Government

Fighting Newsom’s mid-year cuts

-
0

EDITORIAL If Mayor Gavin Newsom moves forward aggressively with mid-year cuts to the city budget, a lame duck Board of Supervisors with four veterans — including the board president and chair of the Budget Committee — on their way out the door could be voting on harsh reductions in city spending on health care, parks, and other services. That’s not the best way to make policy; we’d rather the cuts go to the new board, which will be dealing with next year’s budget anyway. But if the mayor is pushing reductions now, the current board needs to act aggressively and quickly to be sure that the mayor’s wrongheaded priorities don’t carry the day.

We recognize that the city has money problems. Like every other taxpayer-financed entity in America, San Francisco is getting hit hard by the recession. When retail sales drop, so do local sales taxes. When real estate values plummet, so do property taxes receipts. And while some prominent economists are urging President-elect Barack Obama to pour federal money into cities this spring, nobody can count on that happening.

City Controller Ben Rosenfield is projecting that the city will be around $100 million short of cash by the end of the fiscal year. And since California cities (unlike the federal government) can’t run a deficit, that money has to come from somewhere. (Fortunately, the red ink won’t be as bad as it might have been — with little help from the mayor, Sup. Aaron Peskin got two new revenue measures passed in November that will bring some $50 million more into city coffers).

Newsom’s chief target at this point is the Department of Public Health, which is facing more than $256 million in cuts. That’s on top of all the cuts the department has had to absorb over the past two years — and it will cut deeply into the city’s ability to maintain its landmark Healthy San Francisco program. The Recreation and Park Department, libraries, and Muni will face cutbacks too, and there’s almost certainly a Muni fare hike (essentially a tax on the poor) on the horizon.

But there’s no talk of reducing or eliminating any of the mayor’s pet programs — like the 311 call center, which is a fine service but perhaps not as important as medical staff at SF General — or cutting significantly into his own office spending.

And, as always, the mayor has failed to look at any additional sources of revenue (with the possible exception of new parking meters in Golden Gate Park and at Marina Green). It’s particularly frustrating that Newsom and his hired gun, Eric Jaye, pushed so hard to help Pacific Gas and Electric Co. defeat the Clean Energy Act when public power would be the source of hundreds of millions in annual revenue. (PG&E killed 10 other ballot measures that would have brought cheap Hetch Hetchy public power to San Francisco, the largest source of potential new revenue for the city, and the private monopoly yanks more than $650 million a year out of the city in high rates, according to a Guardian study.)

The supervisors don’t have to wait for the mayor to propose cuts and then react. They can begin to move now. They can begin to identify their own set of cuts and revenue enhancements — and can begin establishing an alternative set of priorities. Is it better to cut 311 and the mayor’s special global warming deputy than to cut nurses at General? Is it better to close some redundant fire stations than cut hours at libraries? Should parking meters and garage fees go up downtown before city parks get meters? Back in 1973, in his first run for supervisor, Harvey Milk proposed eliminating the police vice squad (see "I remember Harvey"). That’s an idea whose time may have come again.

The point is that the mayor, who is weak and more focused on running for governor than on running the city, shouldn’t be driving the fiscal agenda alone. The supervisors need to either agree that they won’t act on cuts until the new board takes office or offer some alternative plans today.

Holiday Guide 2008: The game room

-
0

› culture@sfbg.com

The holidays have always been a time for toys. Back in the day, it was board games, baby dolls, and Rubik’s cubes. Then came Nintendo, Dance Dance Revolution, and The Sims. And now? The world of gaming is exploding, with something for everyone — from sci-fi-loving kids to sports-fanatic adults. Here are a few of our favorite new releases, which are sure to please everyone on your list (except maybe Grandpa):

Spore

Maxis (EA Sports); PC/Mac

"Playing God" just took on a whole new meaning. From Maxis, the people who brought you The Sims, comes the genre-defying Spore, a game designed for people who are tired of creating boring ol’ humans. In its captivating metaverse, gamers create a unicellular organism which must evolve into a social, cognizant creature. Explore the game’s expansive, interstellar landscape while developing a whole new species that can live and thrive in a brave new world. If that isn’t enough, it features ambient soundscapes by avant-garde composer and producer Brian Eno.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2009

Konami; PS3, Xbox 360, PSP, PS2, Wii, PC

The Pro Evolution Soccer series, also known as Winning Eleven, has long been the "Beautiful Games" best-kept gaming secret. While enjoying rampant global popularity, stateside it has long been the Don Swayze to Electronic Arts’ FIFA series’ Patrick Swayze. Its underwhelming sales in the United States are due to EA’s publicity machine and its name recognition. But PES 2009‘s staggering fluidity, graphics, and realism leaves FIFA‘s in the dust. While it features the international and club matches we expect, this year’s version exclusively features UEFA Champion’s League mode, which allows you to navigate through soccer’s preeminent club competition that decides the best team in Europe. A majestic sport demands a majestic game, and Pro Evolution Soccer ’09 best captures the nuances and gravity of the world’s most beloved sport.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Blizzard Entertainment; PC/ Mac OS X

If you can control an insatiable appetite for the destruction of your social life during the 42 days between its release and St. Nick’s World Tour, No. 1 on your shopping list should be the latest installment of the soul-sucking, hypnotic genius of Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. While its global fans’ limitless dedication risks the ire of parents, teachers, and psychologists (read: party poopers), who confuse persistence and attention to detail with addictive behaviors, Blizzard has simply achieved every video game maker’s wet dream. It’s crafted a game intriguing and enjoyable enough that both hardcore and weekend warriors want to get in on the action.

Shaun White Snowboarding

Ubisoft; PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS, PSP, PS2, PC

Not since Tony Hawk has an athlete been able to seamlessly transition from extreme sports star to bona fide sports hero and A-list celebrity like Shaun "the Flying Tomato" White has. He’s appeared on countless magazines and talk shows, and is now pulling his own "Tony Hawk" by fronting a big-budget, mainstream video game franchise. While time will tell if Shaun White Snowboarding will be as successful as the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, but early returns have been overwhelmingly positive. The game features four mountain settings — Alaska, the Alps, Japan, and Park City, Utah — with seemingly endless runs and backcountry trails to get lost on. The game flows well, and there are countless opportunities to do hair-raising tricks and twists. White wanted the game to capture the freedom that made him fall in love with snowboarding, and Ubisoft has captured that perfectly, constantly pushing the user to discover the road less traveled without the possibility of death by hypothermia.

Rock Band 2

Harmonix/ Pi Studios; PS3, Xbox 360 (PS2/Wii releasing December 2008)

I’ll be honest with you. There is nothing, but nothing, that can kill a night out quite like Rock Band. Speaking from experience, it usually strikes around 11 p.m., when you and your friends are, theoretically, having your last drinks and preparing to brave the San Francisco nightlife. You may have high hopes for the evening. Maybe you’ll find a cool new bar, meet some new people, or even engage in a hazy dalliance that hopefully leaves you disease- and child-free in the morning. Then, disaster strikes. Someone asks, "Hey, who wants to play a little Rock Band before we go out?" Three hours later, you are wasted, singing "Wanted Dead or Alive" at the top of your lungs, and surrounded by the same four mates you started the night with. Good-bye cool bar, new friends, and Ms. or Mr. Right (Now). The latest version promises even more lost evenings and new opportunities to show off that falsetto, with almost 100 songs from nearly every genre, including classic rock standards (Fleetwood Mac, the Who), a double helping of ’90s grunge (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains), and ’80s metal jams (Ratt, Bon Jovi).

Mirror’s Edge

Electronic Arts; PS3, Xbox 360

First-person adventure games are the Auto-Tune (T-Pain Effect) of video games, with seemingly every major video game manufacturer using this über-realistic, up-close perspective. That said, Mirror’s Edge looks likely to revolutionize first-person shooters with its unparalleled gameplay. Players control Faith, the game’s tragic hero, on her quest to save her sister from a web of deceit woven by a corrupt communist government. The game’s gorgeous, illuminated metropolitan setting demonstrates its elite graphics, but the real attraction lies in Faith’s ambitious journey. While fighting is involved, the user must navigate the expansive urban labyrinth and find ways to infiltrate the totalitarian regime. Though it boasts more action (read: combat) than most RPG’s, Mirror’s Edge is not a game for the unreceptive, lazy gamer who simply wants to blow shit up. But if you like using your brain as well as your bullets, you will rejoice in its complex storyline, nuance, and overall gameplay.

NBA Live ’09

Electronic Arts; Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, PS2, PSP

Without the mighty Baron Davis, how are the hapless Warriors going to make the playoffs? Easy. Pick up a copy of EA’s new installment of the NBA Live juggernaut, make a few shrewd trades such as swapping Al Harrington and C.J. Watson for Carlos Boozer and Deron Williams (that’s fair, right?), start up your season, and voilà! The Warriors go 73-9, break the Bulls all-time record, cruise into the playoffs, and crush the overmatched Boston Celtics to bring the Bay Area their first title since 1975. Meanwhile, the villainous Utah Jazz are sent tumbling to an abysmal 5-77 mark (guess who’s still bitter about the ’07 playoffs?). Along the way, enjoy graphics clear enough to make out Kenyon Martin’s impressive array of neck tats, high-flying dunks more exciting than a moped ride with Monta Ellis, and gameplay so realistic that while playing as the Knicks, you’ll be too lazy to get back on defense. *

More Holiday Guide 2008.

Money is power

-
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY While the latest public power proposal was soundly defeated at the polls, the apparent failure of a pair of electricity generation initiatives backed by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is fueling an existing plan to create more city-owned energy projects.

Proposition H, which would have moved the city toward 100 percent renewable energy by 2040 and allowed public power to help meet that goal, lost Nov. 4 by more than 20 percentage points. PG&E spent a record-breaking $10.3 million against the measure, or more than $53 per vote as of the Nov. 10 tally.

For that kind of money, said campaign finance expert Bob Stern of the Center for Government Studies, "they could have taken every voter out and bought them an expensive meal." But, he said, that’s a pittance for a company like PG&E. "They knew spending $10 million was going to save them a bunch of money."

Two days after the election, PG&E announced a 9 percent increase in year-to-date profits over last year, boosted partly by a 6 percent rate increase PG&E implemented Oct. 1, which it argued was needed to cover the increased cost of natural gas.

Prop. H would have moved San Francisco away from volatile fossil fuel prices, although the city is still hoping to procure 51 percent of its energy needs from renewables by 2017 through the community choice aggregation (CCA) program.

Meanwhile a plan to retrofit the Mirant Potrero Power Plant is looking shakier since Nov. 4, when the Board of Supervisors tabled legislation that would have authorized the Mayor’s Office and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to negotiate the deal.

Prior Land Use and Economic Development committee hearings showed that retrofitting the plant to run on natural gas instead of diesel may not be as technologically or economically feasible as suggested in a report commissioned by Mirant (see "Power possibilities," Nov. 5).

But a recent report on CCA outlines ways the city may be able to procure the baseload energy demand required by the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) without retrofitting Mirant or building new peak-demand fossil fuel plants (known as "peakers"), as city officials originally proposed.

The report by Local Power, the lead CCA consultant hired by the city, suggests that the SFPUC’s current plan to upgrade natural gas steam boilers in large downtown buildings can be modified to capture waste heat and turn it into energy, a process known as cogeneration.

The city Department of the Environment has already identified 106 MW of potential energy — about the same amount Cal-ISO is requiring the city to have on hand for energy reliability. Although this isn’t renewable energy because it’s capturing wasted gas heat, "it’s really clean, good quality brown power," said Paul Fenn of Local Power, noting that it makes use of something that is currently being wasted.

