50 years in law enforcement, said of the weapons charges: “It’s bullshit.”

“While I don’t favor their type of business, it was legal. I wanted to make damn sure they were protected, people were protected, and the building was protected. I told them to hire a security crew,” he said.

Abraham says Plummer assured them during a county Board of Supervisors meeting that if they did everything he required, the feds would leave them alone. “I could have said that,” Plummer said when asked about that assurance.

Although the new charge is “aiding” use of weapons, the security crew was not charged with a crime. It had no effect on the guards or the company, according to Tom Turner, one of SEAL-Mar’s owners.

The indictment of their father, Michael, was no accident. Michael is a patient of the dispensary, but the brothers and his lawyer, Bill Osterhoudt, say Michael had no ownership interest in the co-op.

What Michael Norton does have is a criminal record. In the 1980s, he went to prison for two years in what was known as the Kona coffee caper. He bought low-cost Guatemalan coffee beans and sold them as pricey Hawaiian Kona coffee.

Piled on to the Norton brothers’ legal problems is a tax bill that went unpaid when the federal agents raided their apartment and the business. When the federal agents swept in three years ago, they seized the brothers’ two cars, a house they just bought, more than 300 pounds of marijuana, and an electronic deposit of nearly $340,000 in sales tax sent to the state Board of Equalization, according to Winslow.

“We thought the wire transfer cleared. We had confirmation, but the government still seized it,” Abraham said. “They stole the money,” Winslow said. That debt, with penalties and interest, is now close to $1 million, according to Abraham.

“The feds snatched the sales tax money and left the Nortons liable for it, and now they have liens against them for the money,” Rosenthal said.

The irony for the brothers is that they believe they were the first dispensary to voluntarily pay sales taxes. “We collected them for six months and took a check for $1 million to the BOE,” Abraham said. “They didn’t want to take money from medical marijuana sales and told us to call it something else,” Winslow said. “We refused. They wanted us to lie and say the bags cost $300 and the contents were free. But that would have screwed up our accounting.”

After accepting the initial payment, within a week the board issued letters to all the dispensaries in the state asking for sales tax, according to the brothers.

Judge Jensen rejected defense efforts to get the gun charges thrown out in September. But Jensen, a Republican former prosecutor, signaled he is not happy and ordered both sides to sit down Dec. 9 for formal talks before a magistrate to see if they can resolve the case.

“It’s not enough to say we want the case dropped,” Abraham said. “Our credit is destroyed. We can’t work.”

“Three years later we are still fighting it,” Winslow said. “We’ve been fighting this almost as long as the dispensary existed.”

As for the brothers’ chances to negotiate a resolution with the feds, Rosenthal said, “I’m somehow hoping the clouds are going to part and sanity is going to set in.”

Fighting dirty

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Fighting dirty

rebeccab@sfbg.com

One by one, representatives from California local governments who had gone toe-to-toe with Pacific Gas & Electric Co. recounted their war stories. They were weary, fatigued, and uncertain of the future. Their resources had been depleted by hefty legal expenses, and they were forever caught up in the game of trying to undo the damage of misinformation campaigns whipped up against them by PG&E. None had ever suspected that following state law would be so arduous.

At a Nov. 8 hearing of the California Senate Select Committee on Renewable Energy, held in San Rafael, officials from the San Joaquin Valley, Marin County, and San Francisco spoke about challenges they faced trying to initiate community choice aggregation (CCA) programs, which would create alternative electricity providers to PG&E.

In accordance with Assembly Bill 117, which allows local governments to purchase power in bulk and distribute it to a customer base using the infrastructure and billing systems operated by investor-owned utilities, representatives from local government agencies said they pursued CCAs to bolster local economies and benefit the environment — but quickly fell prey to fierce marketing campaigns.

So far, PG&E hasn’t faced any real consequences for trying to derail its competitors using unethical and sometimes illegal tactics, and the director of the California Public Utilities Commission, Paul Clanon, did not commit to imposing fines or sanctions against the company.

 

COOPERATING FULLY

Despite a requirement under AB117 that utilities must “cooperate fully” with CCA implementation, agency representatives testified that PG&E consistently tried to obstruct their success. The San Joaquin Valley Joint Power Authority’s CCA effort was suspended after a protracted legal battle, and has yet to be revisited.

