By Maria Dinzeo
The agenda at Chevron’s annual shareholders meeting will be slightly different this year, as representatives from Nigeria, Ecuador, and Burma descend on the meeting to finally have their say. For years, Chevron has been accused of myriad human rights and environmental abuses, from having nonviolent protestors gunned down in Nigeria to the dumping of toxic waste into Amazon waterways in Ecuador.
Tomorrow, representatives from these countries will voice their concerns directly to shareholders and executives. Amazon Watch Director of Communications Simeon Tegel told us the event was designed to “potentially help shareholders become more active” in pressuring Chevron executives to finally address and rectify Chevron’s abuses.
“One hopes they are human beings too, although sometimes it’s hard to tell. But perhaps they will be motivated to do something, either from pressure from their shareholders or from the kindness of human nature,” said Tegel.
Chevron’s human rights violations are not limited to abuses abroad. Richmond has long felt the sting of Chevron’s environmental negligence, despite the company’s soaring profits. While Chevron promises more energy efficient oil refining methods, they continue to belch toxins into the air over Richmond, and plans for a $1 billion expansion of their Richmond refinery has increased resident’s health and safety concerns.
“Change is a long time coming,” said Rosi Reyes, spokesperson for the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. “Unfortunately, the citizens of Richmond have read through Chevron’s Environmental Impact Report and they feel that there are empty promises. Chevron continues to use equipment that is over 35 years old, and everything in the report points to [Chevron] refining heavier crude oil.”
Reyes said that the City of Richmond’s aims to wean itself of its oil dependent relationship with Chevron: “We want Chevron to put a cap on crude oil and put money into green energy,” she said.
Though contacted repeatedly, Chevron’s Media Relations Department was unavailable for comment.
Although Richmond representatives will not be allowed inside the meeting, they hope to confront Chevron executives through their protest outside. Said Amazon Watch spokesman Mitchell Anderson, “[Chevron] may not be listening, but they will definitely hear us tomorrow.”
Health
Do people remember Chevron’s abuses? People do
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
When the ruling on same-sex marriage came down, I was in upstate New York, hanging out with my brother, who runs a small construction outfit in a working-class town. His employees are the people Democratic leaders worry about; a generation ago they were called "Reagan Democrats." They make extremely un-PC jokes and insult each other with terms that would make most San Franciscans cringe.
And you know what? They couldn’t possibly care less about same-sex marriage.
"The people in my crew have families to feed and payments to make on their houses," my brother told me. "They don’t care who marries who. It’s the most ridiculous issue in the world." (My brother, who got married on his lunch hour wearing overalls covered with concrete dust, also told me years ago that "marriage is like a horse with a broken leg; you can shoot it, but that doesn’t fix the leg." You get the picture).
Yes, there are gay couples living in his little community. The framers and roofers treat them like everyone else. The construction workers are not remotely disturbed about queers being threats to their traditional values or marriages. And they’re all voting for Obama because they’re sick of the war, sick of the recession, sick of the cost of health insurance, sick of the politics in Washington DC, and ready for something totally different.
I thought about all of that when I came back and read the San Francisco Chronicle stories repeating the old argument that same-sex marriage could be the bane of the Democrats in November. It’s the same thing Rep. Nancy Pelosi says about all kinds of social and economic issues: we can’t go too fast. We might piss off some swing voters.
Sure, you might do that. And I’m not a pollster, and my focus group, as it were, is fairly narrow here. But I don’t think I’m wrong when I say that among rapidly growing numbers of Americans, gay marriage is becoming pretty insignificant as a wedge issue. I used to say that in 20 years, people would look back at this era and wonder what the foes of marriage equality were thinking. Now I suspect we’ll only have to wait 10 years, maybe less, before this is totally accepted in the mainstream of American society.
When somebody like Mayor Gavin Newsom takes the lead on a civil rights issue like this, I think it’s pretty crass to question his motives. But you can’t dispute the outcome: Newsom may have been acting out of pure principle or out of political calculation. But in the end, his career is now tightly tied to an issue that is part of the future. He will never have to say he was sorry about this, and all of the weak and trembling little Democrats who are wringing their hands will all look like idiots one day. One day very soon.
If Newsom wants to be governor, this can only help him — but it won’t be enough. My brother’s point is that the country is in a deep recession, the economy is a disaster, economic inequality is ruining the American Dream, and social issues aren’t going to carry the day. A politician who won’t tax the rich to improve the lot of the poor and the middle class, who won’t offer comprehensive economic solutions, who has nothing to say to people who make their living building houses when the housing market is in free fall … that politician’s going nowhere. *
Food and the city
When we talk about "regional" cuisines or cooking, we often find ourselves talking about some quarter of Italy. For centuries, Italy was a politically fragmented land — a jigsaw puzzle of kingdoms, duchies, principalities, serene republics, and city-states — and did not become a modern nation-state until the 19th century.
Yet what politics could not achieve, food could. As John Dickie demonstrates in his engrossing Delizia! The Epic History of Italians and Their Food (Free Press, $26), trade among the peninsula’s cities in the late Middle Ages became the foundation for the distinctive cuisine we know today as Italian. Cooking in the Italian cities was more similar than not, Dickie suggests, and it was immeasurably better than what was to be found in the impoverished countryside, where peasants were practically boiling weeds for soup. In our time, a love of rustic Italian cooking is just one of many food fetishes — mostly harmless, but maybe not quite, since under the guise of lauding a rural bounty and style that never really existed, it subtly reinforces an American prejudice against cities. We already have Jeffersonian myths about our own countryside — as a redoubt of wisdom, rectitude, health, and happiness — that reach back beyond the founding of the republic.
We have myths about our cities too, but most are of the if-only variety. Urban utopians — the people who think cities would be little paradises if only we could rid them of homeless people or cars or Republicans or loud partiers — would do well to consider Dickie’s portraiture of Italy’s cities across eight centuries. Like all cities, always and everywhere, they are full of dirt, noise, and disease — as well as cruelty, wealth, vanity, status consumption, insecurity, and vicious politicking. They are nasty and exciting, as we would expect from any sort of social experiment that concentrates large numbers of human beings in a small space.