Local Power’s draft report, which lays the groundwork for what the city needs to do before 2010 to make CCA work, also disputes the conclusions of a tidal power feasibility study conducted for the SFPUC. In July, URS Corp. reported that tidal power in the Golden Gate would cost between 80 cents and $1.40 per kW-hour and only generate a little over 1 MW of power. "We do not consider a tidal power project located in the vicinity of the Golden Gate to be commercially feasible at this time," the report states.

Local Power contends that URS undervalued the potential energy by using computer modeling rather than actual tidal data and overlooked the strongest area for building an underwater turbine. It also failed to account for public financing at a lower interest rate, which would make city-owned tidal power much cheaper.

"We are confident you can get 10 MW," Fenn said. "The whole thing was modeled on PG&E ownership."

Local Power recommended the city get actual tidal data from the best spot and run the numbers again. "The ocean is the ultimate energy resource for San Francisco," said Fenn, who compared the challenge of constructing this kind of infrastructure to the Hoover Dam.

Newsom, who opposed Prop. H but still claims to support CCA, remains committed to tidal power. "Mayor Newsom supports advancing a tidal project at the mouth of the bay," his spokesperson, Joe Arellano, wrote in an e-mail.

The rollout of CCA is expected in 2010, when the city issues a request for proposals from companies interested in building or supplying energy. Several companies have already responded to a request for information. CCA is slated to include a 150 MW wind farm, 31 MW of solar, 103 MW of local distributed generation, and 107 MW of efficiency technologies. Funding would come from $1.2 billion in renewable energy bonds that have already been approved.

Local Power’s report includes concrete actions the city can take, including a plan to finally make Hetch Hetchy power available to citizens, a recommendation that the wind farm be built in the Delta for easy access to the Transbay Cable — a new 400 MW, 59-mile transmission line between Pittsburg and San Francisco that’s scheduled to be completed in 2010 — and urging the city to petition the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for so-called public good charges collected from ratepayers that currently go to PG&E’s energy efficiency programs.

"We’re trying to put ideas on the table for the RFPs," said Fenn, who stressed that the city should make it as easy as possible for CCA to get underway, a goal that will require a lot more cooperation between departments. For example, the report outlines several hindrances to getting renewable energy up and running, from permit hassles to delayed interconnections to PG&E’s grid.

"Where we see problems in the city for permitting and zoning, we can seek to change them now," Fenn said.

That chance may come soon. The Land Use and Economic Development Committee is hearing legislation Nov. 12 to require conditional use permitting for all power plants greater than 10 MW. Though the legislation originally targeted the Mirant plant, the Planning Department, in its review of the draft legislation, suggested that all power plants be subject to the additional review. Sup. Aaron Peskin, who sponsored the legislation with Sup. Sophie Maxwell, suggested the change wasn’t appropriate. "It just means more public process."

But, Fenn said, "To set standards based on pre-CCA era is at this point confusing. Like [Sup.] Ross [Mirkarimi] said, the CCA program should be the unifying principle of energy policy in San Francisco. Integrating all the pieces is indeed the entire secret of making all the parts perform better so that we can achieve the required meet-or-beat-PG&E-rates outcome."

Mirkarimi told us the program could obviate retrofitting Mirant or pursuing the peakers. "CCA still has not been taken seriously enough by the SFPUC or the Newsom administration."

CFAC: Court did its job on Prop. 8

-
0

By Peter Scheer

Although its name did not even appear on the ballot, the California Supreme Court was perhaps the state’s biggest loser in Tuesday’s historic elections. The voters’ narrow approval of Proposition 8 effectively reverses the high court’s controversial decision earlier this year, which extended the right to marry to same-sex couples.

The court knew the risks. The statute it declared unconstitutional in In re Marriage Cases was itself the result of a statutory state ballot initiative in 2000. In overturning that assertion of popular will, the court no doubt realized it was setting the stage for a further confrontation in which opponents of gay marriage would try to override the court’s decision through the initiative process, this time amending the state constitution.

Critics will say that Chief Justice Ron George’s Supreme Court is guilty of overreaching – that, by interceding in a political and cultural struggle, the court has suffered a loss of prestige and
institutional authority. But while it’s clear, in hindsight, that the George court miscalculated the depth of opposition to gay marriage in the blue state of California, that does not mean the court’s landmark decision in In re Marriage Cases was a mistake.

For one thing, California’s gay-marriage battle is not over. Proposition 8 is still subject to challenge under the U.S. Constitution for, among other things, its selective cancellation of a
previously granted substantive right. Although a decision founded in federal law would be subject to review in the U.S. Supreme Court, there is no certainty the federal high court would elect to decide the case – or, if it did, that it would end up sustaining Proposition 8.

Proposition 8 is also subject to challenge under the California Constitution, even though the proposition is itself a constitutional amendment. This is so because, although the voters can, through the initiative process, add language to the constitution, it is the responsibility of the California Supreme Court to interpret new constitutional language – and, where necessary, to reconcile it with other, equally valid yet potentially conflicting, constitutional directives.

In the latter category is the most important aspect of In re Marriage Cases: the George court’s decision to analyze legal classifications based on sexual preference under the same rigorous standard of “strict scrutiny” usually reserved for classifications based on race, religion or ethnicity. This portion of the court’s decision is not altered by Proposition 8, and it will be front and center in any litigation against Proposition 8 under state law. While the courts can’t void Proposition 8 on this basis, applying strict scrutiny to Proposition 8’s language is likely to yield a prohibition against gay marriage that is much weaker than the measure’s authors and
supporters intended.

But even if the state Supreme Court takes neither of these paths, leaving Proposition 8 intact (at least until a new electoral majority, in another ballot initiative, repeals it), the court is to be applauded for attempting to resolve a pressing social question – whether to allow gays and lesbians to marry – that the other branches of government had proved incapable of addressing.

In this area and others, it falls to the George court to fill a widening governance gap created by a Legislature that is paralyzed by political divisions and a governor who, despite Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s forceful personality, has little real power compared with other chief executives. (Imagine a federal government in which the attorney general and other top executive branch officials are not appointed by, or answerable to, the president.)

When elected representatives don’t act, the people do, taking the law into their own hands through ballot initiatives, Proposition 8 being only the most recent major example. In this process of direct democracy, an assertive, even activist, Supreme Court is necessary to guard against excesses and to protect the rights of groups disfavored by the majority.

It was in this capacity that the George court, to its credit, issued its decision in In re Marriage Cases, establishing a constitutionally based right to same-sex marriage. Although Proposition 8 is clearly a setback for the court, the damage done to the court’s authority, while considerable, will not be permanent.

===
Peter Scheer, a lawyer and journalist, is executive director of the
California First Amendment Coalition, www.cfac.org.

Teach your children well

-
4


By Tim Redmond

The baby boom generation — and I am at the tail end of it — has been a disappointment. When I was a kid, we figured that when we were in charge, pot would be legal and war would be a crime and we’d tax the rich to feed to the poor/til there aren’t no rich no more … and all that.

And our two boomer presidents have been Bill Clinton and G.W. Bush. I rest my case.

In fact, after the burst of creativity and political ideology in the 1960s, the boomers have been, to a horrible extent, a selfish generation, a group of people who overall have been unwilling to accept sacrifice for the common good, who have, overall, been hostile to tax increases and government programs .. I could go on talking ’bout my generation.

But there’s on thing we’ve apparently done right: We’ve taught our children well

Boomer kids have (again, by and large) grown up in an environment of racial and gender tolerance and acceptance. They are, to a great extent, a multi-ethnic group willing to ignore or bend gender roles with abandon. And guess what? Young people — the boomer kids — were overwhemlingly opposed to Prop. 8

Here are the numbers, which I took from an excellent Kos piece on this

CNN exit poll
Vote by Age
Yes No
18-29 (20%) 39 61
30-44 (28%) 55 45
45-64 (36%) 54 46
65+ (15%) 61 39

So while I am so personally disappointed in Prop. 8 that it kind of runined the Obama victory for me, it’s nice to know that we’ve lost the battle but won the war. This is only going in one direction, and while I’m not always proud of my boomer-mates, I’m proud as hell of our kids.

Corporations do

-
0

› steve@sfbg.com

No amount of feel-good advertising can counter the perfect populist storm that has been brewing around Chevron, the giant Bay Area-based oil company that for the last month has spent $15 million plastering billboards and the airwaves with slick, heartwarming appeals to use less energy.

Few expect the greenwashing campaign to do much good in a political climate that has had everyone from Barack Obama to Sarah Palin bashing "Big Oil." And in the week leading up to an historic presidential election, Chevron was looking bigger and badder than ever.

The week began Oct. 27 with the start of a landmark human rights and corporate responsibility trial in federal court in San Francisco, in which Chevron stands accused of complicity with Nigeria’s authoritarian government in the torture, murder, and abuse of those protesting Chevron’s exploitation of the Niger Delta.

And the work week ended Oct. 31 with Chevron announcing record quarterly profits of $7.9 billion, more than double what the oil giant earned a year earlier, when the company’s $3.7 billion in profits triggered calls by Obama and other political figures to levy higher taxes on such windfalls.

That’s exactly what city officials in Richmond were trying to do this election with Proposition T, which would steeply increase the tax Chevron pays the city for its Richmond refinery. The measure would assess a tax based on the value of raw materials being processed, increasing to about $26.5 million per year, 440 times what it currently pays the city through a payroll tax. (Election results were expected after the Guardian‘s press deadline, so check www.sfbg.com for more.)

Jamie Court, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer rights and the author of Corporateering: How Corporate Power Steals Your Personal Freedom and What You Can Do About It (Penguin, 2003), said the combination of events creates a moment that makes significant reform possible.

"They make a very juicy target for people who want to show that oil companies do not share the values of the American people," Court said. "I think this trial could very well become a defining moment for how public opinion moves policymakers in Washington to real energy reform."

The case, Bowoto vs. Chevron, breaks new ground in seeking to hold an American corporation responsible in US courts for atrocities committed half the world away. The complaint, first filed in 1999, alleges that "the military, at the request of, and with the participation and complicity of Chevron, killed and injured people, destroyed churches, religious shrines, and water wells; burned down houses, killed livestock; and destroyed canoes and fishing equipment belonging to villagers" who were peacefully protesting Chevron’s pollution and destabilization of the region.

The trial, which is expected to continue until December, was brought under the little-used, 219-year-old Alien Tort Claims Act. Unocal faced a similar lawsuit for its alleged abuses in Myanmar and settled the case in 2004. But the Chevron case is the first of its kind to make it to trial.

Michael Watts, a geography professor who directs the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, said the political momentum has been building against big oil companies for a long time and the combination of this case, record profits, and the election create an opportunity for reform.

"The case is very important for a lot of reasons in and of itself, even if there was nothing else going on in the industry," Watts told us. "This is a big, precedent-setting case."

Not only could Chevron be hurt financially by the verdict, but the precedent could affect multinational corporations of all kinds that do business with regimes around the world with poor human rights records. And it could fuel political efforts at home to rein in corporate bad behavior.

"If you’re running up these kinds of profits, why would you let a case like this go to trial in the first place?" Watts asked.

Chevron officials did not return calls for comment.

Chevron is also facing another landmark trial in Ecuador, where Texaco (which Chevron bought in 2001) is being sued for billions of dollars to compensate for widespread environmental degradation of sensitive rainforests from its oil extraction efforts there, a case in which US courts have refused Chevron’s requests to intervene.

Will this perfect storm lead to reform? That depends on the social movements and the political leadership that takes office in January.

Power possibilities

-
0

By Amanda Witherell


› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY San Francisco’s energy future is in flux. On Nov. 4, voters decided the fate of Proposition H, a plan for 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. On the same day, the Board of Supervisors was set to consider a proposal from Mayor Gavin Newsom to retrofit the 32-year-old Mirant Potrero power plant to meet a state mandate for local electricity generation.