At the hearing, Sen. Mark Leno listened attentively and offered sympathetic words of encouragement. “It is a superhuman accomplishment that you are even here with us today,” he jested after Dawn Weisz, interim director of the Marin Energy Authority (MEA), finished describing a litany of tactics the monolithic utility employed against Marin’s CCA.

Marin’s experience may foreshadow what’s in store for San Francisco. CleanPower SF, the city’s CCA program, is picking up steam again after an initial attempt to hire a contractor failed to yield an acceptable agreement. On Nov. 5, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) announced it had received four responses to a second RFP for an electricity service provider to administer the city’s CCA.

Already San Francisco has weathered some attacks. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who chairs the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) and has been a key figure in moving CCA forward, characterized Marin and San Francisco as “brothers and sisters in arms,” saying, “We would share what we knew of what we could expect, because we were no strangers to these tactics.”

Weisz noted that early on, PG&E sent lobbyists to meet privately with local elected officials. Soon after, the company upped the ante with a negative marketing campaign, distributing mailers that contained misleading information about the program. Their activity prompted a rebuke — but no fines — from the CPUC. “I sent PG&E a letter to say knock it off,” Clanon said at the hearing.

PG&E also set up a phone-banking operation to dial up every prospective CCA customer in Marin County and encourage them to opt out of the program and used false information to persuade customers to stick with PG&E service, Weisz charged. “Many were led to believe that their lights wouldn’t go on if they didn’t opt out,” she said.

Once the CCA was in operation, PG&E imposed a delay on the billing process that made one month’s bill artificially low and the subsequent bill abnormally high, making it appear that CCA rates were higher than PG&E rates. This gaffe, which the company chalked up as a technical error, amounted to a sleight-of-hand: “Our rates were set to match PG&E rates,” Weisz explained.

PG&E did not return calls seeking comment.

Against all odds, Marin County is forging ahead with a power program that offers a 26.5 percent renewable energy mix, with 78 percent of its power generated without greenhouse gas emissions. State records show that only 14 percent of PG&E’s energy comes for renewable sources, failing to meet a state requirement that utilities get at least 20 percent of their power from such sources.

Charles McGlashan, a Marin County supervisor who chairs the Marin Energy Authority, noted that implementing a CCA was the most effective method the county could have employed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yielding an estimated 500,000-ton reduction of greenhouse gas emissions annually.

While the potential exists for other municipalities to follow suit, PG&E smear campaigns will likely discourage similar projects. “This is a powerful opportunity that has been virtually destroyed by the antics of PG&E,” McGlashan said. “It has had an extraordinary chilling effect on the political leaders to even embark on such an enterprise.” Later he added, “I’m only doing it because I’m so hell-bent on answering the children’s questions about climate change.”

 

STORM COMING

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, CCA advocates are getting ready to batten down the hatches. “We’re under no illusion — PG&E will compete fiercely,” San Francisco Public Utilities Commission spokesperson Charles Sheehan told the Guardian. He said the city was taking a proactive approach by conducting early outreach to residents and holding public informational meetings about CleanPower SF.

The SFPUC has received four bids from prospective electricity service providers. The respondents are Constellation Energy Commodities Group, Shell Energy North America, Power Choice Inc. (which was selected during the last RFP process but was unable to secure a binding agreement with the city), and Noble Americas Energy Solutions, formerly known as Sempra Energy Solutions. During the Senate hearing, San Francisco CCA director Mike Campbell noted that the city expected to complete a scoring process and select one of the four by the end of the year. The goal is to be fully operational by 2011, he added.

Leno predicted resistance from PG&E. “It’s like a storm coming in,” he said. “We have no doubt of its arrival. They have endless opportunities for nefarious creativity.” He queried Clanon on why the PUC wouldn’t levy fines or sanctions against the utility for the negative campaigns it waged in Marin, as a way to signal that such activity wouldn’t be tolerated in San Francisco.

