Government

Opening up

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Shortly after his election in November 2008, President Barack Obama received a letter from Public Citizen and 59 other nonprofit groups noting that the public’s access to information about the government had been shut down under President George W. Bush.

The groups urged Obama to help "by issuing a presidential memorandum on Day One that makes clear that government information belongs to the people and that directs federal agencies to harness technology and personnel skills to ensure maximum accessibility of government records, consistent with law, regulation, and administrative orders."

Obama responded to these concerns on his second day as president by sending a memo to heads of executive departments and agencies that committed his administration to more transparency and unprecedented disclosures of information.

"In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act, which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government," Obama said, noting that FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: in the face of doubt, openness prevails."

Open government advocates warmly welcomed Obama’s announcement. But 50 days later, as they wait for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to issue new FOIA implementation guidelines, some worry that the new administration may still need more prodding.

Peter Scheer, executive director of the San Rafael–based California First Amendment Coalition (one of the letter’s signatories), told the Guardian that it remains to be seen how Obama’s directive will be implemented.

"The directive is good. The spirit is right. But what really matters is whether more information is turned over to the public on a timely basis," said Scheer, who hopes the Obama administration will explore ways to change the FOIA incentive structure so that agencies have a genuine bias in favor of giving out more information, not less.

"Right now, the incentives are all in favor of withholding information," Scheer explained.

Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told the Guardian that she is looking forward to the U.S. Attorney General’s new FOIA guidelines. "I imagine they will say, ‘If you have discretion to disclose information do so, make a greater effort to meet FOIA deadlines, and put an emphasis on proactively posting stuff online,’" Dalglish predicted.

"The difficulty I see lying ahead is a lack of money to help agencies tackle the backlog of FOIA requests," Dalglish said. "But otherwise, I think we’re going to be in pretty good shape."

Scheer was happy about the Obama administration’s March 2 release of nine highly controversial memoranda and legal opinions that the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared under Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, purporting to authorize warrantless national security wiretaps on U.S. citizens, extrajudicial detention of US citizens suspected of terrorism, and use of the military to conduct counterterrorist operations in the U.S.

In the last days of the Bush administration, DOJ officials claimed that most of these opinions were withdrawn by 2003, but open-government advocates believe their release helps prove the extent to which the Bush regime violated the constitution.

"Let’s just hope Obama is just as amenable to releasing his own legal memoranda, four years from now, as he is to release the prior administration’s more embarrassing documents," added Scheer.

He would also like to see an acceleration of the process for declassifying older national security materials and Federal Bureau of Investigation materials, and hopes that a review of Bush–era DOJ use of the state secrets privilege will "result in a modification or abandonment of that policy, except where absolutely necessary to protect vital national security interests.

"I think everyone became quite reasonably suspicious during the Bush years, when a privilege that was previously rarely invoked was popping up in literally dozens of cases and clearly being overused," Scheer explained.

Yet Dalglish fears that sunshine gains under Obama could be offset by the demise of mainstream newspapers.

"If the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer join Denver’s Rocky Mountain News in closing this year, the United States will be in a world of trouble in the future in terms of fighting for greater openness and transparency in government," Dalglish opined. "For the last 50 years, the mainstream media, not the alternative press, has been waging most of these battles pushing for open government."

The LA Times nails APRI

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Fascinating story in the LA Times today about the A. Philip Randolph Institute.

It focuses on James Bryant, the APRI president who earns $117,000 a year from the nonprofit while also working full-time for the city as a Muni station agent (at $68,000 a year), who hired his son as a $62,000 acting executive director and who charged APRI $5,000 in rent for the use of his half-million-dollar house.

“There is just a conflict of interest all over this thing,” said Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, an online review service. “It looks like something that should be reported to a government entity.”

Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, said Joseph Bryant’s job — the son says his salary last year was $62,000 — is similarly troubling.

“In effect, it’s like putting himself on the payroll,” Borochoff said of James Bryant.

The story also notes that Bryant is on the executive board for SEIU Local 1021 and that there’s an internal union complaint against him.

But it mentions only in passing that APRI has received $290,000 from Pacific Gas and Electric Company since 2005, and tens of thousands more from Lennar Corp;, and in many ways, that’s the real scandal here.

Because APRI, named after the legendary African American trade unionist, has become little more than a shill for PG&E and Lennar. APRI worked against the public power campaign, worked against city efforts to install peaker plants (and thus compete with PG&E for energy generation), and worked in favor of giving Lennar control of the entire Bayview Hunters Point revedelopment project.

It’s a bogus astroturf front group for corrupt big businesses. That’s the real issue with Bryant and his sleazy organization.

Why is this guy chairing the political committee for Local 1021, a progressive union that has always supported public power? Now that the whole world knows that he’s PG&E’s guy, he should resign from that job.

Spin vs. substance

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› rebeccab@sfbg.com

Hollywood paparazzi crews are beginning to follow high-profile politicians, such as Mayor Gavin Newsom, the same way they track the likes of Britney Spears, the San Francisco Chronicle reported recently. And when a celebrity gossip photographer surreptitiously aims the lens at a political leader, the picture that emerges isn’t always flattering.

Likewise, the documents that can be extracted through public records laws — including the federal Freedom of Information Act, California Public Records Act, and San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance — don’t always paint political figures in the most favorable light.

Both end products leave the same impression of a glimpse behind the curtain — consumers feel they’re privy to the raw, unpackaged truth. But while photos may show politicians looking silly or meeting with controversial power brokers, documents show how the people’s business is being conducted. So the willingness of officials to promptly comply with requests for documents and information says a great deal about whether their public statements match their private deeds.

Nathan Ballard, Newsom’s press secretary, characterizes (through e-mail, the medium through which he insists on dealing with the Guardian) the mayor’s commitment to open government as being "as strong or stronger than any public official in this country."

But to hear some proponents of open government tell it — and in our experience here at the Guardian — the Newsom administration keeps much of the mayor’s business under wraps, leaving many info-seekers in the dark or reliant on Ballard’s spin. Responses to requests for public records tend to be delayed and incomplete, and queries directed to the mayor’s office of communications are often returned with terse, one-line e-mails that obscure more than illuminate.

Rick Knee, a longtime member of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force — the city body charged with upholding the open-government rule — says Newsom has been in violation of the Sunshine Ordinance on several occasions. "Mayor Newsom’s actual practices regarding Sunshine have been, shall we say, less than what one would desire of him," Knee says. Despite those violations, he adds, the mayor "continues to refuse to provide what remedies the task force calls for on his part."

Under Proposition 59, a state constitutional amendment that won overwhelming voter approval in 2004, the records kept by public officials are considered to be "the people’s business." In practice, however, it doesn’t always pan out that way.

For example, a group of citizens informally known as the Sunshine Posse who have made it a personal quest to improve government transparency by peppering city departments with Sunshine requests, have sounded alarm bells over the mayor’s refusal to release a more detailed daily calendar. One Sunshine Posse member began seeking more fleshed-out mayoral itineraries back in 2006, according to group member Christian Holmer, to gain an understanding of whom the mayor had met with and what had been discussed.

But he quickly ran into a slew of difficulties. "The Mayor’s Office ignored our simple request for 255 days," Holmer told the Guardian. "We sent weekly reminders to most of his staff and key members of the city attorney’s executive and government teams for months and months." After bringing the matter to the attention of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, Holmer says, a new set of problems cropped up. "For the Mayor’s Office, it was an ongoing tale of crashed hard drives, changing office personnel, lost documents, overt/covert confusion, and best intentions."

Nearly three years later, the scrutinizing crew remains frustrated with the results, saying the Mayor’s Office has only come forth with a watered-down schedule, called the Prop. G calendar ("scrubbed" and "virtually useless," in Holmer’s opinion), rather than the more descriptive document known as the working calendar. Many days, Newsom’s Prop. G calendar is blank, and seldom is there more than a few hours worth of activities, each one usually described in just a few words.

The Prop. G calendar seeks to comply with the minimum standards for calendars set forth in the city’s 1999 sunshine law: "The mayor … shall keep or cause to be kept a daily calendar wherein is recorded the time and place of each meeting or event attended by that official…. For meetings not otherwise publicly recorded, the calendar shall include a general statement of issues discussed."

The working calendar is a confidential document, the Mayor’s Office held in a letter responding to the Sunshine Posse’s complaint that the mayor was withholding public information. "The Mayor’s Office prepares a working calendar that is extremely detailed and accounts for his time from departure from home until his return in the evening," the letter states. "The working calendar contains not only the mayor’s meeting schedule, but also confidential information such as the officers assigned to protect him, security contact numbers, the mayor’s private schedule, details of his travel [etc.]. As with past administrations, the mayor’s staff keeps the working calendar and its contents confidential…. The computer system automatically deletes the working calendar after five days."

Despite this defense, the task force determined that the working calendar is in fact a public document that should be provided to the citizens. Doug Comstock was task force chair when the issue was heard. "We made it very clear that they have to turn over those documents," he says. "If there’s a document that’s being created using public monies and public funds, that is a more specific calendar, that’s the document that needs to be provided." Comstock also noted that it is possible for the Mayor’s Office to redact sensitive information that could pose a security risk. Nonetheless, he says, three years have passed and "the real calendar remains hidden from view."

When asked about the complaints regarding the calendar, Ballard responded, "Their criticism is baseless. We exceed far [sic] the requirements of the Sunshine Ordinance with the level of disclosure that we provide."

Erica Craven, an attorney who sits on the task force, believes there’s room for improvement on the mayor’s practices regarding sunshine. "My instinct is that there are a lot of people who work in the Mayor’s Office who are committed to open government," she says. "But there are some troubling things we’ve seen as well, such as complaints where the Mayor’s Office hasn’t sent a representative to respond to allegations. I would like to see a little bit more commitment and leadership on open government from the Mayor’s Office — I think it would set a good tone in City Hall."

In recent weeks, interest in the mayor’s schedule has intensified once again in light of the city’s financial predicament. In the face of a looming budget deficit of unprecedented size and with the economy in shambles and jobs at stake, journalists and affected citizens are seeking details about how the conundrum is being dealt with inside City Hall.