The results of both votes occurred after the Guardian deadline, but either way, the city’s energy policy is uncertain, particularly after serious doubts about the viability of the mayor’s proposal were raised at an Oct. 22 Land Use and Economic Development Committee hearing.

The retrofit was hastily developed as an alternative to longstanding plans to replace heavily polluting units of the Mirant plant with new, cleaner, city-owned peaker plants. That plan was derailed after a meeting in May between Newsom and seven Pacific Gas and Electric Co. executives, who were apparently concerned about the city generating its own power.

The Mayor’s office calls the retrofit a "bridge" to a renewable energy future and contends it can be cheaper than and as clean as the city’s peakers. Yet at the hearing, Mike Martin, who’s evaluating the retrofit project for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, said no retrofits have ever reached the emissions goals cited in Newsom’s proposal.

Jeff Henderson, senior project manager for Mirant, defended the $80 million price tag for the project (which is about $30 million cheaper than the city’s plan) but also said that they were "giving a price on a project that’s never been done before." Martin said the permits alone would be twice the price stated in a Mirant-commissioned feasibility study.

Chair of the committee Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who represents the district where the plant is sited, cast cost aside, saying that human lives and the lowest possible emissions were more important to her. Her district has the highest incidences of asthma and cancer in the city.

The retrofit would still emit more nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter than the city’s peaker plants but the Mayor’s Office is banking on it operating less, thus emitting less overall. The numbers crunched for the study by CH2M Hill presume Mirant operating about 156 hours a year, though it is permitted for 877 hours. The city has sued the company in the past for exceeding its permitted hours.

When questioned if the 97 percent emissions reduction proposed was possible, Henderson said, "The only thing that leads us to believe that is we had vendors who would say they could meet that under contract."

Maxwell invited three potential vendors to the hearing. All said the industry standard was 90 percent emissions reduction and that it was infeasible, if not technically impossible, to reach 97 percent. To try may even result in a net gain of particulate matter emissions because the plant would need more ammonia catalyst.

But the Mayor’s Office remained confident in the project. "The experts that presented before the committee were all experts attached to the CT project, so I would not consider them independent third-party experts," Newsom’s director of government affairs Nancy Kirshner-Rodriguez told the Guardian.

Bruce Schaller, vice president of Kansas-based power company Sega, said he wouldn’t bid on this job under the current parameters because, "We would be associated with a project that was a failure."

Tom Flagg, president of Equipment Source Company, said the project was "completely illogical and impossible to do." He pointed out that emissions vary widely. "You have surges in emissions levels. Sometimes it’s 94 percent, sometimes it’s 84 percent … A 97 to 98 percent reduction is impossible because in order to maintain that they have 100 percent reduction at times. It’s an average."

The need for new power generation in San Francisco has been pushed by the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), but environmental groups have urged the city to challenge that mandate. Former California Public Utilities Commission president Loretta Lynch, who spoke against the retrofit plan at the hearing, told the Guardian afterward, "The ISO are ideologues, not engineers. They have no basis in fact that we need any peninsula power production."

Supervisors passed a resolution asking the SFPUC to develop a transmission-only plan to meet Cal-ISO’s reliability demands. The SFPUC said it will present something within the next couple of months.

The Green Energy Revolution

-
4

A well-thought-out piece by the manager of the Yes on H campaign:

By Julian Davis

The United States of America and the Planet are teetering on the edge of economic and environmental collapse. We are now well aware of the threat of global warming and the catastrophic climate change it is causing. We know we have to curtail greenhouse gas emissions to heal the planet and sustain life on Earth. We are also in the midst of a serious financial crisis the depths of which we are coming to understand more and more as the days go by. But the economic instability we are experiencing is not just a result of toxic mortgage backed securities and the credit crunch. It’s not just the folly of Wall Street, it’s the folly of Big Oil, it’s the folly of our energy policy, and it is the folly of war.

We borrow trillions of dollars, mainly from China, to violently secure fossil fuel energy resources in the Middle East. This is not only environmentally unsustainable, it is economically unsustainable. Our current energy consumption and geo-political existence are destroying the planet and the American economy.
We are actually amazingly fortunate that there is one answer to our biggest problems. Clean Energy. We cannot save the planet from environmental disaster without developing clean and renewable sources of energy and we cannot save our economy in the long-term without becoming energy independent. Building a massive renewable energy infrastructure will heal the planet, stabilize the economy, create jobs, lift people out of poverty, and relieve us from war.

Our generation has a responsibility to figure this out now. San Francisco has the immediate opportunity with Proposition H to lead the world in the fight against global warming and lead the nation in the quest for energy independence.
Let’s not underestimate what one city can do. San Francisco has been out in front on so many issues in the past, from gay marriage to the most progressive minimum wage in the country. Two years ago a bunch of young workers in San Francisco past a paid sick days measure and now Barack Obama is talking about implementing it nationally. Just a few months ago a rag tag group of San Francisco activists put a 100% Clean Energy initiative on the ballot. A few weeks later, Al Gore issued his now famous energy challenge to America. If San Francisco passes Prop H, other cities and other states and countries around the world will follow.

We now face the biggest economic crisis since the great depression. It has become glaringly apparent that the free market and unregulated rule by private profiteering financial institutions and corporations is not a model that will sustain a healthy economy in this country. Wall Street’s greed has been matched only by Big Oil companies that have made windfall profits while moving at a snail’s pace towards developing alternative energy sources. In San Francisco, financial mismanagement of the private-investor owned utility PG&E has left us with skyrocketing electric rates for natural gas and a paltry supply of renewable energy. It’s time for the public accountability and stewardship of our energy resources and infrastructure that we will get with Proposition H.

At this pivotal moment in history we are faced with profound choices about our place in the world and our future on the planet. We can continue with the folly of national debt, oil profiteering and war or we can create a new clean energy economy, a fearless new ‘new deal’ that builds the next great public works projects, employs the next generation of workers, and ensures peace and stability in the 21st century. With Proposition H, San Francisco will be ready to work with the next President and the federal government to lead the clean energy revolution and build the renewable energy infrastructure that we need to sustain life on earth.

The Chron’s supervisors

-
3

By Tim Remond

Interesting endorsements from the Chron.. I’m not surprised they gave Ross Mirkarimi the nod in D5; he has no real competition, and has done a great job in office from almost any perspective. But the nice words

he’s shown an ability to find common ground on many issues – and has pushed the mayor for more police foot patrols, authored a crackdown on rogue pot clubs and led efforts to ban plastic bags.

fit in with the Chron’s obvious bias in this election. Although Mirkarimi can push the political edge as well as anyone on the board (jeez, did the Chron even support the plastic-bag ban?), the daily paper lauds him for “an ability to find common ground.”

That seems to be why the Chron, which is typically in lock step with downtown’s agenda on local issues, chose Mark Sanchez, another Green, in D9. Sanchez, the paper says, has

proved to be a reasonable consensus builder as president of the Board of Education, and he’s promised to make civility and compromise a priority as supervisor.

I think civility is the word he used with us, and it’s a fine one (actually, I think all three of the D9 progressives can claim they’ll bring civility to the board). But what the Chron wants is “compromise,” which is a buzz word for getting along with, and not defying, the mayor.

It’s not exactly what I think of when I think of Sanchez, who as a progressive on the school board fought bitterly with Arlene Ackerman when she was school superintendent. And in fact, I just called Sanchez and he told me that “I didn’t use the word compromise.” But he did point out that he has a good relationship with the mayor on education issues, and that glimmer of hope was apparently enough for the Chron.

In D 11, the endorsement of Ahsha Safai comes as no surprise, but it’s a bit warped. The district, the Chron says,

needs an active leader who can work with other supervisors and City Hall figures.

(Who do you suppose those “other City Hall figures might be?)

The problem is that Safai has no real political experience and isn’t going to get along at all with the progressives on the board. He won’t even talk to us.

And in D3, Denise McCarthy gets the nod because

In facing a worsening city budget, she’s willing to consider the tough options of budget cuts and layoffs. Though her policy position put her on the left of the spectrum, she is open to other viewpoints and groups in this fractious corner of the city.

You see a pattern here?

The Chron wants people who will avoid fights and all play nicely with Newsom. That’s not what the legislative branch of government is supposed to do, particularly with a mayor who is so focused on running for governor that he isn’t spending much time running the city.

I’m not sure Sanchez is really going to be as willing to compromise as Chron seem to think… but then, I’m not sure the Chron endorsement means that much in D9.

Competing political narratives in SF

-
0

sfpic.jpg

By Steven T. Jones

San Francisco looks very different depending on where you stand. And that point is certainly being driven home this election season as voters hear two very different political narratives about The City.

One expresses great pride that San Francisco is setting an example for cities across the country in strongly opposing excessive militarism; mandating that workers receive a living wage and decent benefits; protecting tenants from eviction, harassment, and unaffordable rents; maintaining a social safety net; demanding developers provide community benefits; seeking clean energy sources; creating a tax structure that favors small local businesses over large corporations; standing up for the rights of the LGBT and immigrant communities; treating prostitution, drug use, and quality-of-life crimes as social problems rather than strictly criminal matters; and generally standing up for the broad public interest against the self-interest of the wealthy and privileged.

The other side mocks such namby-pamby ideals, arguing that only free markets unfettered by government regulation can create social and economic progress, and that anyone who doubts that is either stupid or unrealistic. They decry taxes (but expect taxpayer support for things like promoting tourism, sweeping streets of trash and the homeless, and subsidizing drivers and development) and consider government a bloated, malevolent entity that is far less trustworthy than corporations. Job creation is their top stated concern (but public sector jobs don’t count). They value unwavering patriotism, property rights, and robust, risk-taking capitalism and generally consider the poor and their sympathizers to be lazy, morally deficient complainers who deserve their lowly status. And they think progressives (actually, “ultra-liberal” is their preferred label) are destroying the city.

Which narrative rings true to you? Because where you stand will largely determine how you vote on Tuesday.

Backroom brokers

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s not the invisible hand of Adam Smith tossing hate mail on your doorstep this fall like ugly confetti. It isn’t a distinct and independent group of candidates and civic organizations that just happen to be saying the same things, either. There is a carefully orchestrated campaign going on to undermine the progressive agenda, block affordable housing and clean energy, and give Mayor Gavin Newsom a majority on the Board of Supervisors.

It’s well funded; it’s serious; it’s based on lies — and it’s a threat to rent control, sustainable environmental policies, universal health care, the city’s living wage law, and the rest of the accomplishments and goals of the progressive majority on the board.

If that sounds overblown, listen to what the organizers of this campaign are saying themselves.

On Aug. 15, after progressives took control of the Democratic County Central Committee and installed Sup. Aaron Peskin as chair, John Keogan, the head of a year-old organization called the San Francisco Coalition for Responsible Growth, a pro-downtown group founded to counter the progressive movement, announced his intentions in a letter to allies.

"CRG are [sic] preparing for an all-out attack with other like-minded groups and now is our time to stand-up [sic] and be counted," Keogan wrote. He asked members to support "taking SF on a sharp turn to the right."

Those "other like-minded groups," according to campaign finance reports, are a Who’s Who list of downtown-based organizations that have consistently fought to roll back tenant protections and slash government spending on social services: the Building Owners and Managers Association, the Committee on Jobs, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the Association of Realtors, the Chamber of Commerce, Plan C, and the Police Officers Association.

By law, political candidates can only raise and spend limited amounts of money. But organizations like BOMA, the Realtors, and Plan C can put as much cash as they want into supporting and opposing candidates — as long as the efforts are "independent."

But the orchestration of the attacks on supervisorial candidates Eric Mar, John Avalos, and David Chiu, and the support for their conservative rivals, Sue Lee, Ahsha Safai, and Joe Alioto, is so sophisticated it’s impossible to believe that these groups and candidates aren’t working together.