Clanon did not commit to taking such an action. “That’s a choice about how you get the right behavior,” he said. He noted that the CPUC issued a decision last May preventing the utility from distributing false or misleading information about CCAs or illegally soliciting opt-outs. Clanon warned that PG&E might not be deterred by “fines and sanctions and specific rules.” Pressed on this point later, Clanon told the Guardian that imposing fines or sanctions “would take a lot of resources by us” at a time when the state agency is consumed with other pressing issues, such as the aftermath of the San Bruno explosion caused by a PG&E gas pipeline rupture. “If you set a rule, more people get around the rule,” he said.

Even if the state regulatory body doesn’t hold PG&E’s feet to the fire, Mirkarimi won’t hold back. “We’re tired of the thuggery. We’re tired of the bullying,” he said. He alluded to the Raker Act, a 1913 act of Congress that allowed San Francisco to build the O’Shaughnessy Dam and draw water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir under the condition that no private profit was derived from the development, saying the arrangement had been subverted by PG&E. “We should be able to chart our own energy destiny,” Mirkarimi said.

Rebuilding the labor movement

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Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.

Unions, as you might certainly expect, have been having a rough time during the current recession. How rough? Well, overall union membership declined by a whopping 771,000 over the past year.

The number of workers in unions is still large, around 15 million. But that’s only a little more than 12 percent of the country’s workforce. There is one bright spot: More than one-third of public employees are in unions.

The figures for workers in private employment, however, show that only about 7 percent of them are in unions, That’s the lowest percentage of unionized workers in private employment since 1900. That’s right – the lowest percentage in 110 years.

Unions are fighting hard to reverse the downward trend, and though many outside the labor movement openly doubt – or at least wishfully think – that it can’t be done, I think they’re wrong. The doubters are forgetting that it’s been done before  – and done in the face of obstacles that were at least as great as those confronted by union adherents today.
It began 75 years ago this month, in November of 1935, when eight affiliates of the American Federation of Labor – the AFL – put together what soon became the independent Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO. Their aim was to mobilize the racially and ethnically mixed mass of generally unskilled workers in steel, rubber, auto, meatpacking and other basic industries.

The AFL had largely ignored the industrial workers in favor of skilled and semi-skilled white craftsmen who were organized into separate unions according to their trade – plumbing, printing, carpentry and so forth – rather than by industry.

That kept most workers isolated from each other and enabled the industrial corporations that dominated the economy to unilaterally set pay and working conditions at the lowest possible levels.

The CIO leaders believed that workers could not make a decent living and that the labor movement could not grow and possibly not even survive unless workers were brought together in tight solidarity through industrial as opposed to the craft unionism. of the AFL.

The issues today are different. But the basic need for solidarity remains, as does the need to organize workers whatever their occupation.

That won’t be easy, with only about 12 percent of today’s workforce in unions. But when the CIO began in 1935, less than 10 percent of the country’s workers were in unions, and they faced a Great Depression that was much worse than today’s Great Recession.

The labor movement hit rock bottom during the Depression of the 1930s. But finally unemployment became so widespread and pay and working conditions so bad that large numbers of workers rebelled – most under the banners of the CIO.

 President Franklin Roosevelt, fearing revolution, quickly pushed through Congress bills that in effect put the government behind the workers attempts to organize. They were granted the legal right to organize and to strike – and to choose by majority votes unions to represent them in collective bargaining with their employers.

Millions of workers flocked to unions, CIO and AFL unions alike. Millions engaged in strikes and other militant actions to press their bargaining demands. Pay rose substantially. Workers won unheard of fringe benefits. Working hours were reduced without reductions in pay. Grievance procedures were instituted. Job security was greatly enhanced.

Most important, the living standards of ordinary Americans were raised. And the United States at last had a true middle class.

As the CIO grew, so did the AFL. By the time the competing organizations merged in 1955 to form the AFL-CIO, one of every three U.S. workers belonged to a union.

The vital, demanding and essential task of today’s labor leaders is nothing less than to do what was done by their predecessors when they formed the CIO three-quarters of a century ago . . . nothing less than to bring new life to the American labor movement.


Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.

Only a miracle can save Steve Li now

Mary Magee
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Supporters of Shing Ma “Steve” Li, a 20-year-old nursing student, gathered outside the offices of Sen. Barbara Boxer today to urge her to sponsor a private bill in a last ditch effort to halt Li’s deportation to Peru, which is scheduled to take place Monday, November 15—two months after ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents arrested Li in San Francisco.