The lesson of cities, then, is that they are marketplaces not only of goods and services, but of ideas. They are messy with conflict among innumerable worlds and subworlds. And much of that conflict is pointless or even counterproductive — but not all of it. Sometimes a random spark will catch and burn brightly, and then we all say huzzah, or buon appetito.
Paul Reidinger
› paulr@sfbg.com
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I was having lunch with an old friend the other day, and, as usual, we got through our lives and kids pretty quickly and wound up talking about tax policy. I’m a great date.
I was explaining to her — well, yeah, I was lecturing, at some volume — about the problem with sales taxes and the value of parcel taxes and income taxes, and somewhere along the line I realized that the progressive leadership in San Francisco needs to think a bit more about small business.
See, my friend’s husband runs a small company, and she isn’t happy about the way the city’s universal health plan is financed. "If this is so important to San Francisco," she asked, "why aren’t we all paying for it, instead of just businesses?" Her idea: finance the program with a new sales tax.
Well, I support Healthy San Francisco and I think that, all things considered, Sup. Tom Ammiano did an amazing job of putting together a plan that is actually working. Ammiano told me last week that more than 20,000 people — formerly uninsured people — have signed up. This is a very big deal.
I realize it’s also a pain for a lot of smaller businesses, in part because the rules — specifically designed to keep unscrupulous employers from cheating — are complicated and hard to follow. And for companies that are barely making it, the tab for insurance can be brutal.
That, of course, is the overall problem with employer-based health insurance. But it’s the system we’re working under, and the complexity of creating a completely different model in one city would be, to say the least, daunting. In fact, there were a lot of employers in this city, many big retail outlets and national chains, that could well afford to pay for employee health insurance but instead dumped their workers on the overburdened public health system.
And restaurants, which are whining the loudest, have managed to stick their customers with the added cost, which frankly isn’t such a terrible thing: people who eat out a lot can afford an extra buck so the kitchen help can see a doctor when they’re sick.
And as I (ever-so-gently and quietly) explained over my $12 sautéed prawns, sales taxes are horribly regressive, even worse than small-business taxes. I’m right; she’s wrong. We had a hell of a lunch.
But I think her frustration ran a bit deeper than this one issue, and I hear it from a lot of others too: small businesses don’t seem to be part of the progressive coalition.
I understand why: a lot of small business people are conservative, particularly on fiscal issues. It’s really annoying how often small merchants side with the Chamber of Commerce and the big downtown forces. You can’t get small business groups to support any new revenue measures.
And the progressive supervisors have done a lot for small businesses — starting with enacting limits on chain stores, which have protected locally owned shops in several commercial districts.
There’s a lot more we can do: I’m still pushing for a progressive business tax (cut taxes on the bottom, raise them on the top). And a city income tax would pay for health insurance and a lot more.
But right now, many community merchants are feeling ignored, and our next progressive candidate for mayor needs to think about that. It’s a potentially powerful constituency — but for all the wrong reasons, it’s going in all the wrong directions.
Whining at the Weekly
My old pal Andy Van De Voorde is back. Village Voice Media, which owns the SF Weekly and is now pleading poverty, managed to fly Van De Voorde and the two top comany executives, Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, in to San Francisco for the hearing Friday on our lawsuit. And Van De Voorde, writing as The Snitch, has put forward a remarkable work of journalistic whining.
Oh, dear, says Andy; Judge Marla Miller is prepared to accept the jury’s verdict after a five-week trial and follow the law by issuing an injunction. Requiring the Weekly to follow the law would violate the First Amendment.
There are a couple of key points that he misses.
One is that courts have found consistently over the years that newspapers, despite their First Amendment protections, are also businesses — in some cases, big businesses — and have to follow the same sorts of basic regulations as all other businesses. It costs money to comply with OSHA rules, the National Labor Relations Act, and environmental laws. It’s costing the Guardian (and, I assume, the Weekly) a bit of cash to comply with the city’s new health-insurance law. Should those laws be invalidated because complying with them means I as an editor have less money to spend on reporters and freelancers?
Be serious.
The other point that he misses is that the Unfair Practices Act, the Progressive Era law designed to keep small business from being destroyed by giant predatory competitors, actually promotes the goals of the First Amendment, which, history tells us, include the notion that a broad variety of voices in the marketplace of ideas make for a healthy democracy.
Preventing one large media company from driving a locally owned competitor out of business is a positive result.
See, the Weekly can whine about the First Amendment all it wants, but a jury found that the 16-paper chain, with revenues of some $150 million a year, that owns the Weekly, was trying to silence a First Amendment-protected local San Francisco voice. The Weekly wanted to shut us down, in part because the owners of the chain don’t like what we have to say and the way we say it.
Um, Andy, isn’t there a First Amendment issue there?
If the Weekly now wants to whine about the size of the verdict, let me say for the record that we have warned these folks repeatedly, going back more than five years, that they were violating the law. When we first sent a warning letter, we asked for no damages at all; all we wanted was for the predatory activity to cease. We filed suit only because we had no other choice — and even after years of litigation, the jury found that the below-cost selling continued, up to the moment of the verdict.
And now we have no choice but to ask for an injunction, to do what we tried to do from the start: Make these guys follow the law.
Now the Weekly and its parent, Village Voice Media, have resorted to trying to overturn the Unfair Practices Act and complain about their First Amendment Rights.
Boys: As my late grandfather, the Honorable James C. O’Brien, a New York State Supreme Court judge, used to say, you made your bed — now eat it.
Tolls going up at Golden Gate
Officials at the Golden Gate Bridge are pondering a $7 toll. In early April, we brought you a story outlining why the bridge district was facing a $91 million long-term deficit. Part of the reason is that it operates a transit system that’s incredibly expensive. We all love public transit, of course, but the Golden Gate Bridge’s bus and ferry system, we discovered, isn’t all that efficient. (By the way, it took us a damn long time to understand how the feds crunch transit efficiency figures, but once we figured it out, it made a lot of sense.)