Between Sept. 9 and Oct. 20, public records show, the groups spent a combined $363,754 ($178,177 in District 1, $104,308 in D3, and $81,269 in D11) on independent expenditures attacking Avalos, Mar, and Chiu and supporting their opponents. They also spent $20,000 supporting Eva Royale in her long shot race for the solidly progressive District 9 seat.

The landlords and downtown aren’t the only ones organizing. All that spending, and the threat of even more to come considering the hundreds of thousands of dollars these downtown groups still have in the bank, has served to unite tenant and labor groups in ways unseen in previous San Francisco elections.

"There’s an unprecedented coalition between tenants and labor," labor activist Robert Haaland told us. "We’re working together to defeat the landlord candidates, who are also anti-labor."

"We have a tremendous fear that the spending and progress on health care and social services will be rolled back," Tim Paulson, president of the San Francisco Labor Council, told us. "Anything less than our candidates [being elected in each of the three swing districts] will pose a real danger to the movement."

NEWSOM’S SLATE


One of the central players in this attempt to take the city away from the progressives and hand it over to downtown is Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is actively supporting Alioto, Lee, and Safai.

Eric Jaye, the mayor’s chief political advisor, has no formal role in the three district campaigns, but Newsom rarely makes a move in local politics without consulting Jaye. In fact, when reporters call the mayor’s press office to ask for comments on local candidates and initiatives, they are typically referred to the private consultant.

Jaye told us he’s talked to all of Newsom’s candidates. "I told them to run on district issues," he said.

The mayor and the latest member of the Alioto clan to seek office (Joe’s sister, Michela, is already on the board) have walked precincts together. And Newsom is so involved with the downtown effort he’s skipping a major Democratic Party gala (where he was slated to get an award) to spend time instead with the Republican-led Coalition for Responsible Growth (CRG).

Jaye’s main job this fall is running the PG&E campaign against the Clean Energy Act, Proposition H. So far PG&E has spent more than $10 million on the effort, and that number will grow in the final week before the election. Part of that same campaign has been propping up Newsom ally Carmen Chu, who has benefited from thousands of dollars of PG&E spending on her race. Chu’s face is all over PG&E’s No on H fliers.

Another central operator is Alex Tourk, the former Newsom aide who resigned after learning that the mayor had been sexually involved with Tourk’s wife. Tourk is now running the CRG operation.

"They brought me on board to do a volunteer campaign that, yes, they funded, but which seeks to inform voters in a non-partisan fashion where the candidates in D1, 3, and 11 stand on key issues," he said.

That campaign’s goal was to get 10,000 people to mobilize — he called them, using a term popularized by Richard Nixon, the "silent majority."

Tourk maintains that door-hangers the group has been distributing don’t endorse any candidates or push any initiatives. But the messages fit exactly with the overall downtown strategy — they seek to discredit the progressives by linking them with controversial ballot measures such as Proposition V, which would urge the School Board to save the military recruitment program, JROTC.

The supervisors have nothing to do with JROTC, but downtown and the Republican Party are using it as a wedge issue.

CRG is facing some political heat of its own: SF Weekly reported in its Oct. 22 issue that CRG’s recently elected president, engineer Rodrigo Santos, accepted money for professional work from someone who had business before the Building Inspection Commission while he served as commission president. Santos is a Republican, like several key Newsom appointees.

Making matters worse are revelations that Mel Murphy, vice president of the inspection commission and a CRG member, distributed invites in City Hall to an Oct. 17 CRG fundraiser for Safai and Alioto. City officials aren’t supposed to do political work at City Hall.

Alioto’s filings show that on Oct. 17, he received $500 from the firm of Santos and Urrutia’s structural engineer Kelton Finney and $250 from S&U engineer Calvin Hom.

PG&E’S FAKE DEMOCRATIC CLUBS


Political consultants Tom Hsieh Jr. and Jim Ross are involved in the District 1 race (Hsieh also responded to the Guardian on Safai’s behalf) — and are using PG&E and downtown money to support Sue Lee.

Beyond Chron reported Oct. 27 that Hsieh has been sending robocalls in Cantonese to voters saying that Lee is endorsed by the "San Francisco Democratic Party Club." Actually, the Democratic Party endorsed Mar.

What is this new "party club" anyway? Well, the Web site reported, the club started raising money just two weeks ago, and already has collected $30,000 from PG&E, $2,000 from the Chamber of Commerce, $5,000 from GGRA (Golden Gate Restaurant Association), and $70,000 from the Committee on Jobs. Another new club, called the Richmond Reform Democratic Club, is opposing Mar — and has $18,000 from the Committee on Jobs, $5,000 from PG&E, and $2,000 from BOMA.

In television ads paid for by the Realtors, a voiceover tries to link Mar, Avalos, and Chiu to Sup. Chris Daly, whose popularity outside his district is low — although neither Mar nor Chiu has much of a discernable connection to Daly. Avalos was a Daly City Hall aide.

One of the Realtors ads was so utterly inaccurate and deceptive — it claimed Chiu and Avalos support decriminalizing prostitution, when both have publicly opposed the decriminalization ballot measure — that Comcast pulled the ad off the air when Chiu filed a complaint.

Fog City Journal uncovered what appears to be illegal collusion between the police union and Safai. Although candidates are barred from coordinating with groups making independent expenditures on their behalf, POA president Gary Delagnes told FCJ editor Luke Thomas that Safai had given the group a photo of him to use on a mailer, a copyrighted image that Thomas took. Safai denied wrongdoing, but refused to answer further inquiries about the matter.

It’s a pitched battle — labor, the tenants, and the Democratic Party against the landlords, PG&E, downtown interests, and the Republicans. It’s pretty clear which side you want to be on.

Steven T. Jones, Sarah Phelan, and Amanda Witherell contributed to this report.

The stealth candidate

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

Ahsha Safai is hoping to be elected to the Board of Supervisors without answering questions about his padded political resume of short-lived patronage jobs, greatly exaggerated claims of his accomplishments, history as a predatory real estate speculator, connections to and coordination with downtown power brokers, shifting and contradictory policy positions, or the many other distortions this political neophyte is offering up to voters in District 11, a crucial swing district that could decide the balance of power in city government.

Safai has refused numerous requests for interviews with the Guardian over the last two months. We’ve even left messages with specific concerns about his record and positions. But our investigation reveals his close political ties to the downtown interest groups that have spent close to $100,000 on his behalf and shows him to be a shameless opportunist who is apparently willing to say anything to achieve power.

There’s much we don’t know about Ahsha Safai, but there’s enough we do know for a consistent yet troubling portrait to emerge.

Safai moved to San Francisco from Washington, DC with his lawyer wife in 2000, and immediately began to ingratiate himself into the mainstream Democratic Party power structure, starting as a legislative liaison with the corruption-plagued San Francisco Housing Authority and joining Gavin Newsom’s mayoral campaign in 2003.

Safai became a protégé of Newsom’s field director Alex Tourk, who was a top Newsom strategist for several years until he abruptly resigned after learning that Newsom had an affair with his wife. With support from Tourk (who didn’t respond to our calls about Safai) and Newsom, Safai held a string of city jobs over the next three years, moving from the Mayor’s Office of Community Development to the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services to the Department of Public Works, all of which he touts on his Web ite, greatly exaggerating (and in some cases, outright misrepresenting) his accomplishments in each, according to those who worked with him. (Few sources who worked with Safai would speak on the record, fearing repercussions from Newsom).

THE CONNECT DISASTER


One project Safai doesn’t mention on his Web site is his work spearheading Community Connect, the most disastrous of Newsom’s SF Connect programs. "It’s the one Connect that the mayor will never talk about," said Quentin Mecke, who participated in the effort, on behalf of nonprofit groups, to create a community policing system. "The whole thing just devolved into chaos and there weren’t any more meetings."

In 2005, Safai and Tourk convened meetings in each of the city’s police precincts to take testimony on rising violence and the failure of the San Francisco Police Department to deal with it. Ultimately Newsom decided to reject a community-policing plan developed through the process by the African-American Police Community Relations Board. That set up the Board of Supervisors to successfully override a mayoral veto of police foot patrols.

"Ahsha’s approach was consistent with the Newsom administration, with folks that talk a good game but there’s no substance behind it," said Mecke, who ran for mayor last year, placing second.

Another realm in which Safai has claimed undeserved credit is on his efforts to save St. Luke’s Hospital from attempts by the California Pacific Medical Center (and CPMC’s parent company, Sutter Health) to close it or scale back its role as an acute care provider for low income San Franciscans.

"When I looked at his campaign material and he says he was a leader who saved St. Luke’s, I thought, ‘Am I missing something here?," Roma Guy, a 12-year member of the city’s Health Commission and leader in the effort to save St. Luke’s, told the Guardian. "Nobody thinks Ahsha has taken a leadership role on this. This is a significant exaggeration from where I sit."

Nato Green, who represents nurses at St. Luke’s within the California Nurses Association, went even further than Guy, saying he was worried about Safai’s late arrival to the issue (Safai wasn’t part of the group that protested, organized, and urged CPMC to agree to rebuild the hospital) and the fact that CPMC appointed Safai to its Community Outreach Task Force as the representative from Distrist 11.

"From our point of view, he is the CPMC’s AstroTurf program, simuutf8g community participation," Green told us. "It’s critical to us that we end up with a supervisor who is independent of CPMC and will go to the mat for what the community needs."

CNA has endorsed Avalos in the District 11 race.

"John was the only candidate in District 11 who came out and spoke at the hearings, attended the vigils, and walked the picket line during the strikes," Green said.


REAL ESTATE SPECULATION


Beyond his association with downtown power brokers and endorsement by Newsom, there are other indicators that Safai is hostile to progressive values. He said in a recent televised forum that he would work most closely with supervisors Carmen Chu, Sean Elsbernd, and Michela Alioto-Pier, the three most conservative members of the Board of Supervisors.

During an Oct. 14 Avalos fundraiser hosted by sustainable transportation advocates Dave Snyder, Tom Radulovich, and Leah Shahum, attendees expressed frustration at Safai’s tendency to pander to groups like the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, taking whatever position he thinks they want to hear without considering their implications or consistency with his other stands.

"It was a no-brainer for the Bike Coalition to endorse John," Shahum, SFBC’s executive director, said at the event, noting Avalos’ long history of support for alternatives to the automobile.

Avalos, who had been hammered all week by mailers and robocalls from downtown groups supporting Safai, said he was frustrated by the barrage but that "we can fight the money with people.

"Ahsha has done everything he can to blur the lines about what he stands for," Avalos said. "Whoever he’s talking to, that’s who he’s going to be. But we need principled leadership in San Francisco."

One area where Safai doesn’t appear to be proud of his work is in real estate, opting to be identified on voting materials as a "nonprofit education advisor." One of his opponents, Julio Ramos, formally challenged the designation, writing to the Election Department that the label "would mislead voters and is not factually accurate, the term ‘businessman’ or ‘investor’ denotes the true livelihood of candidate Safai."

Safai responded by defending the title and writing, "My dates of employment at Mission Language Vocational School were from August 2007 through February 2008." So, because of his seven-month stint at this nonprofit, voters will see Safai as someone who works in education, even though his financial disclosure forms show that most of his six-figure income comes from Blankshore LLC, a Los Altos-based developer currently building a large condo project at 2189 Bayshore Blvd. that is worth more than $1 million. (That’s the top value bracket listed on the form, so we don’t know how many millions the project is actually worth or how much more than $100,000 Safai earned this year).

But we do know from city records that Safai has personally bought at least three properties during his short stint in San Francisco, including one at 78 Latona Street that he flipped for a huge profit after buying it from a woman facing foreclosure, who then sued Safai for fraud.