“While we do not introduce private bills, our staff is happy to meet with Mr. Li’s family and his attorneys to discuss his case,” Boxer spokesperson Zachary Coile emailed the Guardian, as protesters delivered stack of letters to Boxer’s office, asking that she intervene in Li’s case.

Unlike Sen. Dianne Feinstein who has sponsored private bills in the past, Boxer has no record of intervening in this way. But advocates were hopeful that now that she has survived the November 2010 election, Boxer will pull off a miracle before Monday.

This afternoon, Li’s attorney Sin Yen Ling texted the Guardian that her request for deferred action had been denied, meaning that Li will be on a plane to Peru on Monday, baring some last minute miracle.

“Our office has been in touch with ICE and is exploring the options,” Gil Duran, media spokesperson for Sen. Dianne Feinstein told the Guardian, half an hour after Li’s request for deferred action was denied.

And Boxer spokesperson Zachary Coile said the senator’s staff met with Li’s mother, his attorney, his City College professor and others, this afternoon.

“While we do not introduce private bills, our staff was happy to meet with Steve Li’s family and his attorney to discuss his case,” Coile stated. “We reiterated Senator Boxer’s strong support for the DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for tens of thousands of undocumented students who go to college or serve in the military. Senator Boxer will keep working in the Senate until it becomes law.”

And tonight, Drew Hammill, press secretary to Speaker Nancy Pelosi emailed the following statement to the Guardian:

“Speaker Pelosi believes that Steve Li’s case is a textbook example of the pressing need for comprehensive immigration reform and passage of the DREAM Act. Speaker Pelosi is working with other Members to recommend that ICE grant deferred action in this case.”

Boxer, Feinstein and Pelosi, who have both been strong supporters of the DREAM Act, have vowed to keep working until it is passed.

Earlier this fall, on Sept. 14—the day before ICE arrested Li– Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced plans to add the DREAM Act as an amendment to the Department of Defense authorization bill.

But that effort was blocked by Senate Republicans. And after the bloodbath that congressional Democrats endured this November, it’s unclear if the DREAM Act has a prayer, though Nancy Pelosi vowed to move it forward during Congress’ upcoming lame-duck session, and it has continued to attract bi-partisan support since it was first introduced in 2001 by Senators Richard Durbin (D-Il) and Richard Lugar (R-IN).

At today’s protest, Li’s legal counsel, Sin Yen Ling, decried the federal government’s decision to deport her client.

“A 20-year-old City College student is not a threat to our national security,” Ling said. “We need to bring Steve Li home as soon as possible.”

According to Ling, Li has not seen his mother Maria, who divorced Li’s dad for years and lives with Li in San Francisco, since his Sept. 15 arrest, when  ICE picked up Li and his mother in Ingleside on Sept. 15 and placed them in separate cars. The car carrying Li then picked up Li’s  father in the Richmond, and all three family members were processed at ICE’s Sansome Street office in downtown San Francisco, before being transferred to Sacramento County Jail. But Li was then involuntarily transferred to an ICE detention facility in Arizona. Meanwhile, Li’s parents were released from detention when ICE determined that China does not want them back because they left China seeking political asylum. But they are now required to wear cumbersome electronic monitoring anklets, because they are deemed a flight risk, and are not allowed to leave San Francisco.

As a result, Li’s parents have been unable to visit their son in Arizona. And should he be deported to Peru, it’s not clear if they will be permitted to follow. And should if they decide to travel to Peru, they will not be allowed to reenter the U.S. for at least ten years, further complicating a complex situation.

At today’s rally, Li’s mother Maria spoke in public for the first time,  breaking down into tears, as she begged Sen. Boxer and the U.S. government to help.

“He has no money, no clean clothes, how will he get by?” she asked, referring to ICE’s plan to put her son on a plane to Lima, Peru, where he reportedly knows no one.  “Sen. Boxer, will you just watch and pretend you didn’t see anything? Today, when you see all of us standing here begging you, will you respond to us? I hope you can understand it from a mother’s perspective and meet with me to discuss how we can help Steve.”