We also showed that the district’s overloaded board of directors contained members who received health insurance coverage through the district, but they also obtained it in the towns where they lived and worked as local public officials. One guy even got three layers of health coverage. Inducements to get out of the car, like high gas prices and bridge tolls, in the long run seem like a good idea. But it doesn’t look like higher tolls are going to save the bridge district from its long-term debt and organizational problems.
Tipping your waiter health coverage
Here’s another example of a restaurant passing on the cost of Healthy San Francisco to its patrons. The lady and I had brunch at the Slow Club in the Mission on Saturday and this is our bill. Healthy San Francisco is the program created by Sup. Tom Ammiano to reach the more than 73,000 uninsured San Franciscans with a reasonably inexpensive form of health insurance.
The program is tied up in federal court right now because restaurants have sued arguing that it’s illegal for local governments to require employers to fund health insurance for their employees, which Healthy San Francisco does. About 19,000 San Franciscans had already signed up for the plan by last week and on Wednesday about 13,000 more were added as local businesses met a deadline for registering with the program.
Part of the idea is that without insuring more Americans, you and I pay for it each time someone who lacks coverage ends up making a costly emergency room visit at a public hospital with a preventable disease, illness or injury because they couldn’t access advance treatment, mental health assistance or any other type of care before they reached a tipping point. This program might actually prove that if the government extends coverage to more people who haven’t traditionally received it, we may all save money in the end.
For now, you’re stuck with the bill while the restaurant industry sues to ignore the true cost of our robust local economy.
What’s up with the restaurant surcharges?
The last time I had lunch at the Slow Club, the check came with a little notice: $1 was added to the cost of every meal to cover the cost of complying with the city’s new health-care mandate. That was fine — if I can afford to eat at the Slow Club I can afford an extra buck so the people who work there can get health insurance.
But it’s interesting that the place didn’t just raise prices by $1 (which most people wouldn’t have noticed — restaurant prices go up all the time). They made a point of letting everyone know that the money was for a new government mandate. It was, in its own way, a political statement: Hey, sorry we have to charge you more, but the city is forcing us to do it.
That’s made some local activists a bit angry (there’s a fascinating little bit on it in the San Francisco Magazine blog — Sup. Tom Ammiano (who wrote the health-care bill) and labor leader Chriss Romero were eating at 2223 Restaurant on Market, and Romero got pissed off when the tab came with a four percent service charge that mentioned the insurance rule.
I get Romero’s point, and we supported the Ammiano legislation — and as someone who works at a small business that has always provided health insurance to employees and is still getting hit with some serious additional expenses to comply, I understand why the restaurants are trying to make a point about it.
And it’s absolutely true that restaurants never do this when other mandates, taxes, fees and expensive compliance rules take effect (you never see it for increases in the minimum wage, for example).
Mild statement or annoying protest? Thoughts?
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I have something to say to Mark Leno, and I hope he’s paying attention.
Listen:
Our endorsement in the state Senate race, which you can read on page 13, was painful. We made the right call, and I stand behind it — but it wasn’t easy.
I still remember the year 2000, when San Francisco politics changed forever, when district elections turned the Board of Supervisors from a collection of political hacks — wholly owned by downtown and utterly loyal to a corrupt mayor — into one of the most progressive policy-making bodies in any city in America. That was the year Aaron Peskin, Chris Daly, Matt Gonzales, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval joined Tom Ammiano and, in one great political day, doomed the Willie Brown machine to political obscurity and paved the way for a living wage law, universal health care, community choice aggregation, real budget oversight, and a city where the grassroots actually mattered.
And you, Mark, were on the wrong side of history. You went along with Willie Brown. You endorsed Lawrence Wong against Peskin. You endorsed Michael Yaki against McGoldrick. You were behind not only the sleazy Brown machine but a couple of truly lame candidates; those endorsements should embarrass you until the end of time. (Be serious — looking back at all that Peskin has done for San Francisco, can you actually say Lawrence Wong, who couldn’t even handle a job overseeing the Community College District, was the better choice? Mark, you are many things, but you are not a fool.)
If you win this election — and I think you will — you have some serious work to do bringing the queer community and the left back together. A lot of people are mad at their friends, and a lot of good allies are fighting. We’re losing sight of the prize, here. And while you had every right to challenge Carole Migden, and I’m glad you did, you also created this situation and you need to help fix it.
How do you do that? For starters, don’t attack Migden. She’s done enough damage to herself. And she’s done a lot for this community. Your campaign consultants will want to send out nasty hit pieces (they’re probably already printed), but you have to stop them. And if you don’t get that, if you think winning is more important than anything, then you’re as bad as Bill and Hillary Clinton, who seem to believe it would be better to elect a Republican than concede defeat to another Democrat. Don’t go there. The collateral damage would be immense. It’s not worth it.
And show a little independence. This November don’t let yourself side with another group of worthless supervisorial candidates who are simply Gavin Newsom clones.
When you refused to criticize Mayor Newsom’s bloody budget, you blamed the governor and told us you didn’t want to see "the good guys fighting." I have news for you: When it comes to the city budget, Gavin Newsom is not one of the good guys. He is our own Arnold Schwarzenegger, refusing to raise taxes and instead cutting programs.
And his allies, the downtown forces furious about the progressive board, will want to put another group of regressive sycophants in office this fall. You have no business being a part of that.
Mark, I like you, but this endorsement was a great leap of faith for me. Show me I wasn’t wrong.
Pelosi and the moth spraying
Correction: Rep. Sam Farr has raised questions about the moth, but has not at this time introduced legislation to de-list it.
EDITORIAL A Santa Cruz County judge has put a temporary halt to the state’s plan to spray chemicals from the air over Bay Area cities in an ill-conceived effort to eradicate the Light Brown Apple Moth. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed to hold off on the spraying until further studies are done on the environmental and health issues.