The woman, Mary McDowell, alleged in court documents that real estate broker Harold Smith, "unsolicited, came to plaintiff’s residence and offered assistance to her because her homes were in foreclosure … [and said] she would receive sufficient money after sales commissions to reinstate the loans on the four other properties."

The legal complaint said Smith then modified those terms to pay McDowell less than promised and arranged to sell the home to Safai and his brother, Reza. "Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereon alleges that defendants did not promptly list her residence on the multiple listing service to avoid larger offers on the home and conspired with the other defendants to purchase the home at a far less than market price," reads the complaint.

The case was originally set for jury trial, indicating it had some merit. But after numerous pleadings and procedural actions that resulted in the plaintiff’s attorney being sanctioned for failing to meet certain court deadlines and demands, the case was dismissed.
But whatever the merit to the case, records on file with the county assessor and recorder show that Safai and his brother flipped the property for a tidy profit. They paid $365,500 for the place in December 2003 — and sold it two year later, in December 2005, for $800,000.
Labor activist Robert Haaland told us that Safai can’t be trusted to support rent control or the rights of workers or tenants: "At the end of the day, he’s a real estate speculator."

A PG&E VP at the door

-
0

Steven Hill, director of the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation (www.newamerica.net) and author of “10 Steps to Repair American Democracy” (www.10Steps.net), sent this over. It’s a fascinating story that shows how PG&E is not only slinging mud but refusing to debate the real issues of Prop. H.

The political mudslide threatening to drown us all

by Steven Hill

You know you are in the height of the political season when you start receiving activists knocking on your door for political campaigns. But I was taken aback recently when the activist at my door was a vice president for Pacific Gas and Electric.

He, of course, wanted to talk about Proposition H, the San Francisco ballot measure known as the “Clean Energy Act” for which PG&E is the main opponent. Before I provide details on that conversation, let me step back for a moment and get something off my chest.

I don’t know about you, but in watching the presidential campaigns wage their mudslinging hack-attacks against each other, it’s clear to me that such “win at all costs” tactics not only degrade the electoral process, but those who participate in and are forced to witness it. From the McCain campaign and their supporters we have heard that Obama is a pal of terrorists, a supporter of infanticide, and a tax-and-spend liberal, with subtle allusions to his race.

From the Obama side we have heard that McCain is too old, too crotchety and too out of touch with Main Street. Both sides feel that their characterizations are fair and accurate — or at least close enough to sling the mud.

But from the voter’s perspective, it’s hard to watch. Instead of finding out what’s good about each candidate, and what stirring vision they have for these difficult times, we are finding out the worst about them. And then, following the election, the tainted winner is supposed to rally the country behind him, even though half the country now detests him.

Something is very wrong with this picture. Sure, we can rationalize it, say that this kind of mudslinging has long been part of American politics. But perhaps that’s partly why the public is so cynical about politicians, and so anti-government. That attitude has contributed to Republicans’ relentless bashing of government, which became the basis for massive deregulation of all stripes, including the financial, banking and home mortgage industries. “Get government out of the way,” was their rallying cry.

So this mudslinging and distorting of facts and information is not harmless or innocent. Those who practice it know exactly what they are doing.

Which brings me back to my curious door-knocker, the vice president for PG&E. I politely greeted him, and he launched into a tirade against Prop H. If passed, he said, this clean energy legislation would “take away my right to vote” (his exact words), raise electricity rates and force San Francisco to buy PG&E’s system (which oddly he implied was antiquated and not worth the money). And besides that, “it’s a power grab by the Board of Supervisors.”

Whew. I had just been doing my own research on Proposition H and other ballot measures to figure out how I would vote. So I knew he was tearing a page out of the Karl Rove campaign handbook. Unlike with the presidential campaigns, however, which happens far away like we are spectators in the 42nd row, here was one of the “candidates” right at my doorstep. PG&E had been spending barrels full of money, over $5 million, to defeat this measure. This was my chance, I figured, to have a real dialogue.

“The proponents of this measure dispute your claims,” I told him. “They say Proposition H will make the City study all possible ways to get to 100% clean energy, and then create a plan to make it happen. PG&E’s system can be part of this plan if you figure out how to deliver low-cost, clean energy. They also say that any bonds issued would have to be approved by the City Controller and the Public Utilities Commission, who are all appointed by the mayor. The Board of Supervisors can’t do anything by itself. What’s your response to that?”

His response was the Sarah Palin “deer in the headlights” look. I don’t think he had been knocking on too many doors of people who had done some homework. Isn’t that what the mudslingers always rely upon?

I was ready to engage and discuss. But instead he said, “I have to go.” And that’s what he did.

In this political season, I urge all voters to do your research, and don’t automatically believe the candidates or their proxies. With the country facing deep economic challenges, too much is at stake to take the word of the sharks at your door or on your TV screens. And please vote Yes on Proposition H.

Action Alert: Public Access in Peril

-
0

We’ve been saying for a while now that statewide cable franchising agreements are problematic and now the chickens are coming home to roost. In Los Angeles, Time-Warner Cable is seizing all 14 public access channels, to be replaced by only 4 government-only channels which will leave no public access broadcasting in the nation’s 2nd largest metropolitan area. And here in San Francisco, Access SF is having to fight to retain funding the city is planning to return to the General Fund from the 5% cable franchise fees. SF residents, please put your supes on alert that stripping public access television of franchise fee funding is unacceptable.

Full disclosure

-
0

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

"If you wouldn’t tell Stalin, don’t tell anyone." This billboard message casts us back to the New Mexico desert, where a mushroom cloud’s worth of paranoia ushered in the modern era of government secrecy. Harvard professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss base their guide to this dark world on interviews with former "secureaucrats" and watchdog lawyers, journalists and scholars. But even without a voice-over, Secrecy‘s editorial threads are clear. There is the B-roll of the pilot carrying that test atomic bomb, for example, fading to black for a muffled explosion before fading back in to a Google Earth image of Manhattan, stained with the debris of the 9/11 attacks. One clandestine mission gives way to another, and a new veil of secrecy spreads with the smoke.

Even as Secrecy‘s former operatives acknowledge the massive intelligence failures leading to 9/11, they’re ready to make the case for the increased need for government subterfuge in the War on Terror: what secrecy begets, only secrecy will solve, and every time the gloves come off, the blinders will go on. Against this tide of Cold War nostalgists, the doubters hardly need sound conspiratorial with 60 years of government abuses at their fingertips. Indeed, the legal precedent for the State Secrets Privilege itself hinges on a bogus case involving a mysterious B-29 accident — 50 years later, it was finally proven that the executive branch went to the Supreme Court not to protect military secrets, but to facilitate a cover-up of Air Force negligence.

Washington Post writer Barton Gellman rightly wonders whether anyone exclusively dedicated to maintaining secrecy is in a good position to judge what they’re defending. The Bush administration, of course, sacrificed this benefit of the doubt years ago. The State Secrets Privilege cannot be invoked as a cover for criminality, but with an executive branch that reserves the right to define the terms of criminality and confidentiality away from the prying eyes of Congress and the judiciary, there’s not much of a chance for checks, let alone balances. As Navy officer and Guantánamo lawyer Charles Swift puts it, "If I can execute you and don’t have to tell anyone why, what’s left?"

The NSA/CIA reps’ telescopic counterargument — that leaks disrupt the gathering of intelligence — hardly justifies these Constitutional affronts, but Galison and Moss still give the press too much of a free ride in Secrecy. Shit slides both ways in this Foucaultian tug of knowledge and power. Those Ari Fleischer press conference replays are only the tip of the iceberg of a culture of credulity and outright fabrication.

There are deeper problems still with Secrecy, starting with the lack of interviews with Pynchonian Web crawlers at the vanguard of the information liberation movement. The filmmakers refer to the paradoxical expansion of access and restriction with a few snippets of local maverick artist-muckraker Trevor Paglen’s work and a Google Earth shot of Guantánamo Bay, blacked out just like the sensitive documents of old, but one wants more on the subject. Perhaps more to the point, Moss and Galison do not always come up with satisfying solutions to the problem of how to visually represent a subject that is, by definition, obscure. The filler animations, X-Files-style soundtrack and surrealist cutaways to flurries of redacted documents in Secrecy are cold leftovers of the Errol Morris school of documentary.

If I’m being hard on Moss and Galison, it’s only because so much of the raw interview material is compelling on its own. The information-crusaders, in particular, are natural documentary heroes. Their quest for transparency dovetails perfectly with the moral imperative and epistemological pleasure of the best documentaries. See Secrecy for them — make it a double-feature with Burn After Reading, and you’ve got a swell kiss-off to the worst intelligence money can buy. *

SECRECY

Oct 24–30, check Web site for times, $11

Opera Plaza, Van Ness at Golden Gate, SF

www.sffs.org

Anniversary Issue: The money at home

-
0

"You need to shrink the distance between the people who visit the private economy and the people who run it."

David Morris. Institute for Local Self-Reliance


› tredmond@sfbg.com

Back in the early 1980s, when the word "sustainable" was barely a blip in the environmental vocabulary, the mayor of Saint Paul, Minn. brought in a consultant named David Morris to help him figure out how to revive the city’s economy.

Saint Paul was facing the same challenges as many other northern cities — old industry was dying, the downtown was decaying, and population was declining as more affluent residents moved to the suburbs. Mayor George Latimer didn’t want to do what some of the other cities were doing and beg companies to move into town: he wanted to see what could be done with the resources the city already had.

Morris, who now runs the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, started by contacting the US Patent Office and getting a list of everyone in Saint Paul with a recent patent. He eliminated corporations and universities and wound up with a list of a few hundred people — inventors, thinkers, folks who had come up with something new. About two dozen had created gizmos or technologies that solved a real problem. Most of the stuff was sitting in basements and in old notebooks.

"Latimer called them all together," Morris recalled, "and he said, ‘We believe in you, and we’re going to help you start a business and market your invention.’" The mayor helped the would-be entrepreneurs find the capital and support they could never have gotten by themselves from a private sector not terribly interested in small business start-up loans. He encouraged them to open companies and market their products. The results were remarkable — lots of new locally-owned companies, creation of good jobs, and the beginning of a revitalization plan that made Latimer a national figure.

That principle — look locally and use the resources you have — remains the heart of a sustainable local economy.

"A sustainable place can feed, power, and house its citizens with local resources," explained Michelle Long, executive director of Bellingham, Wash.-based Sustainable Connections. "You need to generate new innovations with local innovators."

The late urban thinker Jane Jacobs made that notion a centerpiece of her life’s work. Starting with The Economy of Cities in 1969 and later in Cities and the Wealth of Nations in 1964, Jacobs argued that urban economies are like ecosystems — they are healthiest when they are diverse, with many different niches, and they thrive when energy cycles through the system. The cities throughout history that have done best have been those that figured out how to replace imports with locally produced goods and services.

It’s not that complicated, really. A sustainable local economy, like a sustainable ecosystem, needs lots of players, needs the energy of the system — money — to stick around through numerous economic cycles, and needs to use local resources to grow.

An economy that doesn’t depend too heavily on any one sector will not only do better in good times but will be much hardier. As farmers know, a monocrop system not only needs far more sustenance (fertilizers, irrigation, etc.) but is far more vulnerable to catastrophic failure. Diverse local economies, with thousands of small businesses offering a wide range of goods and services, can survive bad times better than communities that depend on just a few big industries.

As the Guardian has shown through a series of studies we did years ago ("The end of the high-rise jobs myth," 10/23/85) — and which research done since then has proved — small, locally-owned businesses create the majority of new jobs in San Francisco. And money spent in small businesses circulates in the local economy; the proprietor of the local hardware store takes his or her revenue and spends it on shoes for the kids. The shoe store owner takes that money and buys groceries at the local market. Every dollar goes around several times; and each time, it adds economic benefit — what economists call the multiplier effect.