Last month, the Guardian filed a request under the Sunshine Ordinance for details on the mayor’s meetings about the budget, asking for "a list of all the labor and business leaders and supervisors that he’s met with about the budget, the dates of those meetings and how long they lasted, all documents associated with those meetings (including any agendas, communications to set up those meetings and follow-up communications after the meetings), and summaries of what was discussed at those meetings, including any outcomes or agreements."

Under the Sunshine Ordinance, such "immediate disclosure" requests are supposed be honored in two days’ time, but it took five days and a Guardian reminder for the Mayor’s Office to respond via e-mail, saying: "As you know, the Sunshine Ordinance does not require us to create documents. If you can point to a specific document that you’re seeking, I’d be happy to try and locate it for you."

Three days later, the Mayor’s Office forwarded the Prop. G calendar, which revealed that the mayor booked 7.5 hours of meetings about the budget crisis over the course of 17 days, none with labor representatives (whom Ballard said Newsom had met with). It included one-line entries disclosing whom he met with and when, but no information concerning the substance of the discussion. When the Guardian pressed for more information, the Mayor’s Office said there were no other documents associated with those meetings or any other information they were willing to provide.

Similarly, just last week, the Guardian tried to find out what the Mayor’s Office was doing about reports that Caltrain and the California High-Speed Rail Authority were balking at using the Transbay Terminal, citing technical concerns. On March 6, we asked who was working on the issue, what communications there had been with these agencies, and other basic information.

Ballard would say only that "The mayor is fully engaged in finding a comprehensive regional solution that ensures that high speed rail will come to the Transbay Terminal," and denied further requests for more substantive information.

Ballard acknowledges that the Mayor’s Office has "occasionally" been found to be in violation of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. However, he noted, "I can’t remember a time when the Ethics Commission did not overturn a task force decision against our office. In other words, most if not all task force decisions against us have, upon review, been found to be without merit."

Actually, the chronically under-funded Ethics Commission isn’t charged with judging whether SOTF findings have merit. The SOTF is the arbiter of whether the Sunshine Ordinance was violated, but it has no enforcement authority and therefore must rely on Ethics to pursue violations — if it has the will and resources to do so.

This touches on a trend that Knee says is a fundamental challenge to upholding the Sunshine Ordinance. "If the [task force] finds that there has been a willful violation … we can refer our findings to any or all of four entities: Ethics, the Board of Supervisors, the District Attorney, and the California Attorney General," Knee explains. "At one time or another we have made referrals to any or all of those organizations. And every single time, those entities have thrown out our findings. Not one complaint we have submitted has been upheld."

To remedy this, he says, a package of proposed reforms is in the works. "We want to give the task force some teeth," he says. "We want enforcement power of our own."

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

Freeing the press

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Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award

ROBERT PORTERFIELD


Bob Porterfield is a shit-disturber, an old-fashioned investigative reporter who has no favorites, no sacred cows, and no fear of offending anyone. Since his first story — a profile of a YMCA social program published in Eugene, Ore.’s The Register-Guard in 1959, when he was 15 — Porterfield has had ink in his veins. He’s shared two Pulitzer Prizes (first for an Anchorage Daily News report on the Teamsters Union in 1975 and then for a series on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority for The Boston Globe), won more than two dozen other prizes and worked on a long list of major investigative projects.

He has become something of an expert in computer-assisted reporting and information systems — but is still a down-to-earth guy who never forgot the value of traditional, hands-on digging. Back in 1986, he was on a team at Newsday looking into the federal Synfuels Corp., a scandal-plagued agency that was shut down in the wake of his stories.

"I remember once we were looking for property records on a Synfuels Corp. project linked to [former CIA Director) Bill Casey," he told me. "I wound up going down to Plymouth, N.C., (population 4,000), and I found this musty old office with two older women sitting there, knitting. There was no index book, nothing computerized. But when I explained what I was looking for, one of the women remembered the parcel of land I was talking about and pulled out the exact documents for me."

Porterfield has devoted a tremendous amount of time to teaching and mentoring, showing young reporters how to use public records to find stories. "I’m glad to see [President Obama’s] new directive on openness, but I hope it trickles down to the independent agencies," he said. "Because there’s been way, way too much secrecy." (Tim Redmond)

Beverly Kees Educator Award

ALAN GIBSON


Alan Gibson is reclaiming the Founding Fathers from conservatives with

his recent book Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions (University Press of Kansas, 2007). It examines the progressive ideals that guided early American political thought.

"The Founding Fathers are often captured by conservatives," Gibson told the Guardian. "But there is no clear line of legacy. It is much more complex than that. Conservative restoration politics are dangerous and not historically accurate."

As an undergraduate, Gibson cultivated an interest in issues of separation of church and state, which led to doctoral studies on James Madison, the namesake of the Society of Professional Journalists’ annual Freedom of Information awards. "Madison was the most progressive of all [the Founding Fathers] when it comes to freedom of the press," Gibson said. "He helped develop the idea that American government should be responsive to public opinion, and the role of newspapers was to make sure that an authentic public opinion was set forth." Gibson, a political science professor at California State University-Chico, lectures at various colleges across the country. Understanding the Founding will be published in paperback later this year. (Laura Peach)

Professional Journalists

MARJIE LUNDSTROM


Journalists often get alarming tips about practices within Child Protective Services (CPS) agencies, but it has always been a nearly impossible task to overcome privacy protections and get even basic information about how CPS handles reports of child abuse or neglect.

"It’s a difficult agency to write about, for some good reasons," Sacramento Bee reporter Marjie Lundstrom, who set out in 2007 to investigate complaints about Sacramento’s CPS, told the Guardian. "They operate in such a vacuum with very little public scrutiny."

She had started to piece together some information from coroner’s records and other public documents when Senate Bill 39 went into effect in January 2008, "and it was just amazing what it opened up."

The bill reveals CPS files in cases where the child has died, allowing Lundstrom to expose the negligence of CPS workers in responding to abuse reports, even those from doctors. "I do feel like what we were able to show, because of the law, where workers made flagrant mistakes that costs kids their lives," she said.

But many CPS records are still secret. Next, after writing several stories about CPS that sparked a grand jury investigation, Lundstrom intends to expose problems within the internal accountability procedures at CPS. (Steven T. Jones)

HILARY COSTA AND JOHN SIMERMAN


When the news broke last September that 15-year-old Jazzmin Davis had been murdered by her aunt after suffering months of abuse and neglect in her Antioch home, Bay Area News Group reporters Hilary Costa and John Simerman submitted a public records request about the girl’s case history with the San Francisco Human Services Agency.

The city denied the request for nearly two months, using a privacy claim. Undeterred, the journalists took the step of testing out Senate Bill 39, a relatively new piece of legislation that mandates public disclosure of findings and information about children who have died of abuse or neglect. A judge eventually ordered that the records be released.

Although highly redacted, the nearly 700-page paper trail told the girl’s story in the form of hand-written notes, report cards, medical records, caseworker visits, and other detailed documents. The records led to a package of stories that exposed a series of failures and violations of state regulations by an HSA social worker, raising questions about agency practices and spurring a review of hundreds of other foster care cases.

"This story’s been so important to me," Costa told the Guardian. "It felt like somebody owed it to Jazzmin to find out what happened to her." (Rebecca Bowe)

Interactive Media

AUTUMN CRUZ AND MITCHELL BROOKS


Sacramento Bee photographer Autumn Cruz had been covering the trial of three-year-old K.C. Balbuena’s murder for several months when she came up with the concept of creating an interactive online courtroom. With the help of Bee graphic journalist Mitchell Brooks, Cruz made public the essential pieces of evidence and information to those outside the courtroom doors.

Viewers can take a virtual tour of the exhibits and documents, along with video and audio statements and interrogations. "As a journalist, you’re fighting every day for your right to information," Cruz told the Guardian.

Although Balbuena’s mother and roommate were found guilty of the murder in early 2008, Cruz laments her inability to bring back the child she grew to know so intimately only after his life was cut short. "I think my bringing his plight to the public will hopefully prevent similar things from happening to other children." (Joe Sciareillo)

Citizen

BERT ROBINSON


Journalist Bert Robinson is a longtime journalist who now serves as assistant managing editor for the San Jose Mercury News. But he’s being honored for his work as a citizen serving on San Jose’s Sunshine Reform Task Force.

"We set out on our sunshine ordinance adventure a few years ago. We found we were faring worse in court, and we couldn’t afford increased court costs," Robinson, a member of the California First Amendment Coalition, told the Guardian.

The project received political endorsements across the spectrum, but the initiative has had problems with the city council’s Rules Committee, controlled by San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, who has supported sunshine in the past.

"We achieved progress with public meeting requirements, but when you get into public records, city staff argue that rules are ‘too cumbersome’ … They say all sorts of things might happen if they become public, [which is] entirely hypothetical," Robinson said.

Task Force work that was slated to last six months has now dragged on for two years. "The city process grinds you down," Robinson said. But he says he’s committed to seeing it through. (Ben Terrall)

Legal Counsel

JAMES EWERT


James Ewert, an attorney with the California Newspaper Publishers Association, has long battled what he calls widespread secrecy in government. So in 2004, he played an instrumental role in providing greater public access to government meetings and records, resulting in the passage that November of Proposition 59, the Sunshine Amendment of California’s constitution.

Most recently Ewert helped Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) with legislation protecting teachers from retribution from administrators when they defend the First Amendment rights of journalism students. Next Ewert hopes to allow greater scrutiny of public/press partnerships and how tax dollars are used in labor negotiations by the public university systems.

Ewert says the public’s right to know is still severely hampered by public safety concerns, including restrictions on journalists’ rights to interview prisoners and obtain information about police officers. But luckily for the public, Ewert is still on the job. (Andrew Shaw)

Student Journalists — High School

REDWOOD BARK


Before April 2008, Drew Ross had never had to defend the existence of the Eureka High School Redwood Bark, where he was the editor. But after arriving on campus one Monday morning to find that former principal Robert Steffen had removed 450 copies of a 20-page color edition of the paper, Ross and his staff fought back.