But the proposal to dump tons of an artificial pheromone called Checkmate over urban areas with millions of residents this summer is not dead: the governor still insists that some sort of eradication plan is needed, and California Food and Agriculture Secretary A.G. Kawamura is warning lawmakers that billions of dollars are at stake.
But the entire issue could be obviated with congressional action, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi needs to take the lead.
Checkmate disrupts the mating cycle of the moth. Nobody knows for sure what effects it will have on humans, but the Checkmate containers have strict warning labels about health hazards. And the stuff will be contained in tiny plastic capsules designed to release it over weeks, or even months. The capsules themselves can be inhaled, possibly causing respiratory problems. There’s no doubt this is a danger, particularly for children.
The legal and political issues are complicated, but it appears that there are only two effective ways to halt the spraying at this point. Either the Santa Cruz legal ruling has to hold up on appeal (tricky, since the governor can declare an emergency and override environmental law), or the federal government has to change the way it looks at the moth.
The moth is a threat to agriculture — but almost certainly not as serious a threat as state and federal authorities claim. Schwarzenegger says the tiny insect, which likes to lay its eggs in a wide variety of plants, will devastate the state’s agricultural industry. But many entomologists say the bug has probably been in the Bay Area for years, and that the state’s crops have not suffered. In fact, in other places where the moth is established (Australia and New Zealand, for example), its impacts have been fairly mild.
The problem is that the feds have listed the moth as a major agricultural hazard. Under international treaties, produce from areas where the bug is established can’t be exported. There’s a simple way to solve this: Congress can de-list the Light Brown Apple Moth. Rep. Sam Farr (D–Monterey) has introduced a bill to do that. But time is short.
Pelosi, however, has the ability as speaker to push this to the top of the agenda and get a bill passed quickly. Mayor Gavin Newsom and the supervisors should call on her to do that — now.
Meanwhile, Oakland is preparing its own legal action. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera and other Bay Area city attorneys should be doing the same.
Governor delays moth spraying
Photo by Peter Grigsby, Office of Governor Schwarzenegger.
After meeting with Sen. Carole Migden and other elected officials and activists concerned about the health implications of plans for aerial spraying designed to eradicate the crop-threatening light brown apple moth, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today delayed the spraying pending additional testing.
“I am very gratified that the Governor listened to my concerns about the safety and efficacy of aerial spraying and agreed to postpone the spray until additional tests are completed,” Migden said in a prepared statement.
After a series of toxicology tests on the spray, which includes a moth pheromone designed to disrupt mating patterns, the spraying has been delayed until at least Aug. 17. Despite the delay, the governor still seems to indicate that the spraying is inevitable, saying in a prepared statement, “I am confident that the additional tests will reassure Californians that we are taking the safest, most progressive approach to ridding our state of this very real threat to our agriculture, environment and economy.”
Others in the Migden delegate included Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento — and the likely next Senate president), Marin County Supervisor Judy Arnold, the Sierra Club’s Bill Magavern and Paul Schramski, State Director of Pesticide Watch.
But it is Migden that could enjoy the biggest political bump from the delay of the controversial spraying until after her June primary challenge from Mark Leno, hoping that her campaign finance and other problems might be overshadowed by the reminder that she still has the juice to get into the Governor’s Office and deliver the goods.
Mad jags
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER "That was just a major experience that I’ll never forget and I never, ever want to have again."
So sayeth 60 Watt Kid’s Kevin Litrow of the mind-render that occurred shortly after he moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles in 2006. "I was contacted — or I might have contacted them. I’m not really sure." He goes on to tell me of being visited one night by a "tornado" of energy that swirled fiercely through his room and knocked him "out of tune," while talking to him in his head. After his guest finally departed, Litrow says he was limping on one side. Finding no corollary for his experience among other UFO reports — "it physically didn’t look like the typically oval-shaped-face kids," he says — he discovered that, nonetheless, the experience "physically and mentally opened some doors." Can the glitch-garnished, knocked-askew psych of Litrow’s band 60 Watt Kid — captured on their intriguing self-titled Absolutely Kosher debut — be partially credited to a brain-tweaking twister from another dimension?
Alien visitations, madness, rehab, and Libya — last week I was lost on a vapor trail, looking down from a star called Planet Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, and waltzing to a psychogenic fugue only I could hear. But now I’m found. I’m told it’s in the water. One moment you’re staring at the cover of Us Weekly, wondering how onetime pedophile’s-wet-dream Britney Spears came to be transmogrified into Our Lady of Mental Health Issues. The next you’re waking up, kicked to the curb with surgical staples where your kidney once was. The price of gas is high, but tripping — and sometimes falling — through the mind’s eye, gets you even higher. April gusts have blown in a slew of artists, spinning yarns of spirits and out-of-body travels. They lived through this. You will, too.
PROVEN GILTY Free Gold (We Are Free) is the name of Indian Jewelry’s forthcoming recorded game, so surely IJ honcho Tex Kerschen knows how to get baby some bullion. "You’ve got to go and roll the rich," says the Houston experimentalist. "You gotta catch ’em leaving restaurants and saying goodnight to their chauffeurs. Wealth liberation has come to rest in our minds as the answer, since we personally slave for oil barons." Kerschen knows: he says he spent the last year working in a refinery while Indian Jewelry took time off to regroup and record. So Free Gold is simply wishful thinking? "You get pummeled with wealth here in Houston," he explains. "They’re building continuously — literally, gilded fortresses. I’ve had to hang terrible art for terrible people. We decided we’d gild the lily ourselves."
REHABIT IT "It’s nice that people are into it," Kimya Dawson says sweetly about the chart-topping Juno soundtrack that hurled her into the consciousness of the mainstream — or at least that of National Public Radio listeners. "But I’m not really the kind of person who keeps track or cares about numbers and sales. I make music, and it’s just kind of what I have to do. It’s what I’d be doing regardless of who was listening." The Olympia, Wash., artist started crafting tunes as part of Moldy Peaches in 1994, and she’s still writing — albeit with less introspection since the birth of her daughter Panda (she just completed a children’s album). Songwriting has been an outright necessity since she drank herself into a coma and entered rehab more than nine years ago.