A dollar spent in a chain store leaves town within hours, wired to a central corporate headquarters where executives care nothing about San Francisco — save as a place to extract wealth from.

Jacobs was brilliant, but she had her libertarian leanings. She often argued that it was best for government to get out of the way and let economies grow organically. That may have made sense to someone who came of age fighting the old-fashioned redevelopment programs and top-down urban planning of the 1960s and ’70s. But the modern urban economy not only needs help from policymakers, but clear direction — particularly in unsettled times like these. As William Greider wrote in The Nation Oct. 20, "only government has the leverage to get the money moving again."

In fact, modern progressive economic thinkers say that the public sector has a huge, perhaps defining role to play in building a sustainable local economy.

"The city needs to emphasize the public over the private," Morris told me. A sustainable economy, he said, is "a society where the public commons grows and the private shrinks." Taking public programs and services and turning them over to private business — which is all the rage in the Mayor’s Office these days — is about the worst thing a community can do.

So what could City Hall do to create a more sustainable local economy? Start, Morris says, by reducing the need for money. "The things that are most valuable in a sustainable economy are those that are free," he said. That means keeping libraries open, making more public space accessible, offering free public events — and encouraging people to reuse even the basics. "There’s no need for most people to buy new clothes, especially for kids. Sustainability starts with people substituting free things for costly things."

That could mean, for example, city-run clothing exchanges (and toy exchanges and places where used construction materials could be traded). It also means leadership by example: Mayor Gavin Newsom isn’t as big on conspicuous consumption as his predecessor, Willie Brown, who bought new imported Italian suits by the rack. But he’s hardly been known for promoting a low-consumption lifestyle. "The mayor could announce, for example, that he is going to reduce his consumption of imported goods by 75 percent in the next year," Morris suggested, "and show everyone how he’s going to do it."

Then there’s distance — both physical and psychological. Obviously, reducing commutes and the need for long-distance shopping trips is a factor, but it’s not enough. "You need to shrink the distance between the people who visit the private economy and the people who run it," he said. The owners of businesses need to live in the community. They need to interact with their customers and neighbors, to see the local schools where their tax dollars go.

In Bellingham, Long’s group worked with local government on a large-scale marketing campaign with the slogan "think local, buy local, be local." Their effort involved an advertising campaign, a coupon book, and even a mascot. "We have a bee who goes around to events; it’s the Be-local Bee," she said. It’s more than just shopping; it’s about thinking about your community first.

The impact: more than 60 percent of Bellingham residents in a recent poll reported that they now think about finding local sources for their goods and services.


One key to all this, Doug Hammond, executive director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, told us, is access to community capital. "If that’s not available, you never get out of the gate," he said.

BALLE, a seven-year old organization with headquarters in San Francisco, works with 20,000 members to promote small, locally-owned businesses and initiatives to sustain healthy economies — and healthy communities.

Community capital means "financing to support innovation," Long said, "from people who are willing to look at what we call living returns — something that works for the lender and for the borrower."

There are, Hammond notes, "almost no resources for locally-owned, independent businesses. It’s a disproportionately-tilted playing field."

Hammond, who took over as BALLE’s director this month, was startled to learn that San Francisco puts all its money — its payroll accounts, tax accounts, and so forth — in North Carolina-based Bank of America. That’s not a local bank. It’s not an institution that supports local businesses, and the money it makes doesn’t circulate in San Francisco.

Cities that want sustainable economies, he said, need "locally-owned common-good banks" that will invest in small loans to local businesses — and be willing to accept fair, but not excessive, returns. "If the city was willing to put some of its working money into that kind of a business, it would be a huge start," he told us. "That kind of thing is the low-hanging fruit."

The mayor has spent a lot of money on staff and programs that promote his image as environmentally conscious. But what he really needs, Hammond said, is a "local-first czar," someone at City Hall who has the mandate — and the authority — to promote a sustainable economy.

"There has to be a baseline for local procurement," he said. "How much of the city’s resources go back into the local community? What are the ways to make those resources community controlled again?"

San Francisco is a peninsula, but it isn’t an island. The city can’t operate entirely independent of the rest of the world. But at a time when global capital is in crisis, and fossil fuel use is threatening ecological catastrophe, and few people in Washington or Sacramento are offering true progressive solutions, San Francisco should be leading the way toward a model for a locally sustainable economy.

It’s not impossible. It’s not even that hard. It just takes political will.
*

Anniversary Issue: Culture isn’t convenient

-
0

› molly@sfbg.com

San Francisco is the playpen of countercultures.

— R.Z. Sheppard, Time (1986)

I live near Church and Market streets, which means I’m stumbling distance from an organic grocery store, my favorite bar, several Muni stops, and a 24-hour diner. It also means the street outside my apartment is usually loud, the gutters are disgusting, there are rarely parking spots, and transients sleep, smoke, panhandle, and play really bad music near my front doorstep.

Actually, until recently, they did a lot of this on my front doorstep. Then the landlords — without asking us first — installed a gate. And I hate it. Yes, my stairs are cleaner. I suppose my stuff is safer. But I’m no longer as connected to my community. I’m separated from the life that’s happening on the street — the very reason I moved to this neighborhood in the first place. I fear I’ve lost more than I’ve gained.

Lately our city’s approach to entertainment and nightlife has been like that fence. While protecting people from noise, mess, and potential safety concerns, we’re threatening the very things we love about this city. Thanks to dwindling city budgets and increasingly vocal NIMBYs, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to manage nightclubs, plan street fairs, and organize outdoor festivals. And as we continue to build million-dollar condos at a brisk place, the city is filling up with affluent residents who may not appreciate the inherent messiness of city living. We’re at risk of locking away (and therefore losing) the events that make this a vibrant place where we want to live.

The recent history of this issue can be traced to the 1990s, when dot-com gold brought live/work lofts to otherwise non-residential neighborhoods — and plenty of new residents to live in them. Those newcomers, perhaps used to the peace and quiet of the suburbs, or maybe expecting more comfort in exchange for their exorbitant monthly rent checks, didn’t want to hear the End Up’s late-night set or deal with riffraff from Folsom Street Fair peeing in their driveways. Conflicts escalated. The Police Department station in SoMa, responsible for issuing venue permits and for enforcing their conditions, embarked on a plan to shut down half the area’s nightclubs. Luckily, city government and citizens agreed to save the threatened venues and the police captain responsible for the proposal was transferred to the airport, the San Francisco equivalent of political exile. In 2003, the Entertainment Commission was formed, in part to take over the role of granting venue and event permits.

But as Guardian readers know, the problem was not solved. As we’ve covered in several stories ["The death of fun" (05/23/06), "Death of fun, the sequel," (04/25/07), "Fighting for the right to party" (07/02/08)], beloved events and venues are still at risk. How Weird Street Fair was forced to change locations. Halloween in the Castro District was cancelled altogether. Alcohol was banned at the Haight Ashbury Street Fair and restricted at the North Beach Jazz Festival. Fees are still increasing. Rules are getting more stringent. As we predicted, it’s getting harder and harder to have fun in San Francisco. And while it’s the job of the Entertainment Commission to prevent problems while protecting our right to party, it has never been given enough funding, staff or authority to properly do its job.

So why should we care? Our legendary nightlife, festivals, and parades bring international tourists to our city — where they stay in hotels, eat at restaurants, shop at stores, and otherwise pump money into our economy. Street fairs give us ways to connect to our neighbors and our neighborhoods. Free events (which, if permit fees increase and alcohol sales are prohibited, will be a thing of the past) give equal access to fun and frivolity to people in all income brackets — and most raise money for charities and nonprofits. Particular venues and happenings provide an important way for those in the counterculture — whether that’s LGBT youth or progressive artists — to meet, mingle, and support each other. And none of that captures the intangible quality of living in a city where freedom, tolerance, and the pursuit of a good time are supported. And all this is one of the reasons many of us moved here, where we pay taxes (and parking tickets), open businesses, start organizations, and contribute to our already diverse and vibrant population.

But if we don’t establish a way to protect our culture, personally and legally, we may lose it. Instead, we need an overarching policy that establishes our values as well as the legal ways we can go about supporting them. The Music and Culture Charter Amendment, in the works for more than three years and currently sitting before the Board of Supervisors, aims to do exactly this.

The most important part of the amendment, created by a coalition of artists, musicians, event planners, club owners, and concerned citizens who call themselves Save SF Culture, would be to revise San Francisco’s General Plan to include an entertainment and nightlife element, just as the current plan contains an entire section devoted to the protection of (presumably mainstream) dance, theater, music, and art, calling them "central to the essence and character of the city." Not only would this amendment mandate that future lawmakers try to preserve events and venues, it would give a roadmap on how to do this effectively — most notably by creating a streamlined, transparent, online permitting process for special events.

Yet even if this important amendment passes and wins the mayor’s signature (which is hardly a sure thing), that’s just the beginning of a process of figuring out how to sustain San Francisco’s culture in the face of potentially threatening socioeconomic changes. At the very least, the next step will be giving the Entertainment Commission the full funding and staff (it currently operates with five of the eight staffers required). And once our beloved clubs and events are out of immediate danger, it will be time to form a coalition of citizens, government officials, and city planners to decide how and where culture in our city should grow, asking questions like whether or not we want a large-scale amphitheater or if we need to designate an area as an entertainment district. Most important, the city needs to develop a framework for resolving the inevitable conflicts with NIMBYs in a way that promotes a vibrant culture.

Yet there’s also a role in this process for each citizen of San Francisco. We need to remind ourselves and our neighbors that tolerance is one of our core civic values, tolerance for different races, classes, genders, sexual identities, and for the potentially noisy, messy, chaotic ways our culture supports those differences. If we erect a gate — physical or metaphorical — every time we’re uncomfortable or inconvenienced, we’ll turn San Francisco into the sanitized, homogenous, boring suburbs that I moved to Church and Market to escape. *

Anniversary Issue: People’s power

-
0

> amanda@sfbg.com

Living in a city like San Francisco, it’s pretty easy to advance your personal environmental prerogative. You can walk, ride your bike, or take public transportation almost anywhere you want to go. You can spurn the dominant consumer consciousness and buy used clothes and household goods at thrift stores. You can take short showers and drink clean Hetch Hetchy tap water instead of the bottled stuff. You can pick organic cornflakes over Kellogg’s version. You can even go to a worker-owned co-op that sells mostly organic goods and buy produce from Bay Area growers at the farmers markets.

But when it comes to energy, you’re stuck.

You’re stuck with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. You’re stuck buying electricity that’s 89 percent environmentally unsound, from a company that can’t even meet the modest state requirement of 20 percent renewable by 2010.

The $12 billion utility company offers absolutely no way for consumers to purchase 100 percent green energy, although some of its counterparts, including publicly owned Sacramento Municipal Utility District and Silicon Valley Power, make that option available.

Sure, you can use less electricity by screwing compact fluorescent light bulbs into your lamps, unplugging your cell phone charger when you leave the house, and hanging your clothes on the line to dry. But you can’t look at the diesel and gas-fired Potrero Hill power plant and say, "Nope, I’m getting my power elsewhere."

What if you could? What if you could hike to the top of Bernal Hill or Mount Sutro and look out across the skyline of San Francisco and no longer see any power plant stacks belching fumes? What if you saw solar panels shimmering on nearly every roof, and wind turbines spinning furiously in the late afternoon breeze, and you knew that your apartment didn’t depend on a distant fossil fuel plant polluting Antioch, or an aging nuclear plant menacing the people of San Luis Obispo?

That’s what a long-term financially and environmentally sustainable energy system for San Francisco would look like. The picture would include thousands of small-scale, locally-owned solar panels and wind turbines and geothermal home heating pumps and plug-in hybrid cars, distributed throughout the city, feeding into a grid that uses wireless technology to monitor and automatically adjust loads in tiny ways you don’t even notice.