Steffen claimed that the nude, dream-like drawing by artist Natalie Gonzalez had ushered in a handful of complaints from students and parents. Steffen justified the action by saying he was "stomping out the flames before they became a forest fire."

"We told him we wanted to hold onto the paper but he recycled them," Ross told the Guardian. "We don’t make the paper for it to be thrown away. And we lost a lot of advertising on this."

Ross complained about censorship and got help from the Student Press Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union. By the next day, the censorship story went front page at newspapers and Internet sites all over the country. Eventually Steffen not only sent out a public apology, he paid for the next 20-page color edition.

"We are now armed with knowledge of our rights," Ross said. "And the community knows the Redwood Bark has rights." (Deia de Brito)

SHASTA HIGH SCHOOL’S THE VOLCANO


Shasta High School student Amanda Cope speaks passionately about freedom of speech after her brush with censorship, telling the Guardian, "We are preserving the validity of the Constitution. Free speech is a protection, a safety, that lets us function normally without fear."

Cope was editor-in-chief of the Shasta High School student paper, The Volcano, when a controversy flared over the paper’s end-of-year issue, which featured a front-page image of a student burning an American flag. Shasta High principal Milan Woollard was already considering shutting down The Volcano when the issue came out and publicly stated: "This cements that decision."

But following a maelstrom of objection from Cope and the rest of The Volcano staff in what looked like a form of censorship in schools, the school district reversed its decision. "I think a lot of students feel they are marginalized in society. They’re teenagers. They don’t have many rights and they feel like they’re squished by adults and people in general," Cope said. "The student paper becomes an outlet for those feelings, and a way for students to explore their world." (Juliette Tang)

THE SCOTS EXPRESS


Last November, the principal of Carlmont High School in Belmont shut down the student paper, The Scots Express. School officials claimed that the paper lacked adequate faculty oversight after it published a satirical article about the writer’s sex appeal.

Editor-in-chief Alex Zhang fought back against what he saw as censorship and rejected school officials’ justifications. "I just wanted my paper back," he told the Guardian.

In response to the uproar over what many saw as a muzzling of the press, the Sequoia Union High School District began training Carlmont staff on First Amendment rights and mandated an overhaul of the school’s freedom of speech policy. The district is planning an expansion of its journalism programs in the school curriculum and a partnership with the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.

Zhang is working on relaunching the publication in late March under the faculty oversight of English teacher Raphael Kauffmann. "You can’t have a democracy without freedom of information," Zhang said. "And I’m proud to be one of those young journalists who care about the freedom of information." (Joe Sciarrillo)

Advocacy

KATHI AUSTIN


As the Guardian chronicled in a cover story last year ("Hunting the lord of war," June 23, 2008), San Francisco-based human rights investigator Kathi Austin has spent almost two decades tracking down and exposing those who have made a business out of human rights violations.

Most recently, Austin helped bring the notorious Viktor Bout, a Russian entrepreneur accused of illegally trafficking weapons to brutal regimes from Colombia to the Congo.

"A human rights violation is considered a violation that is carried out by a state actor," Austin told the Guardian. "We were trying to change the whole field of human rights to philosophically say we should be going after these private perpetrators as well."

Thanks largely to Austin’s work, Bout was arrested in Thailand in March 2008 and will likely face criminal charges in the United States. Despite working in treacherous places like Angola and Rwanda, doing meticulous and time-consuming research, Austin said her approach is simple: "What’s wrong and who’s doing it?"

Her patience and persistent pursuit of international justice have led Austin to positions at the U.N., the World Bank, the Center for Human Rights, and the Council on Foreign Relations, to name a few. A Paramount picture featuring Angelina Jolie as Austin is reportedly in production — a fittingly karmic return of celebrity for someone who has worked so long under the public radar. (Breena Kerr)

Electronic access

MAPLIGHT.ORG


Once upon a time, before 2005, the only way to connect the dots between the dollars contributed to politicians and the special access and favorable laws they subsequently granted to contributors was to wade through reams of campaign finance filings. While everyone knew that money talked, few knew just how much campaign cash was dictating public policy.

But now, thanks to MAPlight.org, a Berkeley nonprofit that uses sophisticated analytical tools to produce visually pleasing, easy-to-use charts, there is now a fun, simple way to follow the money.

MAPlight began by putting up data connected to the pro-consumer bill informally known as the Car Buyer’s Bill of Rights. "The data showed that car dealers gave twice as much to Sacramento legislators who voted to kill the bill than to those who voted to pass it," executive director David Newman recalled.

Next, MAPlight pioneered the combination of campaign dollars and politicians’ votes when it launched its U.S. Congress site in May 2007. Most recently its research showed that House members who voted for the $700 billion financial bailout bill received 50 percent more money from the financial services industry than those who voted against it.

Newman plans to expand to all 50 states. "Wherever there is journalism to be done, MAPlight can provide support and help promote openness and transparency in government." (Sarah Phelan)


The Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists hosts its annual James Madison Awards dinner March 18 in the New Delhi Restaurant, 160 Ellis St., SF. The no-host reception begins at 5:50 p.m. followed by dinner and the awards programs at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $50 for SPJ members and $70 for non-members. For reservations or information, contact Freedom of Information Committee chair David Greene at (510) 208-7744 or dgreene@thefirstamendment.org or visit www.spjchapters.org/norcal.

Newsom’s state secrets

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EDITORIAL On January 21st, his second day in office, President Barack Obama announced that he was dramatically changing the rules on federal government secrecy. His statement directly reversed, and repudiated, the paranoia and backroom dealings of the Bush administration.

"The Freedom of Information Act," the new president declared, "should be administered with a clear presumption: in the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public."

The following day, Jan. 22, we sent an e-mail to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s press secretary, Nathan Ballard. "Now that President Obama has made a dramatic change in federal FOI policy," we asked, "would Mayor Newsom would be willing to issue a similar executive order in San Francisco?"

Ballard’s response:

"We wholeheartedly agree with the President on this issue. The mayor has charged my office with handling sunshine requests for the executive branch of city government, and he has directed us to cooperate swiftly and comprehensively to all sunshine requests, and to err on the side of openness."

That, to put it politely, is horsepucky.

As we report in this issue, it’s difficult, and at times insanely difficult, to get even basic public information out of Newsom’s office. Take his calendar: by law, the mayor is required to make public his appointments calendar. Other public officials manage to do that — in fact, the president of the United States, who has a tad more national and personal security issues than the mayor of San Francisco, lets the press know what he’s doing almost every minute of every day.

Most days, though, what we get from Newsom’s office is a statement like, "The mayor has no public events scheduled today." Or, "The mayor is holding meetings at City Hall." Meetings with whom? What private events is he attending? What’s he do all day? What lobbyists, activists, public officials, or campaign donors is he talking to in his City Hall office? Why is that some huge state secret?

Or take the city’s terrifying budget problems. When Board of Supervisors President David Chiu began holding meetings with key stakeholders to look for a solution, Newsom refused to show up, saying there was no need. The mayor claimed he was holding his own meetings with everyone who needed to be involved.

That was news to many of the people in Chiu’s sessions. So who was the mayor talking to? The mayor’s office won’t tell us — and the limited calendar information he releases doesn’t shed any light, either.

The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force has repeatedly found Newsom directly in violation of the Sunshine Ordinance. Legions of reporters have run across the slammed door, the ducking, the non-responsiveness, and the general hostility of the mayor’s press office. As the White House comes out of the dark ages and starts to set new standards for open and honest government, San Francisco is not only lagging behind — this city’s chief executive is actively resisting.

We’re getting tired of this. The city attorney, district attorney, and Ethics Commission all have the mandate and ability to enforce the Sunshine Ordinance, but none have made that a priority. At this point, the only way the executive branch is going to comply is if the supervisors give the Sunshine Task Force the authority and resources to do its own enforcement.

In the meantime, somebody on the board ought to introduce Obama’s exact policy statement, replacing "Freedom of Information Act" with "San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance." And the Sunshine task force should begin an investigation into how the mayor’s press office is defying, on a regular basis, both the letter and the spirit of the city’s open-government law. *

Leno picks up single-payer campaign

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By Tim Redmond

State Sen. Mark Leno has taken on the long campaign to enact single-payer health reform in California. He’s announcing tomorrow (Wed) morning that he’s introduced SB 810, which follows (and is nearly identical to) SB 840, the landmark measure by former Sen. Sheila Kuehl that passed the Legislature and was vetoed by the governor.

The bill is remarkable in its simple premise: Everyone — consumers, businesses, government — will save money if the public sector takes over the role of providing health care from the private insurance industry. “We don’t have a health-care policy right now,” Leno told me. “We have a risk-management policy. When the private insurers talk about paying for health care, they cal lit a ‘medical loss.'”

By Leno’s estimates — and those of about every other credible analyst and study — businesses would see lower costs, individuals would pay lower premiums and the state would spend less on health care if only the insurance industry were out of the picture.

“We pay more for health care than any other industrialized country, and we get worse outcomes,” he said. “The system is broken.”

But it won’t be easy. Leno is confident that SB 810 will pass both houses of the Legislature — and that the governor will once again veto it. “And that’s why we need to make sure we elect a Democratic governor in 2010 who will promise to sign this bill in 2011,” he said. “And we need to start organizing now to defeat the referendum the insurance industry will put on the ballot in 2012 and the hundreds of millions of dollars they will spend to confuse Californians.”

In other words, it’s a long-term battle. I wonder if any of these business groups like the California Chamber of Commerce will come to their senses and recognize that this is about the most pro-business thing you could do in this state. Health-care costs are slamming small businesses, hurting our ability to compete as a state and a nation — and the entire economy of California is more important than the profits of one industry.

We shall see.

Editorial: Newsom’s state secrets

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(Scroll down for Executive Editor Tim Redmond’s best argument to save the Chronicle and how it ties in to James Madison’s birthday, our annual Freedom of Information issue, and the annual SPJ/FOI awards dinner.)