Ling said Li’s mother decided to speak because of the direness of her son’s situation, even though she was wearing a federally-mandated monitoring anklet.
“She felt it was now or never,” Ling said.

Li’s teacher Sang Chi also spoke, praising Li as a model student and a prime example of the kind of person that should be eligible for the DREAM Act. And then the Rev. Norman Fang led Li’s supporters in a prayer.

‘We ask that a miracle take place and that Steve’s mom and San Francisco can be happy again, that the heart and soul of what is morally right can overcome regulations,” Fang said, noting that 100 years, his family members were detained at Angel Island “for no other reason than they were Chinese. ‘There is only one border in our world—the one that separates Heaven and Earth.”

Li’s attorney Sin Yen Ling clarified that she doesn’t believe that ICE singled Li out.
“He’s just been swept up as part of a larger program,” Ling said, noting that actions that split families apart and target folks who came to this country as undocumented children have inspired a movement of DREAMers—folks who support the DREAM Act.

Every year, about 65,000 U.S. raised students, who would qualify for the DREAM Act’s proposed benefits, graduate from high school, according to the National Immigration Law Center (NILC).

“These include honor roll students, star athletes, talented artists, homecoming queens, and aspiring teachers, doctors and U.S. soldiers,” states a NILC press release. “They are young people who have lived in the U.S. for most of their lives and desire only to call this country their home. Even though they were brought to the U.S. years ago as children, they face unique barriers to higher education, are unable to work legally in the U.S. and often live in constant fear of detection by immigration authorities.”

Asked how ICE caught up with Li, who does not have a criminal record, Ling pointed to modern technology
“In this day and age, you can track anyone down,” Ling said.” And it’s a priority for ICE to identify people with final deportation orders,” she continued. Ling was referring to the fact that Li’s parents were denied their request for political asylum from China and issued a removal order, unbeknownst to their son Steve, who was born in Peru, came to the U.S. when he was 12 and was 14, when his parents’ asylum request was denied.

But Ling did not blame President Barack Obama, who promised to bring millions of undocumented residents out of the shadows, when he was running for president in 2008.
“It’s tough to criticize the president when he had five different priorities coming into office, including healthcare. His administration probably miscalculated how long it would take to pass healthcare. And part of the problem is partisan politics around immigration.”

Ling estimates that there are two million young people currently in the U.S. who would benefit from the passage of the DREAM Act, but blamed partisan politics for why the legislation failed to pass by only 3 votes in the Senate in September.

Sup. David Campos showed up at the rally and told Li’s supporters that the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution Nov. 9 calling for ICE to defer Li’s deportation.

“The Board is not always on the same page, but on this issue we were unanimous,” Campos said. “We get it, we understand the tragedy that this deportation would result in. And we remain hopeful that something will happen. There are millions of young people in the same predicament, and the solution is not deportation. The solution is passing comprehensive immigration reform. Until then, we need an intervention.”

Meanwhile, somewhere in Arizona, Steve Li sits in a jail cell, hoping, praying and dreaming…

Yee launches mayoral bid as supervisors consider their options

Sasha Cuttler
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Yee launches mayoral bid as supervisors consider their options

Amid the jockeying for position on who will be San Francisco’s next mayor, Sen. Leland Yee this morning filed paperwork at the SF Elections Department to form a mayoral exploratory committee before a throng of journalists who were invited yesterday for a big “announcement.”

Yee diligently hit his talking points and did little to divert from a script emphasizing his deep local roots, his belief in being a humble public servant, and how this action was “beginning a conversation with San Franciscans” about “what they want of their city government and their next mayor.” Yee used the word “conversation” so many times that an AP reporter asked him to explain his issues and reasons for running without using the word “conversation,” a word Yee still slipped into his answer.

Meanwhile, members of the Board of Supervisors yesterday introduced competing motions for naming an interim mayor to replace Gavin Newsom while he leaves in January to become lieutenant governor. Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, and Chris Daly are seeking to have the board vote on a replacement mayor as soon as next week, while Board President David Chiu asked the board clerk’s office to develop a framework and process for choosing a new mayor. Asked whether he has the six votes needed to take up the matter next week, Avalos told the Guardian, “That’s my hope, but we’ll see.”