It would also involve a new economic model that doesn’t require you to own a home to own solar power, and a system that uses off-the-shelf and emerging technologies to promote efficiency. The city would use its low interest bonding ability to invest in larger tidal power and wind farm infrastructure, and pay for things like burying power lines and training the next generation of city workers to run the new, smarter energy grid and maintain and install more renewable energy.

It isn’t pie in the sky, either — most of the technologies exist, the funding structures are there, and the goals are real: Al Gore has said the country could have 100 percent renewable energy in 10 years, and he’s right.

San Francisco is actually on the path to making it happen — with a November ballot measure, Proposition H, and a community choice aggregation system — if City Hall and the voters can get beyond PG&E’s lobbying and lies.

Imagine you’re a longtime tenant in a rent-controlled apartment with a landlord who hasn’t bothered to put solar panels on the roof because he or she doesn’t pay the electric bill (you do). But it doesn’t matter, because you actually own shares in a vast network of photovoltaic panels distributed all over the city, maintained and managed by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC).

You, along with the thousands of other San Franciscans who are part of this power cooperative, pay a flat rate for enough shares to meet your energy needs. Over time, as the upfront cost of the system is paid off, your rates decrease and your power bill drops so low it is barely a factor in your life. And the SFPUC helped you find ways to make your apartment more energy efficient, so that some of your wasted electricity could be freed for other people to use. That way, the city wouldn’t have to spend more public money building a new power plant. And the panels you own provide more electricity than you actually need — so you’re making a little money selling the excess to other residents.

This is the vision of what would happen under Proposition H and community choice aggregation (CCA), the city’s proposed plan for locally controlled power. "It unbundles the location of the resource from the ownership so renters can participate," said Paul Fenn, CEO of Local Power and lead author of the city’s CCA plan. That’s key for a city like San Francisco, where two-thirds of the population rents.

Right now, even though the city has some robust incentives for purchasing solar panels, buyers still need deep pockets to cover the upfront cost.

But the city can use its low-interest bonding authority to purchase panels in bulk and identify well-oriented, available roof space to install them. The roof owner could own the panels, rent the space, just buy the power, or opt out entirely. "It’s not just public power, it’s community power," Fenn said. "It’s not just owned by the government — it’s owned by the people."

SMUD — a model public power agency — offers its customers something similar, "solar shares" in an array of panels. Shares start at $10.75 for a half-kilowatt and, depending on how much energy you use, you would save between $4 and $50 per month.

California’s CCA law — Assembly Bill 117, authored by state Sen. Carole Migden and passed in 2002 — allows counties to become their own energy providers and buy or build their own power, then pipe it to residents using the existing transmission infrastructure owned by the utility company. As a CCA, the city could pursue green energy more aggressively than PG&E does, could set its own rates, and make rules about how people are compensated for their power.

For example, current metering laws allow you to be credited the extra energy your solar panels produce during times they aren’t producing. But if at the end of the year your system generates more power than you use, PG&E keeps the surplus — for free. The CCA could pay you a fair rate for it instead.

San Francisco’s current CCA plan lays out the financing and acquisition for 51 percent renewable energy by 2017.

That’s about 360 MW of energy — and the upfront costs for solar panels on homes, businesses, and city buildings, as well as a 150 MW wind farm and scores of other energy-saving measures, are financed by a $1.2 billion revenue bond. Assuming a good interest rate of about 5.5 percent and a 20-year payback, that amounts to $99 million a year for the city.

Rates would cover this and any excess revenue could lower bills or fund future renewable energy projects. And, if voters pass Prop H in November, the city will be required to provide 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. Prop. H builds on the existing CCA plan by requiring the city to look at owning its own transmission and distribution system — a program that would bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, enough to fund extensive conservation and renewable programs. How can clean, reliable, low-cost energy be right on the horizon? Simple: Public ownership and decentralized local generation.

The benefits of publicly owned, locally based energy are vast. Local distribution cuts the cost of building large transmission lines and saves a lot of energy that’s lost as heat from high voltage electricity traveling long distances. Renewable energy doesn’t use fuel, and fuel is what we’re really paying for from PG&E — which is also a natural gas company.

The city owns no fossil fuel-reliant infrastructure, but PG&E is deeply invested in natural gas, gets about 40 percent of its energy from it, and has four new gas plants under construction. "As a society, we have to decide whether we want to get on the up elevator or the down elevator," said Robert Freehling, research director for Local Power. "Over time, fuel costs more and more. We make all these investments in hardware and tend to forget that it’s a promise to spend more money later. With solar panels and wind turbines there are no risks that the cost of wind or sunlight is going to go up in five years."

Natural gas, as well as every other fossil fuel, definitely will rise in price. (PG&E recently raised rates 6 percent to reflect that.) If a carbon tax or a cap and trade law is implemented, it’ll go up even more.

"Ultimately what will happen is that fossil fuels will get more expensive and renewable energy will become more affordable," Freehling said.

Would the city do a better job of promoting energy efficiency than PG&E? Look at the record.

Between 2003 and 2005, a Peak Energy Program was undertaken as a partnership between PG&E and the SF Department of the Environment (SFE) with $16.3 million in state money. In an August 2006 report, the Office of the Legislative Analyst found that with only an eighth of the funding, SFE was responsible for more than one-fifth of the energy savings. In other words, the city used the money more efficiently than PG&E.

The major criticism of most renewable energy technologies is that they’re intermittent, meaning they can’t provide power all day and all night. The sun goes down; the wind fades. Nuclear, coal, and natural gas are always on because we need power. And though many energy experts have asserted that the grid still needs at least some base load power, this assumes we’ll never apply technology to the system in any meaningful way.

But those critics are talking about a stupid grid — and the days when energy was managed that way are over. Federal and state regulators began meeting as a smart grid task force this year.

In a smart-grid world with 100 percent renewables, intermittent resources are blended to meet the current load, and the load is tweaked in minor, unnoticeable ways to meet what the resources can provide.

Suppose, for example, that it’s mid-afternoon on a hot day and a cloud bank passes over San Francisco, causing the output from all the city’s rooftop solar panels to decrease slightly. The smart grid would instantly send a signal to 10,000 air conditioners and shut them off for 15 minutes until the cloud passes. Later that night, perhaps the output from the city’s wind farm dips from 150 MW to 100 MW — the grid would automatically turn down everyone’s refrigerator by one degree.

"It’s called capacity-balancing," Fenn said. "It’s part of how you go greener and stay cheaper."

But PG&E will never pursue real green energy because in the long run, there’s no profit in it. "That’s like trying to persuade AT&T, back in 1975, to pursue developing the Internet," Fenn said. "We’re not looking for a 20 percent improvement. We want a complete transformation." *

Skidelsky: Can Afghanistan Be Won?

-
0

Here is an installment from Robert Skidelsky’s monthly column: Can Afghanistan Be Won? from the Project Syndicate news series. Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University, author of a prize-winning biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes, and a board member of the Moscow School of Political Studies.

Kipling’s Wisdom

by Robert Skidelsky

– Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University, author of a prize- winning biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes, and a board member of the Moscow School of Political Studies.

LONDON – The beginning of October marked the seventh anniversary of the beginning of the American-led bombardment of Afghanistan. Seven years later, the Taliban are still fighting. Some 50 insurgents died recently in an assault on Lashkar gar, the capital of Helmand province. Osama bin Laden is nowhere to be found. Has the time come for NATO to declare victory and leave?

Recently, a French diplomatic cable relating a conversation on September 2 between the French ambassador to Afghanistan, Francois Fitou, and his British colleague, Sherard Cowper-Coles, was leaked in Le Canard Enchainé , a French satirical magazine. Cowper-Coles was reported to have said that the security situation in Afghanistan was deteriorating, that NATO’s presence was making it worse, and that the two American presidential hopefuls should be dissuaded from getting bogged down further. The only realistic policy would be to cultivate an “acceptable dictator.” Of course, the British Foreign Office denied that these thoughts reflected the British government’s views.

Sparring with Garcia

-
0

I was honored to be a guest on KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasny this morning, but I was once again dismayed by the conservative political spin of Examiner columnist Ken Garcia, another guest on the show. Perhaps I should adjust my expectations (after all, Garcia works for a paper that endorsed John McCain for president) but it’s still so frustrating to be arguing about issues we should have settled generations ago in San Francisco.

Instead, progressives are still fending off arguments by Garcia and his ilk that Pacific Gas & Electric is more trustworthy than our elected local government (a ridiculous notion that PG&E is spending record-breaking millions to push), that decriminalizing social ills such as drug use and prostitution is the same thing as condoning and promoting them (as if “harm reduction strategies” pioneered in SF is a foreign concept), that creation of affordable housing (which developers won’t build without public subsidies that Prop. B will strengthen) is something the city can’t afford, that new revenue measures are also bad, and that the best leadership program we can offer our young students is JROTC (the main purpose of which is to instill military values in our peace-loving kids and recruit them as cannon fodder for our wasteful, unnecessary wars).

I think I held my own and hopefully offered listeners a better sense of this city’s full political spectrum than they often get from the mainstream media, but I’ll let you all be the judge of that. You can listen to the show here:

CFAC’s Sunshine and Darkness awards

-
0

OPEN-GOVERNMENT GROUP GIVES “DARKNESS” AWARDS ZAPPING ORANGE COUNTY
JUDGE, CAPISTRANO SCHOOL BOARD, SAN BERNARDINO ASSESSOR

The California First Amendment Coalition has named the 2008 recipients of its “Darkness Award,” given in recognition of conduct that thwarts freedom of speech and the public’s right to know. The awards, to be presented Saturday, October 18 at UC Berkeley, are given to:

— Riverside Superior Court Judge David C. Velasquez, who attempted to bar the Orange County Register from covering public testimony in a lawsuit against the paper. His attempt to impose government censorship in the form of a prior restraint was quickly knocked down by the Court of Appeal.

— San Bernardino County Assessor Bill Postmus, a former chairman of the Board of Supervisors who: 1) refused to disclose his activities and e-mails during a two-week period when wildfires raged in the county, 2) as assessor hired an “executive support staff” that, according to the Grand Jury, did “public image work for him, and 3) employed an aide who is being prosecuted by the District Attorney for alleged destruction of public records.

— The Capistrano Unified School Board, which was so indifferent to anti-secrecy laws that the Orange County District Attorney issued a public report outlining the board’s many violations of the Ralph M. Brown public meetings law. In a follow-up inquiry, the District Attorney found further violations and concluded that the board had proven itself “incapable or unwilling” of complying with the law.

In contrast to the Darkness Awards, CFAC also today named the 2008 winners of awards that affirmatively honor service in the cause of free speech, open government and the public’s right to know. Attorney Hal Fuson, the Chauncey Bailey Project, the San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch, and legislative advocate Jim Ewert are being recognized for their dedication to First Amendment principles.

—Hal Fuson, vice president and chief legal counsel of Copley Press, will receive the annual Bill Farr Award, presented jointly by CFAC and the California Society of Newspaper Editors. The award recognizes Fuson’s career-long contributions to the principles of free speech,
free press and public access to government.

—The Chauncey Bailey Project and the San Francisco Chronicle will receive CFAC’s Beacon Award. The Chauncey Bailey Project, representing 25 journalists from multiple Bay Area news organizations and journalism schools, produced more than 140 stories that
illuminated the circumstances around the 2007 assassination of Chauncey Bailey, an editor for the Oakland Post who was investigating Your Black Muslim Bakery. Working independently but likewise relying heavily on public records, the San Francisco Chronicle generated 103 stories and probed deeply into the case.

—Linda Deutsch, the legendary court reporter for the Association Press, is a Beacon Award winner. Ms. Deutsch has not only brought some of the nation’s most celebrated trials to our doorsteps, she has fought valiantly for openness and press freedom, earning among other things the Society of Professional Journalists’ First Amendment Award.