It’s difficult, and at times insanely difficult, to get even basic public information out of Newsom’s office.

EDITORIAL On January 21st, his second day in office, President Barack Obama announced that he was dramatically changing the rules on federal government secrecy. His statement directly reversed, and repudiated, the paranoia and backroom dealings of the Bush administration.

“The Freedom of Information Act,” the new president declared, “should be administered with a clear presumption: in the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.”

FAIR: What the Dow isn’t

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Media Advisory from the media advocacy organization called the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

The media is misusing the Dow as a ‘scorecard’ of White House policy

3/5/09
To hear some in the corporate media tell it, you judge a president by how the Dow Jones Industrial Average is performing–and, thus, Barack Obama is not doing a very good job.

As NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory said (3/1/09):
The Obama stimulus package, $787 billion. The housing plan, $75 billion. That’s $2.3 trillion. Seven hundred and fifty billion dollars additional in this document for additional bailout money for the banks. Meantime, what metric do we have to see how people–what people think of that government intervention? The Dow is one metric. It closed on Friday at its lowest level since 1997, just over 7,000.

Prop. 8 and American Theocracy

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This Christian minister had “gay’s” [sic] debating with him all day, but his main “argument” was simply a faith-based belief that God opposes homosexuality.

Text and photo by Steven T. Jones

I got a call from Sen. Mark Leno, who was frustrated by dealing with what he labeled “religious zealots” during yesterday’s Prop. 8 hearing and rally, and wanted to talk about my reporting on how churches bused in conservative Christians from former Soviet-bloc countries whose immigration was sponsored by Sacramento area churchgoers.

The problem isn’t with religion. After all, Leno noted that the California Council of Churches opposed Prop. 8 and the stripping away of same-sex marriage rights. People are entitled to their beliefs. The problem is with religious fundamentalists who want government and laws to conform to their religious values. Several Prop. 8 supporters told me they were trying to implement God’s will, and a couple even said that God told them to be there.

“These folks are theocrats. They want a theocracy,” Leno said. “We’re spending tens of billions of dollars fighting theocracies around the world, because they’re antithetical to the concept of democracy.”
Assembly member Tom Ammiano agreed, telling us that he’s drawing a line in dealing with these hateful religious zealots. He said someone from the Catholic League sitting near him in the hearing tried to be chummy with him, and he told him, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

Ammiano was also irritated by attorney Kenneth Starr, the darling of the religious right who argued their case yesterday, whose main argument Ammiano summarized this way, “I felt like he was saying, what are these slaves complaining about? They’ve got a house to sleep in. What, they want clothes now?”

Chronicle layoffs could top 225.

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Text by Sarah Phelan

The chips are down at the Chronicle–and it sounds like the California Media Workers Guild tried, but did not succeed, in striking a bargain with the devil.

According to a bulletin posted at the Guild’s website, Hearst Corp. ultimately told the union that even if its members agree to cutting the bejeezus out of the paper, it won’t be enough to save 150 layoffs and won’t necessarily prevent Hearst from shuttering the Chronicle. Hot damn.

No wonder a Chronicle employee by the fabulous name of Delfin Vigil posted a paid advertisement in the San Francisco Examiner, describing Hearst’s suggestion to close the 144-year-old newspaper as “unacceptable, unforgivable, or even un-American.”

Vigil suggests that Hearst give Chronicle workers the “right of first refusal” to takeover the paper, or “a newly formed group of past and present Chronicle employees who still believe in its value.”

So far, online comments suggest that the blogging public doesn’t care about or understand the value of newspapers. At least not in this modern world, where you can bounce around online to multiple postings and links for free, but end up, perhaps, never actually getting to the end of, or fully digesting, anything you read.

But as Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia-based nonprofit, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, points out, ” this nation will be in a world of hurt,” particularly concerning the battle to create open and transparent government, if major daily newspapers like the Chronicle go down.

As Dalglish notes, for the last 50 years, mainstream media organizations—not the alternative press—waged most of these battles, suing the government to access documents and information.

And then there is the fact that newspapers, unlike laptops, can be left in the car, taken to the beach or read in the bath without fear that a $1,000 piece of hardware will be stolen or destroyed. They make great hats, birdcage liners and fish wraps. They are recyclable and biodegradable. Heck, a drag queen once even made a dress out of a cover story that was written about her. And, occasionally, the words printed on their pages will bring you to laughter or tears, thanks to a team of largely invisible, but always overworked and underpaid workers.

Meanwhile, a “negotiations summary” posted at the California Media Workers Guild shows just how many pounds of flesh Hearst wants Chronicle workers to give—and then bleed them to death.

BVHP realtors to discuss black crisis

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Diane Wesley Smith, owner/broker of DWS/BVHP Real Estate Services, says that a newly formed group, the Bayview Hunters Point Real Estate Professionals, will meet at 1 PM, Friday, March 6 to discuss the current real estate situation in Bayview Hunters Point and how folks can help protect the BVHP community.

Afraid that the current redevelopment plans for the BVHP won’t help folks who grew up and live in the community to get jobs or stay in the BVHP, including those who hope to live in public housing, but have felonies on their record, Wesley Smith believes the time is right for concerned citizens to come together and brainstorm about this ongoing crisis.

Part of this crisis has been documented by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s African American Outmigration task force, which showed that African Americans are leaving San Francisco at a higher rate than any other U.S. city. But a visit to the taskforce’s website suggests that the taskforce has not met since December 2007. Equally disturbing is the fact that the task force did not present its findings to elected officials until August 2008. In other words, voters were not able to access relevant data about the plight of their city’s African American community, until six weeks after they had voted on–and endorsed–a conceptual framework that is now being used to drive an urban design plan that has environmental and social justice groups raising their eyebrows.

Fast forward to March 2009 and Diane Wesley-Smith is hoping that folks can come together and reach out to the Obama administration to make sure that the federal government realizes that the city is moving forward with plans to simply cap a radioactively contaminated landfill in the BVHP, even though the mess was created by the federal government, lies next to the San Francisco Bay and will be capped adjacent to a massive condo development.

“At the very least, Lennar should have online disclosures about the condition of the land they plan to develop,” says Wesley Smith, noting that she is concerned about all the people living in the BVHP.

The Bayview Hunters Point Real Estate Professionals will meet at DWS/BVHP Real Estate Services, 4636 Third Street at Newcomb Avenue.

Warmest Regards,

Diane

Diane Wesley Smith, Owner/Broker
DWS/BVHP Real Estate Services
4636 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94124
415 821-2847 Office
415 342-5970 Cellular

Jess Brownell: Think Dubai!

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Think Dubai, free, rich, and minimally governed. It will be fun.

By Jess Brownell

Sometimes it’s like taking candy from a baby. Or selling an adjustable rate mortgage to an illiterate.

This requires a little set-up, but it’s worth it. Recently the New York Times Book Review covered a book by Jeff Madrick called “The Case for Big Government.” In the Times piece Mr. Madrick was quoted as writing “there really is no example of small government among rich nations.” The review elicited a response from one Donna Wiesner Keene, identified as a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum (whatever that is) and a former toiler in the verdant gardens of the Reagan and Bush administrations, taking issue with Mr. Madrick. According to her, the statement quoted above is “unsupported nonsense. Think Dubai, free and rich.”
Oh God, yes. Let’s do that. Let’s think Dubai, free and rich and, I guess, minimally governed. Trust me, it’ll be fun.

Economy kills porn’s hard-on

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Kink.com owner Peter Acworth

By Steven T. Jones

The San Francisco Chronicle today reports (way back on its Business page) on how the recession/depression and free Internet porn sites (which often steal content from paid sites) are hurting the porn industry, which will in turn hurt San Francisco’s economy.

Among the revelations is that homegrown success story Kink.com last month laid off 13 employees and scuttled plans for some new sites after a major expansion at its San Francisco Armory headquarters just last year.

Just like the newspaper and music businesses, the porn industry will need to find ways to continue to monetize its content. Maybe the bankers aren’t the only industry that could use a government fluffer these days.

Blaming the system

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› rebeccab@sfbg.com

The Grand Sheraton Hotel in downtown Sacramento was buzzing Feb. 24 as some 400 conference-goers representing myriad geographies and political perspectives gathered in one room to tackle an enormous question: should California’s constitution get an overhaul?

Hosted by the Bay Area Council, a San Francisco-based business group, the summit introduced the idea of staging a statewide constitutional convention that would grant Californians the opportunity to make major revisions to the state constitution and streamline the government reform process.

The council hopes to place a measure on the ballot as early as November 2010 to ask voters if a convention should be called. If the effort gets a green light, it would mark the first time in 130 years that a meeting of this kind was convened in California.

The state’s government is dysfunctional, Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters opined during the summit. Full of stakeholders with disparate viewpoints who are too often unwilling to collaborate, he said, the Legislature either tends to roll out "unworkable monstrosities" or have its efforts stalled by a small number of representatives who disagree with the majority. "The problem isn’t really which party is in charge," he said. "It’s the fundamental structure of the government."

The summit attracted diverse interests ranging from Chevron Corp., an icon of big business in the Bay Area, to the Courage Campaign, a left-leaning political organization cast in the mold of Moveon.org. Despite being divided on other issues, all parties seemed to be in agreement on the main point that California’s government is desperately in need of a fix.

"I think of the government in California as being like the Winchester House — you keep adding rooms, but there are no corridors," Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) joked at the summit, referring to a historic mansion in San Jose renowned for its monstrous size and complete lack of a floor plan.

The idea for holding a convention was first floated last summer, when Bay Area Council President and CEO Jim Wunderman published an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "California Government Has Failed Us." Wunderman struck a nerve, and organizations such as Common Cause and the League of Women Voters signed up to partner with the business group to launch the constitutional convention effort. Clamor for government reform got louder still in recent weeks, as a disapproving public witnessed legislators sink into a debacle over the budget deal.