While Yee seems focused on winning the mayoral election next fall, rather than winning six votes on the board now, he told reporters, “I have the highest regard for members of the Board of Supervisors…They have a tremendous challenge in front of them and I wish them well.”

In his prepared statement that listed his contact person as Jim Stearns, a political consultant who usually works for progressive candidates and ballot measures, Yee sought to differentiate himself from Newsom, who has had hostile relations with the board throughout his seven-year tenure. “I want to see the Mayor work with, and not against the Board of Supervisors,” Yee said in that statement.

Asked by the Guardian to elaborate on what appears to be a critique of Newsom, Yee demurred. “I’m not going to judge this mayor. History will do that,” he said.

Playing it safe for now could be a sound strategy for Yee, who would be the city’s first Chinese-American mayor and who has a history of endorsing progressive candidates and positions, but who also just raised and spent more than $1.2 million (much of it in big corporate donations that far exceed limits on local donations that his committee will now allow him to begin collecting) on his uncontested Senate reelection, including giving six-figures to Stearns and spending almost as much on polling.

Stearns tells the Guardian that, consistent with his message today, Yee will run a very positive campaign. “We’re going to run a different kind of campaign, a very collaborative campaign,” he said. “This city deserves a different kind of campaign where people are just firing their guns at each other.”

Dodging bullets

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Dodging bullets

steve@sfbg.com

Progressives in San Francisco dodged a few bullets on election night, which was the highest hope that many held in a campaign season dominated by conservative money and messaging. The Board of Supervisors retained a progressive majority, Prop B’s attack on public employees went down, the wealthy will pay more property transfer taxes, and — perhaps the best news of all — Gavin Newsom is leaving for Sacramento a year before his mayoral term ends.

But economically conservative and downtown-backed campaigns and candidates scored the most election-night victories in San Francisco, killing a temporary hotel tax hike pushed hard by labor and several progressive-sponsored ballot measures, and winning approval for the divisive sit-lie ordinance and Prop. G, removing Muni driver pay guarantees, which had the widest margin of the night: 65-35 percent.

“Ultimately, downtown did well,” progressive political consultant Jim Stearns told us on election night, noting how aggressive spending by downtown business and real estate interests ended a string of progressive victories in the last several election cycles. He cited the likely election of Scott Wiener in District 8 and the strong challenge in District 2 by Mark Farrell to perceived frontrunner Janet Reilly, who had progressive and mainstream endorsements.

A preliminary Guardian analysis of reported spending by independent expenditure committees shows that groups affiliated with downtown or supporting more conservative candidates spent about $922,435, the biggest contributions coming from conservative businessman Thomas Coates and the San Francisco Board of Realtors, compared to $635,203 by more progressive organizations, mostly the San Francisco Democratic Party and San Francisco Labor Council.

That spending piggy-backed on national campaigns that were also skewed heavily to conservative and corporate-funded groups and messaging that demonized government and public employee unions, playing on people’s economic insecurities during a stubborn recession and jobless recovery.

Stearns said voters are having a hard time in this economy “and they don’t like to see the government spending.” He said national polls consistently show that people are more scared of “big government” than they are “big corporations,” even if San Francisco progressives tend to hold the opposite view.

And even that narrow defeat came after an almost unprecedented opposition campaign that included every elected official in San Francisco except the measure’s sponsor, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, and both the labor movement and many moderate groups.

“The campaign on this was extraordinary and caught fire at the end,” Alex Clemens, founder of Barbary Coast Consulting, said at SPUR’s Nov. 4 election wrap-up event. In particular, the message about how much Prop B would increase the health care costs on median-income city employees seemed to resonate with voters.

“We are really happy that Prop. B is going down because it was such a misguided measure. It was not well thought through,” Labor Council President Tim Paulson told the Guardian at the election night party labor threw with the San Francisco Democratic Party at Great American Music Hall. “San Francisco voters are the smartest in America.”

Paulson was also happy to see those voters approve taxing the transfer of properties worth more than $5 million, “because San Franciscans know that everyone has to pay their fair share.”