"I popped out of rehab, and I was depressed and on medication, and I didn’t know how to function on this planet, and I picked up a guitar, and it made me feel better," Dawson explains. The first Moldy Peaches show happened two weeks after she got out. "It’s always been mutual therapy for me and the people listening to my stuff. I always figured if I stopped doing it I might go crazy."
LIBYA LIBERATION How can a stellar Oakland combo like Heavenly States top their last heroic act as the first US rock band to play in Libya after the lifting of a 30-year travel ban? To start, they spent about a year working on a film about the experience, relying on puppet reenactments and animation, before they woke up and asked themselves, why aren’t we making music? After selling the rights to their Libya adventures (producer Jawal Nga is writing a script tentatively titled Rock the Casbah), the band has come up with their most eclectic and confident recordings to date, Delayer (Rebel Group). The group’s next act? "We got asked to play in Iran at this music festival," vocalist-guitarist Ted Nesseth tells me. "But Genevieve [Gagon] couldn’t sing in public. Then someone e-mailed to say her friend was a journalist living in a North Korean village filled with musicians, so we have to figure out a way to go there and record. There’s absolutely no way any of that crap is going to happen. I think we have a lot of touring to do supporting this album, and then we want to make another one."
SPIRITED "You know," announces Triclops! guitarist Christian Beaulieu, apropos of neither the group’s new CD, Out of Africa (Alternative Tentacles) nor what vocalist John Geek describes as their "bung load of shows," "Sonny [Kay] from GSL recently called me the ghost of Dimebag Darrell."
"It’s really kind of impossible because you were born way before he died," I venture.
"Well, I told my friend I was the ghost of Steve Vai," Beaulieu continues, "and he said, ‘Holy crap! That’s the best news I’ve heard all day: Steve Vai’s dead!’ I’m just trying to figure out how to put a handle on my Telecaster." *
INDIAN JEWELRY Thurs/24, 9:30 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
KIMYA DAWSON Fri/25, 8 p.m., $20. Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF. www.ticketmaster.com
TRICLOPS! Fri/25, 6 p.m., free. Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF. www.amoeba.com
HEAVENLY STATES Sat/26, 10 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com
60 WATT KID Sat/26, 9 p.m., $25. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com
SFIFF: Explosive stuff!
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
SFIFF The pop detritus of today is the archaeological evidence of tomorrow, to be pieced together by future generations — should there be any — who will no doubt want to know what the hell we were thinking. Their conclusions may be bizarre. But will their conjecture be any stranger than our present-tense realities?
Inventing tomorrow’s conspiracy theories today is Mock Up on Mu, the latest pseudodocumentary, sci-fi historical dig, Situationist prank, and thinly veiled fight-the-power rant by San Francisco’s collage king, Craig Baldwin. In the mode of his prior cult faves Tribulation 99 (1992), O No Coronado! (1992) and Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) — albeit with a higher percentage of new staged sequences mixed into the ingeniously assembled archival errata — it again grinds fact and fiction into a tasty genre-defying pulp. For many, Mu‘s world premiere is the most eagerly awaited event in the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival’s goody-laden schedule.
It’s 2019 AD on the Empire of Mu — the Moon — where L. Ron Hubbard (Damon Packard) is building theme parks, selling crater-naming rights, and beaming corporate logos back to "that prison planet called Earth." Having been banished from our planet, he must dispatch "Agent C," a.k.a. Marjorie Cameron (Michelle Silva), back to the blue ball to engage in some espionage involving the seductions of both Ra-worshiping rocket scientist Jack Parsons (Kal Spelletich) and sleazy defense contractor Lockheed Martin (Stoney Burke). Realizing "Commodore" Hubbard’s purposes may be more nefarious than professed, she finds the truth is out there … way out there. It’s naked and shameless, in fact. Those hippies were right: free love will save us all.
As ever, there is a certain investigative method behind the Oakland-born Baldwin’s jigsaw madness. The real Parsons was the founder of the pre-NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an avid occultist. He started a private boat dealership with none other than Hubbard, before Hubbard absconded with some money and Parsons’ girlfriend (whom he married). Soon thereafter, Hubbard wrote the original Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950, which in turn led to that gift to mankind we call Scientology. As for Parsons, he went on to marry painter, author, and psychic Cameron, who, like him (as well as Hubbard) was an early American devotee of Aleister Crowley and a participant in sex magick rituals.
Thus you don’t need six degrees, let alone Kevin Bacon, to connect Wernher von Braun, Kenneth Anger, and Tom Cruise. History is fun! As is Mu, with its antic use of everything from old propagandistic footage to clips spanning eras of cinematic sci-fi: Georges Melies’ 1902 Trip to the Moon, the original Flash Gordon serial and 1936’s H.G. Wells–based Things to Come, drive-in trash (it’s always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die), and Star Trek. The resulting fair-use frolic nonetheless reveals a serious side or three while exploring the dense and slightly demented history of military and aerospace business in sunny California.
Baldwin recently took a break from his numerous other roles — programmer at Other Cinema; teacher at SF Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and Artists Television Access — to sound off on Mu.
SFBG I hate to ask such a blunt question, but what is this movie about?
CRAIG BALDWIN My "Mu-vie" is about how utopian visions of technology and space exploration became compromised by the military in the late 20th century. And [about] how the lives of [technological and space travel] pioneers afford a rich trace of California regional history after World War II: the complex crossing of alternative tech research, personal belief systems, lifestyles, artistic practices, newly organized and newly imported religions, and spiritual institutions. Plus that era brought an explosion of the formerly marginalized sci-fi genre, of which Mu is of course the very latest iteration!
Mu is also about the cult of film, especially experimental film. I’m trying to work though a new model of historiography or storytelling that I am calling collage-narrative. It’s a humble stab at opening up a new space in film practice that is not only of interest to historians but also to aesthetes. And, my dear, I don’t have to tell you that these groups are certainly not mutually exclusive!