An arduous budget debate further intensified when it came to extracting the last vote needed to achieve the required two-thirds majority. The Democratic majority wound up negotiating with Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria), who turned his vote into leverage to force concessions on his own demands. Maldonado was able to single-handedly eliminate a proposed 12-cent increase on the gas tax, and he stipulated that an initiative be placed on the May ballot for an open primary.

"The budget was held hostage to right-wing ideology when the people of the state were demanding a real solution to a real problem," says Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Association and the owner of a lobbying firm. "For example, the only way they could get the votes was to give away huge corporate loopholes."

The lesson learned? "We have tied ourselves in knots with the two-thirds vote requirement," declared Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, a moderate Democrat and gubernatorial candidate, spurring a round of applause at the summit. Garamendi called for "majority rule, plain and simple, on every issue." He also suggested extended term limits, and transitioning to a 120-member unicameral legislature to allow representatives to better represent smaller districts.

Other ideas for reform that got bandied about during the summit included reinventing election procedures and considering approaches such as instant-runoff voting, establishing proportional representation, changing the number of signatures needed to place an initiative on the ballot, and establishing an automatic review process for state agencies.

In order to hold a convention, California voters would have to approve two separate ballot initiatives. The first would create an amendment to the current constitution allowing voters to call the convention, while the second would call the actual convention. Both questions could be put to voters on the same ballot, according to the Bay Area Council. Any changes made to the constitution would then have to be ratified by voters.

The process of calling a convention is clear enough, but questions abound on how to proceed from there. For example, how would convention delegates be selected? How many would attend? How would the organizers ensure inclusiveness across ethnic, gender, and economic boundaries? Would the convention open up the entire constitution to debate, or would parties agree to narrow the scope to a few key issues? How would the convention itself escape the same gridlock that critics say has rendered the Legislature dysfunctional?

Without hammering out the fine points, it’s hard to know whether the enthusiasm exhibited at the summit could survive the nitty-gritty details of actually going through with a convention. It’s also too early to say whether progressives could emerge from such a process satisfied with the results.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the constitutional convention. "I wouldn’t tell you at this point I’m enthusiastic about it because it could be too much blah-blah and not enough action," he told the Guardian. "I do definitely support budget reform — I’m going to make that a priority — and really want to look at the budget infrastructure, certainly the two-thirds majority. I think we need to deliberate on it and make certain that it wouldn’t have any unintended consequences."

Sen. Mark Leno shared Ammiano’s view that the two-thirds majority requirement tops the list of problems. "I think we could take some modest but profound steps before we open up an entire potential Pandora’s box," he said of the convention idea. "I don’t wish to dampen the spirits of our friends at the Bay Area Council. Their intentions are very good. But should it go forward, the devil will be in the details."

Goldberg took a similar stance. "The biggest problem is the two-thirds vote requirement for taxes and a budget," he told the Guardian. "If a constitutional convention is the way that issue gets resolved, that’s positive. But the question is, how long is that going to take? How are they going to do it? There are so many unanswered questions that I would say, if that’s the only way to deal with the two-thirds vote, let’s do it."

Robert Cruickshank, public policy director at the Courage Campaign and a blogger with the political Web site Calitics.com, said he feels confident that a convention is a worthwhile pursuit for progressives. His organization conducted a poll of its membership to gauge whether there was progressive support for the idea, he said, and results showed that 92 percent of respondents supported it.

For his part, Wunderman emphasized the convention as a tool that could be used by voters rather than elected officials in Sacramento. "I’m excited about changing the game, changing the rules," he told the Guardian. "And I’m more confident than ever that if you lead Californians to revise their constitution, once they see it, they’ll know what they have to do, and they’ll do it. And the fact that it was them that did it will give rise to support for the product."

The Chronicle death watch

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Is San Francisco really the frontrunner in the race to become the first major U.S. city to go without a major daily? Or is it a victim of disaster capitalism, in which powerful corporations exploit economic meltdowns to exact otherwise unacceptable concessions from employees and/or antitrust legislators?

Media critics chewed on those questions last week, following Hearst Corporation’s abrupt Feb. 24 announcement that it is undertaking "critical cost-saving measures including a significant reduction in the number of its unionized and non-unionized employees" at the San Francisco Chronicle, and will close or sell the paper, which has 1,500 employees, 275 in the newsroom, unless these changes occur within weeks.

Noting that the Chronicle lost more than $50 million in 2008 — the worst in a string of nonstop losses the paper has suffered since Hearst bought it in 2000 — Hearst vice chairman and chief executive officer Frank A. Bennack Jr. and Hearst Newspapers president Steven R. Swartz warned that "without the specific changes we are seeking across the entire Chronicle organization, we will have no choice but to quickly seek a buyer for the Chronicle or, should a buyer not be found, to shut the newspaper down."

Two days later, the California Media Workers Guild, which represents workers at the Chronicle, reported that Hearst is seeking "a combination of wide-ranging contractual concessions in addition to layoffs, the exact number of which the company said it did not yet have."

"For Guild-covered positions, the company did say the job cuts would at least number 50," read a Guild statement. "Other proposals include removal of some advertising sales people from Guild coverage and protection, the right to outsource — specifically mentioning ad production — voluntary buyouts, layoffs and wage freezes."

Guild representative Carl Hall said he doesn’t see any reason to think Hearst’s threats are a bluff.

"The Rocky Mountain News just closed in Denver," Hall told the Guardian. "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which is also owned by Hearst, is slated to close in March, if a buyer isn’t found. We’ve seen bankruptcies and disaster scenarios all around the country, and the Chronicle has experienced some of the deepest operating losses in the nation."

Reached for comment March 2, Chronicle publisher Frank Vega told the Guardian, "We’re still in the process," while Guild treasurer George Powell said that "proposals have been exchanged and each side is evaluating them."

WHERE’S THE MONEY?


Evaluating Hearst claims is hardly an easy task. A privately held corporation, Hearst doesn’t open its books to the public. But one thing is clear, just from reading postings on the corporation’s Web site: Hearst is midway through a squeeze in which it’s trying to turn a profit on the 15 newspapers it owns throughout the country.

And that means more syndicated stories — and possibly the end of free newspaper Web sites.

As Swartz outlined in a recent press release, all Hearst newspapers will be required to allow for "efficient production or common content sharing," use "outbound telemarketing and self-service ad platforms more effectively," increase their subscription rates, outsource printing, and charge for digital content.

"Exactly how much paid content to hold back from our free sites will be a judgment call made daily by our management," Swartz stated. "Our goal is a business model that seeks, by 2011, to get more than 50 percent of our revenue from circulation revenue and digital advertising sales."

And the same day that Chronicle workers learned that their newspaper might be facing the axe, Hearst cut 75 out of 135 newsroom positions at the San Antonio Express-News in Texas.

As San Antonio Express-News editor Robert Rivard told his staff, "Incremental staff and budget cuts, we are sorry to say, have proven inadequate amid changing social and market forces now compounded by this deepening recession."

"It’s like death in here today," a source, who asked to remain anonymous, said. "Everyone who was laid off is still here, working ’til March 20."

And like the growing pool of newsroom refugees nationwide, the survivors of this San Antonio massacre have since met to brainstorm about other newsgathering business models.

"We all have kids, so we need salaries and insurance," our source confided, "but we’re going to start researching some options, see what’s working and not in other places. The time is ripe."

THE SINGLETON SCENARIO


Meanwhile, sources within the Chronicle — who asked to remain anonymous given the ongoing negotiations — claim that there isn’t much hope that Hearst will come up with innovative solutions, but that there is a chance the paper could be sold to Dean Singleton, the only other major Bay Area newspaper publisher.

Singleton’s MediaNews Group owns the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times, and has lost several antitrust cases in recent years. Any deal with the Chronicle would require Department of Justice approval — and would give one owner control of nearly every daily newspaper in the Bay Area.

The media baron refuses to comment on whether he is considering buying the Chronicle.

"We’ll just watch it play out," Singleton told Editor and Publisher’s senior editor, Joe Strupp, last week. "I am not going to speculate on what could happen."

But, as Strupp noted, "MediaNews remains highly leveraged."

Hearst Corporation currently holds a substantial amount of MediaNews debt, owns 31 percent of MediaNews Group newspapers outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, and recently took control of four Connecticut papers that MediaNews was managing for Hearst.

Former Chronicle city editor Alan Mutter believes Singleton could still be in the running.

Observing on his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog that "To wipe out a $50 million loss, let alone make a profit, the [Chronicle] would have to eliminate 47 percent of its entire staff," Mutter later clarified that he believes it’s "extremely unlikely" that the Chronicle will reduce its staff to that extent.

"But, it will try to do some serious cost cutting, and it could be sold, potentially, to MediaNews, because Singleton would not necessarily be expected to put up any money," wrote Mutter, noting that hundreds of people involved in the Chronicle‘s advertising operations could be eliminated if Singleton took over, since ads for MediaNews’ papers are already assembled in India. Another motivation for Hearst to find someone to take over the Chronicle lies in the multimillion dollar printing plant that Hearst just built.

"But no one expects the business to break even now," Mutter said. "If you want to make $20–<\d>$30 million profit over the long term, that’s not a good outcome for a business that has lost $1 billion in recent years."

Michael Stoll, director of the Public Press project, which seeks to launch a nonprofit daily paper, told us he thinks it would be "a real tragedy" if Hearst followed through on any of its Chronicle threats.

"Most San Francisco journalism is generated by reporters at the Chronicle, and its few competitors would be ill-prepared to step in and immediately fill the void," Stoll said.

Concerned that Singleton’s MediaNews could try to make the case that there is a crisis and that the Department of Justice should therefore waive antitrust prohibitions against monopoly ownership, Stoll warned that "the expansion of MediaNews ownership to nearly every other paper in the Bay Area in the last two years has proven to be an unmitigated disaster in terms of a less independent voice from Santa Cruz to Santa Rosa, and from San Mateo to Contra Costa."

The Society of Professional Journalists is calling for a public discussion of Hearst’s threats.