In the Board of Supervisors races, it was basically a status quo election that shouldn’t alter the body’s current politics dynamics much. Sup. Bevan Dufty will be replaced with fellow moderate Scott Wiener in D8 and Sup. Chris Daly by progressive Jane Kim in D6. The outcome of races to replace ideological wobbler Sup. Sophie Maxwell in D10 and conservative Michela Alioto-Pier in D2 may not be conclusively known for at least a few more days (maybe longer if the close races devolve into lawsuits), but neither is a seat that would diminish the board’s progressive majority.

Progressives could have made a gain if Rafael Mandelman had won in D8, but he was seven points behind Wiener on election night and even more after the initial ranked choice tally was run on Nov. 5. And in D6, fears that downtown-backed candidate Theresa Sparks might sneak past dueling progressive candidates Jane Kim and Debra Walker never materialized as Sparks finished far behind the lefty pair.

Consultant David Latterman, who worked for Sparks, told us on election night that he was surprised to see that Kim was the choice of 32 percent of early absentee voters “because we targeted those voters.” By comparison, Walker was at 20 percent and Sparks was at 21 percent in the initial returns, which tend to be more conservative. By the end of the night, Kim had 31.3 percent, Walker 27.7 percent, and Sparks just 16.5 percent.

“If she did that well with absentees, it seems like it was Jane’s race to win. If they choose Jane, they wanted Jane. It’s just that simple,” Latterman told us on election night.

At her election night party, Kim credited her apparent victory to a strong campaign that she said fielded 400 volunteers on Election Day, most wearing the bright red T-shirts that read “See Jane Run” on the back. “I feel good,” Kim told the Guardian. “What I’m really happy about is we ran a really good campaign.”

In the end, Kim’s campaign was put over the top by the second-place votes of Sparks’ supporters, with 769 votes going to Kim and 572 to Walker in the first preliminary run of ranked-choice voter tabulations. But despite the bad blood that developed between progressives in the Kim and Walker campaigns, Board President David Chiu, an early Kim supporter, sounded a conciliatory note, telling the Guardian on election night, “Given where Debra and Jane are, I’m glad that we’re going to keep this a progressive seat.”

How to fight the GOP

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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How to fight the GOP

OPINION Now what?

Now we need to build a grassroots progressive movement — wide, deep, and strong enough to fight the right and challenge the corporate center of the Democratic Party.

The stakes are too high and crises too extreme to accept “moderate” accommodation to unending war, regressive taxation, massive unemployment, routine foreclosures, and environmental destruction.

A common formula to avoid is what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the paralysis of analysis.” Profuse theory + scant practice = immobilization.

It’s not enough to denounce what’s wrong or to share visionary blueprints. Day in and out, we’ve got to organize for effective and drastic social change, in all walks of life and with a vast array of activism.

Yes, electioneering is just one kind of vital political activity. But government power is extremely important. By now we should have learned too much to succumb to the despairing claim that elections aren’t worth the bother.

Such a claim is false. For instance, consider the many hundreds of on-the-ground volunteers who rejected the paralysis of analysis by walking precincts and making phone calls to help reelect progressive Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Arizona). Grijalva won a tight race in the state’s southwestern district and will return to Congress next year — much to the disappointment of the corporate flacks and xenophobes who tried to defeat him because of his strong stance against the state’s new racial-profiling immigration law.

The mass-media echo chamber now insists that Republicans have triumphed because President Obama was guilty of overreach. But since its first days, the administration has undermined itself — and the country — with tragic under-reach.

It’s all about priorities. The Obama presidency has given low priority to reducing unemployment, stopping home foreclosures, or following through with lofty pledges to make sure that Main Street recovers along with Wall Street.

Far from constraining the power of the Republican Party, the administration’s approach has fundamentally empowered it. The ostensibly shrewd political strategists in the White House have provided explosive fuel for right-wing “populism” while doing their best to tamp down progressive populism. Tweaks aside, the Obama presidency has aligned itself with the status quo — a formula for further social disintegration and political catastrophe.

The election of 2010 is now grim history. It’s time for progressives to go back to the grassroots and organize with renewed, deepened commitment to changing the direction of this country. If we believe that state power is crucial — and if we believe in government of, by, and for the people — it’s not too soon to begin planning and working for change that can make progressive victories possible in future elections. 

Norman Solomon is co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death.

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