SFBG Your father worked for a rocket manufacturer. Has that made you more interested in Cold War and military-industrial complex themes?
CB Yes, my dad worked for Aerojet. He was born the same year as Parsons! And I was born the year Parsons died. I am his reincarnation. But the point is something like 30 percent of Californians were involved in the aerospace biz at its height.
SFBG How much real Scientology material is in Mu?
CB [The film] remains at the level of Swiftian allegory or satire, spinning off of their Genesis story and [acting as] a meta-gloss on Hubbard’s own autobiography.
SFBG I wish Unarius had become the growth religious cult of our time. They’ve certainly made better movies. But regarding yours, the real life connections between Parsons, Hubbard, Crowley, "Mother of the New Age movement" Cameron, occultism, and scientific and military work are stranger than fiction.
CB Everyone has been very influenced by the New Age, uh, belief systems. But more than anything, I identify with postwar bohemians, beats, and hippies. Those days when rocket scientists and sci-fi pulpmeisters and occult conjurers and proto-Wicca ritual carnal orgiastic pagans intermingled may be long gone — though Kenneth Anger is still around.
SFBG Mu uses a lot of excerpts from mainstream and low budget entertainment. But where does the less familiar material — educational, promotional, and so forth — come from? You must spend infinite hours looking for the perfect clip.
CB It comes from my usual source: My basement archive of 2,500 industrial films. I do spend time in there, but could hardly claim to find the perfect clip. Au contraire. I call it "availabilism" — making what I do have work for me, through editing and audio techniques, overwriting it all into an associational stew hopefully akin to the half-memory, half-fantasy, sublinguistic colloid of thought itself.
SFBG What reaction does your work get from students? They presumably grok the pop culture stuff, but do they get the political undercurrents?
CB People can be responsive to the pop-cult clips, or the regional history, or the antiwar sentiments. But methinks [Mock Up on Mu] will be a touchstone for legions of occult or subcult partisans ravenous for these almost mythic tales of the roots of alternative religions.
SFBG Sir, your Thetan level must be off the charts.
MOCK UP ON MU Mon/28, 9:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; April 30, 8:55 p.m., Pacific Film Archive
More green reasons, post-Earth Day
Michael Kang of the String Cheese Incident is in at the Digital Be-In.
The sun may have set on Earth Day, but that doesn’t mean the musically oriented eco-celebrations can’t continue. Here are a few more events:
DIGITAL BE-IN 16: ECOCITY
An Ecocity theme and speakers, exhbiits, installations, an eco-fashion show – and live music by Michael Kang (String Cheese Incident), Waterjuice (Vaporvent), Lumin with Irina Mikhailova, Yossi Fine (Ex-centric Sound System), Diana Rosa, and MC Yogi, and DJs Rhythmystic (Rhythm Society), Alex Theory (Mystic Vibration), Irina Mikhailova (Cyberset), Neptune (Beat Church), Dov (Cyberset, Muti Music), Goz (Cyberset), Omer (Harbin), Timonkey (Muti Music), and David Shamanik (Rhythm Society). Fri/25, 7 p.m.- 4 a.m., $20-$25. Temple, 540 Howard, SF. (415) 750-0971.
CARNAVAL SAN FRANCISCO’S ECO-GREEN FESTIVAL
Zona Verde is the theme of this green fete – which organizers are claiming as the largest outdoor green event in the city. Tribal DJs will be force along with sacred healing ceremonies, art installations, and natural home and alternative energy vendors. May 24-25. time to be announced. Harrison and Treat at 17th St., SF.
HARMONY FESTIVAL
Alongside eco-awareness booths and holistic health product peddlers are performances by Angelique Kidjo, Paula Cole, Mickey Hart Band with Steve Kimock and George Porter, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, Arrested Development, Jackie Greene, Charlie Musselwhite, Mike Stern Band with Victor Wooten and Friends, the Devil Makes Three, and the Amazing Techno-Tribal Community Dance. June 6, 2-10 p.m.; June 7, 10 a.m.-10 p.m.; June 8, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. with after-hours shows from 10 p.m.-2 a.m.; $25-$139. Sonoma County Fairgrounds, 1350 Bennett Valley Road, Santa Rosa.
Leno on Newsom’s budget cuts
Assemblymember Mark Leno, who is challenging state Sen. Carole Migden in the June primary, responded this afternoon to our editorial on Newsom’s budget cuts.
Migden responded earlier today.
Here’s Leno’s statement:
Dear Bay Guardian Editors,
You are absolutely right to assert that the Federal Government has turned its back on urban America and the Governor’s repeal of the Vehicle License Fee (VLF) has left our City in extremely challenged fiscal health. I agree with you, Tim, that new revenue is needed for the City. Current state law gives local government few options.
For that reason I have and am presently authoring legislation to bring more local control to our revenue streams, so that we can guarantee that San Francisco’s budget is not balanced on the backs of those who can least afford it.
In 2005, I authored AB 799, co-sponsored by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, SF Labor Council, Board of Supervisors and the Mayor, which would have allowed San Francisco voters to restore their own VLF which would have brought approximately 70 million new dollars to San Francisco. Unfortunately the Governor vetoed the bill.
I brought the bill back in 2007 as AB 1590. Unfortunately, it got held up in the Senate. I am working with all four co-sponsors to shake it loose this year.
Back in 2003, when cities and counties were faced with huge cuts, I authored AB 1690 to bring more revenue to the local level. The measure would have allowed voters to decide to levy a local income tax, which could have eased our way and pre-empted painful cuts to our local budget. That measure, though passed through the Assembly, was also held up in the Senate.
The Mayor and Board of Supervisors have a great challenge on their hands. The fiscal crisis we face is nothing short of tragic. I will continue to use my voice to argue that the cuts considered must be equitable, and those with the least should suffer the least.