Worried that additional cuts to the Chronicle "will only exacerbate what SPJ perceives as an already growing vacuum of credible reporting and will further limit scrutiny of our public institutions," Northern California SPJ board president Ricardo Sandoval observed that closing the Chronicle "would mean losing the largest source of news for hundreds of thousands of readers in the San Francisco Bay Area."

Asking Hearst to participate in "a high-profile conversation with its community based on the imperative of reinvention," Sandoval said, "We urge journalists, foundations, corporations, the public, and public officials to join us in finding solutions to this increasingly urgent civic challenge."

As University of California at Berkeley journalism professor Bill Drummond warns, "this is not just the decline of the industry. If the mainstream media, which is supposed to be balanced and fair, goes away, if that scrutiny is no longer there, everything will be more partisan and narrower.

"And in this atmosphere where everyone is begging the government to fund their industry, what about the fourth estate?" Drummond said. "Maybe we need the newspaper equivalent of public broadcasting, with pledge drives and bake sales."

Vanishing points

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

ESSAY/REVIEW There is a wry but hilarious scene near the very end of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 912 pages; $30), in which a French literary critic finds a German writer, Archimboldi, lodging at what the critic calls "a home for vanished writers." After checking into a room at the large estate, the elderly vanished writer wanders the grounds, meeting with the other vanished authors, residents whom Archimboldi finds friendly but increasingly eccentric. Gradually it dawns on Archimboldi that all is not as it seems. Walking back to the entrance gate, he sees, without surprise, a sign announcing that the estate is the "Mercier Clinic and Rest Home — Neurological Center." The home for vanished writers is an insane asylum.

As we enter the Obama era, with all its promise of "change," I’ve found it impossible to read 2666 without being haunted by the memory of those who vanished into the lunatic asylum of the long George W. Bush years — not just the nameless and unlucky left to rot in the Bush administration’s secret torture cells throughout the world, but also those who disappeared right here at home. For instance, a guy I worked with a couple of years ago. One day he was training me on the job, and a week or so later he was in a federal prison, labeled a "terrorist" — which in his case meant that he edited a Web site called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty.

There were other ghosts, those who vanished after refusing to speak to grand juries. They were rumored to have gone over the border, or back to the land, or who knows where, their very names now superstitiously verboten to speak out loud, lest we bring the heat down on ourselves. Now that Obama is here and everybody is eager for "change," who will remember the once-bright hopes and dreams of the generation that beat the World Trade Organization in Seattle at the dawn of this decade — the hopes that would later be chased down and gassed and beaten by riot police under cover of media blackout in the streets of Miami, St. Paul, or countless other cities? Of course, there were the suicides and overdoses, and other kinds of disappearances, different but related, too: the abandoned novels, or the guitars taken to the pawnshop. Three people in my community jumped off bridges. Only one survived. The human toll of the Bush years in my life has been enormous.

Watching the celebrations in the streets of the Mission District on election night in November, I could tell all of this was soon to be trivia. I saw a virtually all-white crowd of completely wasted people take over the intersection at 19th and Valencia, shouting "Obama!" and dancing in the street. In one way, this scene was touching: the spontaneous gathering was a product of the true feelings of human hope that people have for a better world. Yet the moment already had the scripted feel of something self-conscious or mediated, like the Pepsi ad campaign it would soon become. I had a sinking realization: those of us who have spent eight years battling the post-9/11 mantra of Everything Is Different Now were now going to soon be up against a new era of, well, Everything Is Different Now.

The narratives we tell ourselves about our country are important. Just when a Truth and Reconciliation Committee is most needed to write a detailed narrative of the Bush era’s torture, spying, illegal war, and swindling, I could already see the opportunity for that kind of change slipping away into the blackout amnesia aftermaths of the street parties taking place all across the nation. The election of a president of the United States from among the ranks of the nation’s most oppressed minorities has offered the country a new triumphant storyline. We have symbolically redeemed our sins against civilian casualties and third world workers, without too much painful self-examination. I could see that Obama’s brand of change was really so seductive because it offered a chance to change the subject.

Like Ronald Reagan, elected while the U.S. was mired in recession and post-Vietnam soul-searching, Barack Obama developed campaign narratives that made the U.S. feel good about itself again. Obama guessed correctly that national morale is low partially because we don’t want to deal with the nameless guilt we feel from the atrocities Bush and company committed in our names. Accordingly, he stated during his campaign that he would not pursue criminal prosecution of members of the Bush administration. Nor has Obama questioned the preposterous idea that we can win either a War on Terror or the war in Afghanistan. If you think about it, "Yes We Can" — his campaign’s appeal to good old American can-do spirit — isn’t far off in substance from Bush’s faith-based convictions about U.S. power. Both Bush’s crusade to make democracy flower in the desert of Iraq and Obama’s notion that the auto industry could save itself — and the planet! — with electric cars are fantasies that appeal to our sense of pride about being the richest and most powerful.

When a country that is owned by China and is getting its ass kicked simultaneously by ragged guerilla armies in two of the most impoverished and backward parts of the world keeps finding new ways to tell itself that it’s the richest and most powerful country, it is in deep trouble.

When political leaders and journalists seek to generate false narratives for our consumption and comfort, the difficult task of remembering the truth falls to literature.

Roberto Bolaño completed 2666 in 2003, shortly before he died, too poor to receive a liver transplant, at the age of 50. Born in Chile, Bolaño counted himself a member of "the generation who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell," and was himself something of a vanished writer. Briefly jailed during the 1973 coup in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the popularly elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, Bolaño wandered in exile from Mexico City to Spain, working variously as a janitor and a dishwasher, entering obscure literary competitions advertised on the backs of magazines, while his generation was consumed by Pinochet’s secret prisons and torture cells.

Fittingly, disappearance is perhaps the main action of characters in Bolaño’s works, from the vanished fascist poet and skywriter in 1996’s Distant Star (published in English by New Directions in 2004) to the entire romantic generation of doomed Mexican poets and radicals followed across the span of decades and continents to its vanishing point in a desert of crushed hopes in 1998’s The Savage Detectives (published in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007). In 2666, the terminally ill Bolaño wrote as if in an urgent race against the moment of his own departure, unwilling to leave anything out, as if he wanted to save an entire lost underworld from banishment. Taking on every genre from detective noir to the war novel to romantic comedy in an exhilarating, nearly 1,000-page race to the finish, the book is Bolaño’s epic of the disappeared.

The periphery of 2666 teems with Bolaño’s archetypal lost and doomed, a host of minor characters including a former Black Panther leader turned barbecue cook, various Russian writers purged by Stalin during World War II, a Spanish poet living out his days in an asylum, and an acclaimed British painter who cuts off his own hand. There are the usual obscure literary critics and lost novelists, and we even briefly meet an elderly African American man who calls himself "the last Communist in Brooklyn." This last communist could speak for all of Bolaño’s lost and departed when he explains why he presses on: "Someone has to keep the cell alive."

The book’s action, however, centers upon the unsolved serial killings of hundreds of women in the fictional Mexican border city of Santa Teresa during the late 1990s, events based on real-life unsolved killings in Juarez, Mexico. The majority of the women murdered in Juarez were workers at the new factories along the border with the United States, the unregulated maquiladoras that have sprung up in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In the book’s longest section, "The Part about the Crimes," we learn the names, one by one, of 111 of these murdered women. In terse, police-blotter language, Bolaño describes the crime scenes — the girls’ clothing, their disappearances, and the police investigators’ attempts to construct the last hours of their lives. Their bodies are discovered slashed, stabbed, bound, gagged, and always raped, in ditches, landfills, alleys, or along the side of the highway. Seen from these vantage points, Bolaño’s Santa Teresa is a disjointed place, seemingly patched together from snatches of barely remembered nightmares. Shantytowns and illegal toxic dumps spring up everywhere in "the shadow of the horizon of the maquiladoras." It is a city that is "endless," "growing by the second," a new type of urban zone in a Latin America that has become a laboratory for free trade policy experiments. It is a city made unmappable by globalization.

Bolaño clearly intends the reader to see the disappearances as the inevitable byproduct of the cheapness of life in the maquiladora economy, yet the killings also eerily evoke the disappearances in fascist 1970s Chile and Argentina. These murders are an open secret, virtually ignored by the media. Residents almost superstitiously refer to them only as "the crimes." The Santa Teresa police respond to the killings with a staggering indifference and ineptitude that might suggest complicity. The maquiladoras are ominous, hulking windowless buildings often in the center of town, not unlike the torture cells once hidden in plain sight in Buenos Aires (Bolaño even names one of them EMSA, an obvious play on Argentina’s most notorious concentration camp, ESMA), and many of the women’s bodies are discovered in an illegal garbage dump called El Chile. 2666 suggests that the unrestrained capitalism of the free-trade era is the ideological descendent of the 1970s South America state repression from which Bolaño fled, and that the killings in Santa Teresa are in part a recreation of the Pinochet-era disappearances.

While the scenes Bolaño describes are grisly, his language is clinical, the cold camera eye of the lone detective gathering evidence. The collective impact of story after story starts to accrue into its own profoundly moral force. By giving name and face to hundreds of disappeared women, Bolaño suggests that literature is a political response, a way to make wrongs right by bearing witness. While it would certainly be a mistake to read 2666 strictly as a political tract, Bolaño explicitly ties writing to justice in a rambling digression about the African slave trade. A Mexican investigator of the killings points out that it was not recorded into history if a slave ship’s human cargo perished on the way to Virginia, but that it would be huge news in colonial America if there was even a single killing in white society: "What happened to (the whites) was legible, you could say. It could be written." For Bolaño, the search for justice is partially about who can be seen in print.

At a literary conference in Seville six months before his death, Bolaño joked that his literary stock might rise posthumously. Sure enough, Bolaño the man has, ironically, vanished after his untimely death, lost in the fog of fame in the English-speaking world. Mainstream critics call his work "labyrinthine" — perhaps English-language critics’ stock adjective for Latin American writers — in a rush to "discover" a new Borges. Bolaño was a high-school dropout who bragged of discovering literature by shoplifting books. He claimed to be a former heroin addict who hung out with the FMLN in El Salvador. His genius deserves comparison to the great Borges, but it’s safe to say that, unlike Borges, a literary lapdog of Argentina’s generals, Bolaño would never have addressed the military leaders of the fascist Argentine coup as "gentlemen." Bolaño wrote without a net, over the abyss of atrocity into which his generation vanished. He did so in an effort to make a literature that recorded for all time where the bodies were buried. As a female reporter in 2666 says, "No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them."