—Jim Ewert, legal counsel and legislative advocate for the California Newspaper Publishers Association, is being honored with a Beacon Award. Ewert is in his second decade of protecting reporters, standing up to censorship, and elevating the rights of student
journalists and their advisers.

The awards will be presented at CFAC’s annual Free Speech and Open Government Assembly, to be held this Friday and Saturday at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The award presentation is on Saturday. The program and free online registration are available here:

The full citations for all awards follow.

You can’t kill them

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

They’re on the fringe, and they don’t plan to leave it. Though mostly overlooked in their home country of New Zealand during the last two decades, the free-rockers in the Dead C will be the first to tell you that they’re not terribly bothered.

"We are not seen as plausible cultural ambassadors," stated guitarist Bruce Russell by e-mail from his home Down Under, citing the failure of the "laughable New Zealand media" to cover what’s artistically adventurous as one of the reasons his three-piece rarely can make it abroad to play shows. One would hope that Russell, Michael Morley, and Robbie Yeats would be more seriously considered for Kiwi government arts grants: indie rockers of yesteryear and the narcoleptic noisemongers of today repeatedly cite the Dead C as an influence on what they do. Just look who’s opening for them on their upcoming US gigs: Thurston Moore (who hosted them at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ "Nightmare Before Christmas" in England two years ago), Blues Control, Wolf Eyes, Six Organs of Admittance — all serious contenders on the experimental circuit, and all projects that garnered something, aesthetic or emotional, from the Dead C’s history of desperate clatter.

The Dead C got its start in Dunedin — members are located in Port Chalmers and Lyttelton today, about 225 miles apart — when the self-designated "AMM of Punk Rock" released its 1988 full-length debut, DR503, on Flying Nun, the infamous home to pop bands like the Clean, the Chills, Tall Dwarfs, and the Verlaines, for whom Yeats once drummed. A pop group the Dead C are not, but for an ensemble so ardently free-form and unmarketable, they’ve done nicely.

"The irony is, we’ve done very well in commercial terms by being ‘uncommercial,’" Russell explained. "I don’t know many of our contemporaries in New Zealand who are in better career positions than us. We make money. We can make any kind of record we like."

Much of their international clout was forged in their ’90s relationship with the Siltbreeze label, run and recently revived by Tom Lax of Philadelphia, with whom they released some of their most acclaimed discs, including 1992’s Harsh ’70s Reality, 1995’s White House, and 1997’s Tusk. This period saw them create what many consider to be their most vital material, flirting with darkly catchy riffs while always doggedly blazing space for noisy, alien buzz and scrape. Secret Earth is their brand new release, shortly following last year’s Future Artists (both Ba Da Bing) and recorded over two days, six months apart. Morley’s eerie exhale oversees a stupor-inducing slow grind that renders track titles a useless roadmap for proceedings: after a few minutes with the Dead C, one won’t notice such trifling details as the stops, starts, and riffs anymore. They are, after all, masters of mood. Morley and Russell’s guitars-at-odds and Yeats’ distantly mic’d drums consistently scare up an unsettling, deconstructed blues-groove that makes clear the precedent for Sebadoh’s stoned angst cassettes.

Regardless of influence, the upcoming US dates mark only their third outing to the States since getting together — damn! What do they do on the rare occasion they’re on a stage? "We approach live shows quietly, without undue fuss, so we can take ’em by surprise and wring their necks before they can fight back," Russell wrote, pointing out that there’s nothing static about a Dead C track — other than that staticky sound.

Any fan with the whoops and feedback screeches of "Driver U.F.O." committed to memory will hear something that sounds rather otherwise if that song shows up in the set. "We are ‘fully improvised,’ though every now and then we’ll attempt an item from our back catalog," Russell continued. "But we never, ever practice them."

This back catalog is becoming more available thanks to Ba Da Bing, their US label for the past few years, which will be reissuing DR503 and 1989’s Eusa Kills (Flying Nun) on vinyl. The band is, according to Russell, also hoping to reissue its pre-1990 work next year (working title: Complete ’80s Reality). Immediately available, however, is the tour-only 12-inch, which includes recent live recordings, and gives an added incentive to check ’em out this week.

Why not? It’s hard not to be charmed by their passive-aggressive, cavalier mode of operation. "We just do what we do and dare people to ignore it," Russell offered. "Which they duly do, and we could not care less."

THE DEAD C

With Six Organs of Admittance

Thurs/16, 8 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

Reviving radicalism

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

As the country’s economic, environmental, and political systems teeter on the brink of collapse, several Bay Area groups are reviving calls for radical solutions. And some are drawing parallels to the spirited political activity of 40 years ago.

“In my opinion, 1968 was the beginning of a process, an awakening of the questioning of social movements,” Andrej Grubacic, a globalization lecturer at ZMedia Institute and the University of San Francisco, told the Guardian.

The Great Rehearsal was a week of events from Sept. 17-25 that centered on the many protests, actions, and events of the 1960s and ’70s that are paralleled today. The event alluded to an ongoing struggle for alternatives to the failing institutions that are hurting the average American.

“Neoliberalism is this sort of clinching of the system. It is the last gasp of a dying system,” Katherine Wallerstein, executive director of the nonprofit Global Commons, told us. Wallerstein believes that deregulation is to blame for many of our economic woes, such as the housing crisis, job loss, and a volatile market.

Other recent events such as the Radical Women conference in San Francisco have highlighted the systemic causes of our economic turmoil, saying we should bail out people not banks, cancel student debt, and end home foreclosures. They went on to suggest that the bailout was just a form of jubilee for the rich.

Radical Women member Linda Averill announced at the conference that “if unions don’t take the offense now, we’re going to lose it all.” She went on to advocate mobilizing the labor movement, stating that we must band together against those sustaining the system. Other revolutionaries went even further, calling to abolish the capitalist system. RW member Toni Mendicino said the system of profit is inherently greedy and that reguutf8g it isn’t enough — we must get rid of it.

The Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) is a radical student-run organization focused on solving global climate change. Many of the initiatives taken by SEAC deal with less mainstream environmental concerns, including combating coal power and promoting clean water. These previously ignored problems are pumping new life into the environmental movement. Brian Kelly, former Students for a Democratic Society organizer who now does organizing work for SEAC, told us, “The problem is the fucked-up system. (We need to) carve out a decent life through an alternative to capitalism.”

John Cronan, an organizer for the radical union Industrial Workers of the World, advocates Participatory Economics (Parecon) as an alternative to capitalism. He highlighted Parecon’s values as a solidarity-based system that abolishes the market and replaces it with participatory planning. Parecon, he says, will take into account the social costs that goods and services create; something commonly ignored in today’s capitalist system, a system many claim perpetuates the environmental crisis.

“Climate change is highlighting the system flaws,” Kelly said. He went on to place the environment and climate change as the highest priority in the upcoming presidential election, proposing green technology as the answer to the economic turmoil and global climate change taking place. The Power Vote program, he told us, supports the investment in green technologies by politicians and citizens.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has pushed local governments in many rural farming communities to create ordinances claiming nature as an entity that should have more political and legal prominence than property. These ordinances aim to curb pollution and provide communities with a safeguard against corporate influence.

Through similar efforts, grassroots organizations have managed to stop 59 coal-fired power plants in 2007 by persuading courts not to grant permits for the plants. This is one of many steps to contest the environmental degradation taking place.

“I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience,” said Al Gore, calling for people to rise up against the construction of new coal plants, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in March.

Gore’s call to action has prompted many activists to battle corporations and self-interested government. “The current economic and political systems are out of whack with human and democratic values,” Kelly said. “The system is exposing itself.” According to many, the system is shifting dangerously close to totalitarianism.

There’s even been a resurgence of the old Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program), an FBI-run spying and political sabotage program that was responsible for the arrests of 13 Black Panthers in 1973 in connection with the 1971 murder of a San Francisco police officer. The men were subjected to torture techniques similar to those used at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

The 13 Panthers were acquitted for lack of evidence and the case was closed. However, in 2005, with the help of the USA Patriot Act, the case was reopened and eight of the Panthers were re-arrested. John Bowman, one of the detained, announced to the press, “The same people who tried to kill me in 1973 are the same people who are here today trying to destroy me.” Former Panther Richard Brown warned audiences at the Great Rehearsal that the Patriot Act has given the government the ability to profile any ethnic group or organization, past and present, as terrorists.

“The Patriot Act was passed in the name of protecting us and our democracy. But it limits us,” Cronan said. Groups like New SDS have incorporated working against the Patriot Act through their antiwar work, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has consistently battled against the act.

Even the Communists are back. Earlier this month, the Revolutionary Communist Party held a demonstration in San Francisco, telling the small crowd, “The world today cries out for radical, fundamental change.”

Many radical groups see opportunity in the current moment. Grubacic told us that, “The future belongs to the ones creating it in the present.” *

 

Economic stimulus, at home

-
0

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom is planning to announce a local economic stimulus package some time this week. The Board of Supervisors is holding hearings on how the city can help the San Francisco economy. As the presidential candidates thrash around with proposals to address the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, local politicians are hoping to do their part at home.

And that’s a fine idea. Even in this globalized economy, San Francisco can do a lot to protect its residents and businesses from the ongoing disaster. But the best way to do that will require political courage — and a recognition that economic stimulus works best from the bottom up, not the top down.

The most effective way to get a depressed economy going, in other words, is to put money as directly as possible in the hands of the people most likely to spend it. That means the sorts of policies that big business and landlords will want — say, cutting "red tape" and reducing business fees and taxes — isn’t gong to help.

Progressive economists say that on the national level, one of the most effective policies would be a short-term reduction in the payroll tax. Most working people pay 7.5 percent of their wages into the Social Security trust fund, and most businesses match that contribution. Suspend the employee contribution for three months and everyone in the nation instantly gets a significant raise. (The Social Security fund would take a hit, but this is an emergency and that can be fixed later; despite all the gloom and doom, Social Security will be fine for the next half century with just a few minor fixes.)

The idea is that people who get a raise during a recession are likely to spend it, quickly, which pours money into the economy. The same principal can work in San Francisco. Any economic stimulus package will cost money and add to the city’s deficit (unless Newsom and the supervisors are willing to raise taxes to fund it). But some short-term policies could more than pay for themselves by jump-starting local spending.

A few ideas:

• Place a moratorium on all residential evictions. Barack Obama is talking about a short-term freeze on mortgage foreclosures, which makes sense for the nation. But in San Francisco, where most residents are renters, evictions are far more of an economic threat. The mayor and the supervisors could ask the sheriff to refrain from carrying out any eviction actions for a limited period (and potentially cut off funding for eviction actions).

• Create an emergency rent-subsidy fund. Make city cash available to anyone facing eviction because of economic circumstance.

• Reduce Muni fares for a few months. Muni is in many ways a tax on the poor and working class, who have no other travel options. Almost every penny that people spend on transportation would go right back into the economy.

• Suspend the payroll tax on small businesses. Small businesses create most of the jobs in the city; suspending the tax on the smallest businesses (those, say, with payrolls of less than $500,000) would help the most vulnerable and keep the engines of the local economy from failing. Raising the tax on big businesses would, of course, more than pay for this.

• Raise the general assistance payment. Sure, some of that money would be spent on alcohol and drugs, but most would be spent on things like food and clothing.

• Spend more, not less, on the public sector. Government spending creates jobs; government programs saved the United States from the Great Depression. Taxing the wealthy to fund public jobs programs makes excellent economic sense at the city level, too.

Those are just a few ideas. The supervisors should devote their hearings to developing more. But a plan that only helps big business and doesn’t put money in the pockets of the rest of San Franciscans won’t do anything to help the local economy. *

1...798081...105Page 80 of 105

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