I continue to argue that we have a revenue problem, not a spending problem. To forestall mean spirited cuts, we need to be as creative as possible to create new revenue streams. Otherwise, we will be continually faced with Sophie’s Choices.
Sincerely,
Mark Leno
And thanks to Mark for sending that, and for pushing for state legislation that would give cities more ways to raise revenue. I have always been impressed by his willingness to do that and his creative approaches.
I will note, for the record, that Leno declined to say anything critical of Gavin Newsom and his budget decisions.
Moth Bills, Moth Balls
The Assembly Agriculture Committee passed two pieces of legislation today authored by Assemblymember John Laird (D-Santa Cruz) and related to the Light Brown Apple Moth controversy.
“We need to back up and walk through each outstanding issue in a science-based, clear way using neutral third party experts,” said Laird, who has been dealing with the LBAM furor since last summer, and has one of the best website’s in terms of tracking the progression of arguments and lawsuits related to the moth.
So, just what will Laird’s legislation do?
ACR 117, an Assembly Concurrent Resolution, calls on the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the Department of Pesticide Regulation, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and other relevant state departments to address unresolved health, scientific and efficacy issues surrounding the CDFA’s Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM )eradication plans.
The resolution passed 5-3, and next heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
“It is the responsibility of our government to demonstrate its LBAM actions are necessary and do not compromise human or environmental health,” said Mr. Laird. “It isn’t the responsibility of the people to demonstrate the reverse.”
AB 2763, the Invasive Pest Planning Act of 2008 – would require the CDFA to create a list of invasive animals, plants, and insects that have a reasonable likelihood of entering California for which an eradication program might be appropriate.
For each invasive on the list, the department would prepare a written assessment on the most appropriate method of eradication. If pesticides were to be used, the assessment would have to discuss application methods, the chemistry of the pesticide and its inert ingredients, impacts on public health and the environment. If a pest was found, the department would have to notify various local agencies, hold public hearings, and comply with other requirements. The bill passed by a vote of 8-0 and next heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
“The California Food & Agriculture’s Light Brown Apple Moth program has led to more contacts with my office than any single issue during my time in Sacramento,” said Laird. “Clearly, the state was not adequately prepared for LBAM. This bill aims to put in place a pest planning process that prevents the kind of public fear and confusion we’ve experienced with LBAM.”
Whether any of these efforts will succeed in derailing the feds’ trade agreement-driven plan to spray for the moth this summer in Santa Cruz, Monterey and the BAy Area counties remains to be seen.
Bill Maxfield
Director of Communications
Assemblymember John Laird
831-596-0910 Mobile
831-425-1503 Santa Cruz
916-319-2027 Sacramento
“Public confidence is at issue,” said Assemblymember Laird, who has been living through the ongoing LBAM spraying nightmare since last summer, when the feds announced they were spraying Laiird’s hometown, “We need to back up and walk through each outstanding issue in a science-based, clear way using neutral third party experts.”
ACR 117, an Assembly Concurrent Resolution that calls on the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), the Department of Pesticide Regulation, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and other relevant state departments to address unresolved health, scientific and efficacy issues surrounding the CDFA’s Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM )eradication plans. The resolution passed by a vote of 5-3 and next heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
“As stated in the resolution, it is the responsibility of our government to demonstrate its LBAM actions are necessary and do not compromise human or environmental health,” said Mr. Laird. “It isn’t the responsibility of the people to demonstrate the reverse.”
AB 2763, the Invasive Pest Planning Act of 2008 – would require the CDFA to create a list of invasive animals, plants, and insects that have a reasonable likelihood of entering California for which an eradication program might be appropriate. For each invasive on the list, the department would prepare a written assessment on the most appropriate method of eradication. If pesticides were to be used, the assessment would have to discuss application methods, the chemistry of the pesticide and its inert ingredients, impacts on public health and the environment. If a pest was found, the department would have to notify various local agencies, hold public hearings, and comply with other requirements. The bill passed by a vote of 8-0 and next heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
“The California Food & Agriculture’s Light Brown Apple Moth program has led to more contacts with my office than any single issue during my time in Sacramento,” said Mr. Laird. “Clearly, the state was not adequately prepared for LBAM. This bill aims to put in place a pest planning process that prevents the kind of public fear and confusion we’ve experienced with LBAM.”
For more information on the Light Brown Apple Moth issue—including key documents, correspondence, news and other information, visit Assemblymember Laird’s LBAM resource page: http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/a27/moth.htm
###
Bill Maxfield
Director of Communications
Assemblymember John Laird
831-596-0910 Mobile
831-425-1503 Santa Cruz
916-319-2027 Sacramento
TIny Moths, Giant Misinformation campaigns
Just when you think there couldn’t be more to be said on the moths, a new flurry of arguments crops up.
Two competing pieces out today, both using science to support the pro and cons of aerial spraying for the Light Brown Apple Moth.
In a piece called “Moths and Misinformation”, A.G. Kawamura, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, addresses misinformation about the CDFA’s aerial spraying program for the Light Brown Apple Moth.
These include claims that the pheromone products are untested, that we are all going to be guinea pigs, that the treatments caused a red tide, poisoned the water, and even killed waterfowl.
And then there are what Kawamura characterizes as, “misleading and inaccurate references to describe a pheromone, including hormone, carcinogen, mutagen, endocrine disruptor and other scary-sounding descriptions.”
“I urge the public to seek out scientific studies and historical data,” Kawamura states.
Meanwhile, Dr. Dennis Knepp and Dr. Jeff Haferman, two Monterey area scientists, claim to have unearthed serious errors in an analysis of the particle size of the Suterra pesticide spray being used to combat LBAM.
We can see how small the moths are, but just how big are the particles in the aerial pheromone spray?
Well, Knepp and Haferman recently reviewed particle-size data from Suterra and provided by CDFA. They claim to have found that the CDFA made serious errors in their review of the Suterra data.
“The CDFA states in their analysis that only 1.2% of the particles in the Checkmate spray were smaller than 10 microns, which is a critical size for inhalation to deep within the lungs.