The dangers of believing false narratives should be evident by now. In the wake of our current financial collapse, it is now widely understood that the U.S.’s sense of itself as the richest and most powerful nation in the world has been kept artificially afloat in the recent past by the import of cheap goods and credit from China. These cheap goods are manufactured under labor and environmental conditions much like those of Bolaño’s maquiladoras — conditions we tell ourselves we would never allow here at home, yet which are vital to our economic survival. Dealings with China have, instead, spread repressive tactics in reverse back to corporations from the United States, such as when Google memorably agreed to remove all reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from its Google China site.

There is a crucial difference between hope and self-delusion. In its dogged search for uncomfortable truth, 2666 creates a hard-won hope that is different from the way in which that word manifests on the campaign trail. It respects the hope that truth matters, that staring it down can provide the shock of self-awareness that makes real change possible.

In the meantime, there is the hope of literature itself. In 2666, Bolaño devotes a scene to one of his disappeared characters, a Spanish poet who lives out his days in an insane asylum in the countryside. The poet’s doctor — who in a classically deadpan Bolaño twist tells us he is also the poet’s biographer — reflects on the asylum the poet has vanished into. "Someday we will all finally leave (the asylum) and this noble institution will stand abandoned," he says. "But in the meantime, it is my duty to collect information, dates, names. To confirm stories." *

Erick Lyle is the author of On The Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of The City, out now on Soft Skull Press.

Save public-access TV!

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By Tim Redmond

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has introduced a measure that might help save public-access TV, in San Francisco and elsewhere. It’s not that radical – just a nonbinding resolution calling on the federal and state government to make a small amendment to legislation that currently threatens the existence of PEG – public, educational and government – programming on cable TV.

But it’s got the giant AT&T all agitated, and lobbyists are descending on City Hall to crush it.

The background is a bit complicated, but I’ll try to make it simple. In 2006, the state of California passed a very bad law called the Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act (DIVCA), which took away from cities and counties the ability to regulate cable-TV franchises. Now the state Public Utilities Commission – a crew of pro-industry hacks if there ever was one – has that jurisdiction.

One of the results: The city of San Francisco no longer has the ability to require that the operator of its cable franchise provide money for PEG programming. Meanwhile, an old federal law (from 1934) allows cities to mandate that cable franchises pay for capital facilities for PEG – but not for operating expenses.

And the city’s franchise agreement with Comcast is ending this year, and with it will go some $600,000 in operational funding for the city’s public-access TV. More than a dozen PEG channels in Los Angeles county have already gone dark; that could happen here as soon as June.

Mirkarimi wants the state and the feds (that is, our powerful Congressional delegation and our relatively powerful folks in Sacramento) to revisit this, and make a very modest change in law that would allow franchise money to be used not just for capital expenses but for operating budgets.

AT&T dashed off a letter to Mirkarimi Feb. 27th whining about the measure and insisting that the city should pay the PEG expenses out of its existing franchise-fee money. That money goes to the general fund; at a time when the entire social safety net in San Francisco is about to collapse, who really thinks that money will be diverted to public-access TV?

The measure comes up tomorrow at the board. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Who will the AT&T lobbyists get to?

Feds finally relax pot policies

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marijuana.jpg
By Steven T. Jones and Ben Terrall

Might the wasteful U.S. war on marijuana be coming to an end? That possible light at the end of this long dark tunnel was sparked by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday when he said the federal government would no longer raid medical marijuana facilities in the 14 states where voters have legalized weed for medical uses.

That announcement comes just days after California Assembly member Tom Ammiano introduced a bill that would decriminalize and tax marijuana, even pot consumed for strictly recreational reasons by healthy Californians. Advocates are hailing the twin announcements as a refreshing change from the ridiculously intolerant rhetoric that has characterized the national narcotics debate for decades.

Ridin’ the synergy

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Listening to Keelay & Zaire’s debut, Ridin’ High (MYX Music Label), is like being transported back to Bay Area hip-hop in the early ’90s. Remember those glory days? Hobo Junction and Hieroglyphics battled for supremacy; the Invisibl Skratch Piklz and Bomb Records sparked the turntablism movement; and Celly Cel, Spice-1, Richie Rich, and the Click created mob music.

Production team Tim "Zaire" Lewis and Kyle "Keelay" Pierce evoke that era with balletic numbers such as "I’m on Swerv," with its Zapp-style — not T-Pain style — Auto-Tunin’, and laid-back gangsta soul like "Alright with Me" and "Nurf to the Turf." The cast itself isn’t Bay-specific. Its geographical makeup — a product of connections made through MySpace pages and online community forums — ranges from Raleigh, N.C. (Phonte Coleman and Darien Brockington) to Bloomberg, N.J. (rising producer Illmind’s group Fortilive). It’s a result of Internet hustling, and the chorus line raps, sings, swaggers, and jostles for attention. But the smooth, breezy, Dayton-tires-rolling-on-concrete tone remains.

"We really just wanted to make something that would give the listener the feeling of riding around in a car," says Keelay by phone. A Salt Lake City transplant, he enrolled at San Francisco State seven years ago. "After college, I just didn’t want to leave," he remembers. "I loved it in the Bay Area. It quickly became my home."

Keelay met Zaire on the UndergroundHipHop.com — once ughh.com — message boards. Both work 9-to-5 gigs: Keelay is a computer technician for Wells Fargo. Zaire, who lives in Newport News, Va., is a government contractor who mysteriously performs "intelligence work." ("I don’t know what he does!" answers Keelay when pressed for details.) Without a label deal, they painstakingly cobbled together Ridin’ High over two years, paying for the guest appearances themselves, though, Keelay adds, "a lot of people were really generous," and did it for free. "Me and Zaire had to send beats and sessions back and forth" via e-mail, he says. "We did it all through the Internet."

Now MYX Music Label (MML), who signed Keelay & Zaire to a deal last fall, has chosen Ridin’ High as its first major release. MML is a subsidiary of ABS-CBN Global, a Philippines media company that launched a U.S. version of MYX TV in 2007. According to Karim Panni, who manages the imprint, the "music lifestyle channel" can only be seen on DIRECTV in the Bay Area. But it is working on various deals that will widen its reach. Meanwhile, Comcast carries MYX’s most popular show, Built from Scratch, through its On Demand channel.

"There’s a lot of work that goes into getting added onto Comcast. But we’re working on it," says Panni, also known as Nightclubber Lang, one-third of the Seattle group Boom Bap Project. "I was on tour with Brother Ali, and the owner [of MYX] asked me if I wanted to run his record label."

It seems odd that a multimedia company with international ambitions would choose an indie rapper to launch a record label. And judging from MML’s release slate — including 20 C Energizers, described in press materials as a "hip-hop CD produced solely by Asian MCs, producers, DJs and singers," and MYX TV-affiliated DVDs such as Slanted Comedy, which showcases Asian American comedians — MYX appears to target Asian youth culture. But when asked about MYX’s Asian identity, Panni bristles. "I’m not trying to be typecast as an Asian label," he says. "We’re not trying to market to a niche audience. We’re reaching out to everybody."

"These days, with the Internet, the lines between major and underground are really fine. So instead of looking for this type or that type of rapper, I just look for the people who are making really good music that I would like," Panni adds. His expectations for Keelay & Zaire are modest: "Really, to establish themselves in the Bay Area, in the California market, and then become one of the elite production duos in the game. This is a good jump-off to show what they can do."

KEELAY & ZAIRE

With Blue Scholars, Grynch, and DJ Vin Roc

Sun/1, 9 p.m., $12–<\d>$15

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 522-0333

www.slims-sf.com

Speed Reading

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THE FACE IN THE LENS: ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHS

By Robert Flynn Johnson

University of California Press

208 pages

$45

A shop in the Tenderloin sells anonymous photos. The pictures are messily packed in boxes and labeled according to whether the subject, sometimes but not always graphic (there are plenty of head shots of failed actors, for example), is heterosexual or homosexual. As digital images fly and float through the Internet, I’ve thought about those boxes of snapshots, their mix of allure, mystery, and depressing banality. With The Face in the Lens: Anonymous Photographs, a sequel to his acclaimed monograph Anonymous (Thames and Hudson, 2005), Robert Flynn Johnson both expands and refines the type of gathering and organization I discovered in that store.

Alexander McCall Smith’s brief intro, which imagines stories around some of the book’s images, isn’t as effective as Johnson’s essay, which connects obvious critical sources such as Susan Sontag with aphorisms on sight and photography from W.H. Auden and Jean Cocteau. Johnson is out to find the many spaces between the sentimentality of humanistic projects such as the 1955 book and exhibition, The Family of Man, and the morbid focus of monographs such as 1973’s Wisconsin Death Trip. He does so with 1880s daguerreotypes and late-1980s color snapshots. We see Robert F. Kennedy on the day of his death, mass hangings in the Soviet Union, flying leaps from flaming buildings, storm troopers in suburban backyards, kids smoking, infants in dresses holding rifles, men in drag or kissing by Christmas trees, and naked women soldering. Few images are obvious or dull. Some are worthy of a Ralph Eugene Meatyard or Weegee. The power of others resides in the relationship between clueless photographer and defiant or sad subject. (Johnny Ray Huston)

BLANK SPOTS ON THE MAP: THE DARK GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENTAGON’S SECRET WORLD

By Trevor Paglen

Dutton

324 pages

$25.95

In 2006’s Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (Melville House), Trevor Paglen worked with former Guardian writer A.C. Thompson to reveal the subculture of "planespotting" and the realities behind terms such as "rendition" as practiced by clandestine U.S. forces. The book also provided an interesting entryway into, or extension from, Paglen’s work as a visual artist, with Thompson’s journalistic voice seemingly braided in and out of Paglen’s more academic tone.

Blank Spots on the Map is a more mainstream book, as evidenced by its publisher. This aspect has its assets and drawbacks. One asset is that Paglen’s writerly voice has improved greatly, growing more versatile and characterful as it shifts to first-person. A look at the rendition programs of the CIA is just one element of his overall effort here, which involves revealing hidden spots used by the U.S. for covert activities throughout the globe — and in the skies above it. Early on, he cites facts showing that the number of federal government employees working on classified projects far outnumbers those working aboveground. At times, Paglen relates discoveries in a manner that suggests that he alone has made them. But for the most part, Black Spots is a bracing, real-life through-the-looking-glass antidote to Tom Clancy–style escapism. (Huston)

Beautiful nightmare

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If the U.S. really is entering a new period of transparency and team-playing, that might take a while to swallow for some nations that have known us best as an unreliable fair-weather ally. One of the Vietnam War’s lesser-heralded tragedies was what happened to neighboring Laos. Early in Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, we see JFK in 1961 saying of Laos, "All we want is peace, not war. A truly neutral government, not a Cold War pawn." Whatever earnestness that statement possessed, it was raped under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, despite all official denials.

The CIA drafted and trained Laotian military personnel as secret guerilla units gunning for North Vietnamese fighters along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. U.S. aircraft began dropping bombs on Laos — 3 million tons’ worth over nine years, more than in both World Wars combined. Vietcong were targeted, but civilians suffered plenty from the bombings as well as from a Yank-supported South Vietnamese invasion.

Nixon’s disgraced resignation drove one last nail in the coffin of this "unpopular" war. The 1975 "fall of Saigon" withdrawal was accompanied by abrupt pullouts of American interests and muscle in Laos. Though not quite as ghastly as what ensued in collaborating Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the fast overthrow of Laos’ "neutral" U.S.-backed monarchial government by Communist forces had similar consequences. Pathet Lao’s oppressive new regime closed itself to the world, arresting, executing, or otherwise persecuting anyone suspected of ties to the prior epoch.

The Betrayal fascinates like other rare, intimate documentaries shot over long periods — Michael Apted’s Seven Up series being the most famous example. This one began a quarter-century ago, when Kuras contacted 19-year-old Thavisouk Phrasavath (credited as co-director and co-writer, and the film’s sole editor) for lessons in speaking Lao for an unrelated project. His personal story — past, present, evolving — took up any time not occupied by Kuras’ cinematography career, which has encompassed features and docs by Spike Lee, Rebecca Miller, Harold Ramis, Jonathan Demme, Mary Harron, Jim Jarmusch, Michel Gondry, and Sam Mendes.

Phrasavath’s father was a Royal Army officer seduced by better pay and the promise that his own country’s best interests were being served — even when he plotted its bombing targets. After long service, the Americans’ abrupt pullout got him arrested, sent to re-education camp, and assumed executed by loved ones. Considered traitorous along with her 10 children, his wife Orady desperately bribed smugglers for their safe expatriation. When that happened, it was so sudden she had to leave two briefly absent daughters behind. She chose the United States as an asylum destination, believing that a government grateful for her husband’s sacrifices would "take care of us when we get to America." The clan got dumped in a decrepit mid-1980s Brooklyn apartment shared with other Southeast Asian refugees, next to a crack house and surrounded by gang violence.

Kuras was there then, and later on when some startling changes occurred in the Phrasavath family saga. But The Betrayal is as soft on narrative detailing as its color palette, which finds rainforest green and Buddhist monk-robe saffron echoed even in the harshest New Yawk/Joisey landscapes. Her visual impressionism is a gift, especially in the abstract illustration of teenage Phrasavath’s solo escape across the Mekong. But such poetical shorthand also frustrates — we’d like to know far more than Kuras and Phrasavath allow about what happened to immediate blood beyond himself and his mom.

But that stuff could be forgivably relegated to DVD extras. A rare new documentary that really belongs on the big screen, The Betrayal‘s flowing lyricism gracefully connects a poignant family history to larger socio-political and extra-large spiritual themes. It’s an almost sinfully beautiful movie about ugly global realities.


THE BETRAYAL opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

Losing the tax argument

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EDITORIAL The lead topic on the local cable TV show City Desk News Hour Feb. 21 was the state budget, and a panel of local reporters were talking about the mix of tax increases and service cuts the Legislature finally passed. After a bit of back and forth, Scott Shafer, host of KQED’s California Report, piped up. "Everyone knows it’s a bad idea to raise taxes in a recession," he said.

Shafer, who was a press secretary to former Mayor Art Agnos, is hardly a conservative commentator. In fact, at the risk of damaging his credentials as an unbiased reporter, we might even call him a liberal. And to judge from the response of most of the panel, nothing he said was particularly controversial. Sure, raising taxes in a recession is bad; so is cancer, and violent crime. Next question.

But that’s not just a limited viewpoint — it’s factually inaccurate. Raising taxes during a recession can be an excellent economic idea, if it’s done right. Because the one thing almost every credible economist outside of the far-right intellectual swampland agrees on these days is that cutting government spending during a recession is a terrible idea — and if the only way to keep the public sector jobs, the social services, and the welfare payments going is to raise taxes, then raising taxes on those who can afford to pay is not only good politics, it’s good policy.

And it’s infuriating that this point seems to have dropped out of the mainstream of debate. That’s a major failure of the Democratic leadership, in California and nationwide.

Historians can argue forever about the direct impact the New Deal had on ending the Great Depression. But it’s pretty clear that what Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman calls the great jobs program of World War II turned the American economy around. And during World War II, tax rates, particularly on the wealthiest individuals and corporations, were exceptionally high. The top marginal income tax rate exceeded 80 percent. Corporations that made more than a modest return paid a high excess-profits tax. The high income tax rates on the richest Americans remained through the postwar boom era, a time when inequality declined and overall wealth grew.

That money went into the public sector, not just for the war but for retooling and rebuilding U.S. industry. High taxes on the rich paid for the interstate highway system, the University of California system, the California Water Project, the birth of the Internet. It took almost half a century for the Republicans and no-taxers to wreck the economic gains of that high-tax era.

And yet, despite all the consistent, clear evidence, we still hear the news media, the commentators, and even liberal Democrats saying that tax cuts are good for the economy and tax hikes are bad.

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

One of the most important goals of the next year or two, under the Obama administration, is to change the national debate over public and private priorities. That won’t be easy. President Obama has started off in the right direction, although the Republicans forced him to include several hundred billion in wasteful tax cuts in his stimulus bill. The tax hikes in the state budget plan are almost entirely regressive (sales taxes and a flat increase in the income tax.)

Here in California, and here in San Francisco, elected officials who claim to represent the Democratic Party’s future need to stop mouthing the old Republican line. None of the Democratic candidates for governor, including Mayor Gavin Newsom, have been our front about the need for more government spending, even if it means higher taxes on the wealthy (say, a business tax that hits harder on the biggest and less so on the small). In fact, Newsom has taken the opposite line, writing in a Feb. 13 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed piece that "we have to reduce spending." The San Francisco supervisors are at least talking about new revenue sources, but polls show that will be a hard sell.

Why do the polls show that? Because people like Newsom — and to some extent, the supervisors — aren’t using their bully pulpits to change the tone of the discussion, to make the case for economic sanity, to challenge the demented wisdom that’s brought us to this nightmare.

That has to change, now, or there will be no way out. *

The SECA art awards

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SECA, SECA now. Behold a free-floating netherworld where masked versions of Roseanne Barr and Bill Cosby boogie down together. Stare for one last time into the static of the soon-extinct analog TV to see what patterns emerge. Take an x-ray of Manet. Spy on government secret agents. Peep through the Guardian’s viewfinder at the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art’s biennial award exhibition devoted to Bay Area creators.

The 21st installment of the SECA Art Awards brings the strongest overall group of awardees in some time, four individuals — Tauba Auerbach, Desirée Holman, Jordan Kantor, and Trevor Paglen — whose contributions form a unified vision that’s been missing from the exhibition of late. You might not know it from reading the somewhat contentious artist discussion at the close of the exhibition’s booklet (where Auerbach’s plainspoken interjections are refreshing), but it’s easy to form a chain of symbolic connections that spans from one end of the exhibition to the other.

Holman is this issue’s cover star, partly because her recent playful representations of TV’s first families have proven refreshingly prescient regarding the national identification with (if not of) Barack Obama. And partly because it’s time to put a weird mask on the front of the newspaper. It’s a pleasure to present Matt Sussman’s take on Holman’s drawing-and video installation The Magic Window — no one could better identify the "Soft Pink Missy" beat of its heart. Elsewhere, Kimberly Chun gets systematic with Auerbach, Ari Messer scopes out the camera candor of Kantor’s paintings, and I map the photographic investigations of Trevor Paglen. Let’s take a look.

Sorry, Ilinois gets the stimulus first

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Barry Schrader, a former government affairs officer for the Livermore Lab and retired in Illinois, sent along this joke that is making the rounds out there. It explains how the stimulus plan will work. B3

Three contractors are bidding to fix a broken fence at the White House. One is from Chicago, another is from Tennessee, and the third is from California. All three go with a White House official to examine the fence. The California contractor takes out a tape measure and does some measuring, then works some figures with a pencil. “Well,” he says, “I figure the job will run about $1,800: $400 for materials, $400 for my crew and $1,000 profit for me.”

The Tennessee contractor also does some measuring and figuring, then says, “I can do this job for $700: $300 for materials, $300 for my crew and $100 profit for me.” The Chicago contractor doesn’t measure or figure, but leans over to the White House official and whispers, “$2,700.”
The official, incredulous, says, “You didn’t even measure like the other guys! How did you come up with such a high figure?”

The Chicago contractor whispers back, “$1,000 for me, $1,000 for you, and we hire the guy from Tennessee to fix the fence.” “Done!” replies the White House chief of staff. And that is how the new stimulus plan will work.

—As per Sen. Tombstone Burris

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