“They based their computations on particle volume, not number of particles, which is simply incorrect,” Haferman stated. Knepp explained that when the analysis is corrected “we find the average particle size to be about 17 microns with significant numbers of much smaller particles.”
“Our analysis shows that the small particle sizes from the Checkmate spray can cause significant health issues, and the CDFA needs to seriously reexamine their findings” said Knepp.
Knepp has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in the areas of Geophysics and Electrical Engineering. Haferman has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, and has published over a dozen papers in the fields of Meteorology and Engineering, and also sits on the Monterey City Council.
The seeds of health
› culture@sfbg.com
One warm winter day at Ruus Elementary in south Hayward, Chef Tiffany sweeps a roomful of second-graders into their only cooking class of the year. Before long, they’re shouting out the names of body parts that benefit from fresh veggies: "Eyes!" "Teeth!" "Heart!" And even if Swiss chard elicits a wary silence, the kids already know spinach from bok choy, and Chef Tiffany, known to adults as Tiffany Chenoweth, smoothly transitions from her talking points about leafy greens into the hands-on section of the class (after delivering a squirt of antibacterial gel onto the palms of each child). Meanwhile, out past the bustling blacktop, garden instructor Rachel Harris walks an ethnically diverse group of third graders through the concept of soil enrichment. They reluctantly tear down a lush patch of fava beans that reaches over their heads, pretending to pull nitrogen out of the air (hands up!) and deposit it into the soil to benefit spring crops (hands down!). This is school garden time.
If there’s a downside to teaching children how to nurture a green, nutritious school garden, it’s hard to fathom. The list of touted benefits is lengthy: students reap fresh air and physical exercise, hands-on participation, awareness of the natural environment, so called "school bonding," and an unprecedented taste for raw spinach. For school faculty, there are welcome breaks in the classroom regimen, an engaging outlet for unruly pupils, and a bridge to involvement with volunteers in the community. And parents get to share skills and experience, from farm expertise to carpentry, that once felt irrelevant to an academic setting.
But in an educational realm where standards reign supreme, the benefits of gardens can be tough to quantify. In promotional literature, the Network for a Healthy California, a funder of Hayward Unified School District’s program, stresses connections that reflect common sense, like the idea that making fresh vegetables readily accessible to low-income families will reduce the growing rate of obesity. But the future of garden instruction in the long term, when inroads against sprawling ills like obesity might become broadly measurable, is unpredictable when grants and appropriations change from year to year. Even in the Bay Area, where strawberry patches and kale flourish beside asphalt schoolyards, garden educators continually scramble to afford basic supplies, sometimes spending more time cultivating donors than mulching vegetables.
That’s how it often feels to Miriam Feiner, program director for the Willie Brown Jr. Academy Garden. "We’re pretty much our own two-person nonprofit," Feiner says of herself and assistant Joti Levy at an Arbor Day work party on March 8, where dozens of native seedlings — coffeeberry, sticky monkey flower, and other species attractive to bees — awaited planting on a weedy slope.
The duo’s fundraising efforts have been rewarded with sizable grants from SF Environment’s Environmental Justice Grant Program and Alec Shaw of the Shaw Fund, as well as partnerships with San Francisco Beautiful and Friends of the Urban Forest.
Even more rewarding though, Feiner says, weekly garden-based classes at Willie Brown have students literally begging for kale. But she concedes that ultimately the current model, which is based on constant fundraising, is "not sustainable."
Difficulties in funding aside, people like Abby Jaramillo, the youthful director of San Francisco nonprofit Urban Sprouts, will gladly explain why it’s important to find a way to sustain such programs. When Jaramillo and her team took over the Excelsior Garden, shared by the June Jordan School for Equity and Excelsior Middle School, she said she was "up to her armpits in fennel."
But the overgrown herbs weren’t the only sign of disrepair. "It was a struggling middle school desperately in need of something that would make the students have a stake," she said. Describing the community’s "food environment," a term of art in nutrition education, she listed liquor store fare and junk food as the most prevalent options. Five years and six new school gardens later, Jaramillo thinks school administrators and teachers are genuinely on board with Urban Sprouts, whose mission is to serve low-income youth in San Francisco. "When the kids come outside; they are leaders, teaching each other how to plant," she says. "We need to make the garden a core, that will remain here and make a difference."
Whether that happens depends on whether garden education becomes institutionalized, not just a supplemental benefit reliant on the assiduousness of leaders like Jaramillo and Feiner. "My dream," Jaramillo says, "is that it would be like gym." That is to say, an expected feature of the precollege landscape. I asked her if there were models for this kind of integration. She, and everyone else I spoke with, pointed to the Edible Schoolyard, the celebrated collaboration between local-food pioneer Alice Waters and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. At the Schoolyard, a beneficiary of the Chez Panisse foundation, the perpetual cycle of seasons meshes with the academic year as rising eighth graders ceremonially plant corn for incoming sixth graders to harvest in the fall, suggesting a garden practice that is truly rooted in the school experience.
According to the San Francisco Unified School District, out of 104 K-12 school sites in the city, 36 maintain "green schoolyards," with 45 new gardens planned over the next four years. Statewide, $10.8 million from Sacramento was awarded in the form of California Instructional School Garden Program grants in October. It’s not nearly enough to fulfill the California Department of Education’s stated goal of "a garden in every school." But as Jordan students prepare to sow enough lettuce to provide the entire school with a lunch salad for one day, Jaramillo is hopeful that showing even a small percentage of kids where food comes from will have a lasting effect, with lessons about healthy eating rippling out through them to their families and into the community.
With the infrastructure of garden education still in its founding stages, assessing its efficacy poses a conundrum. The kind of life-changing transformations that green schoolyard proponents hope for might not be apparent in the short term, while slashed budgets threaten to endanger the longevity of even the most lovingly planted plots. Still, educators like Harris aren’t daunted by the relative nonstandardization of their field. She’s seen the results first-hand — like the student at a Hayward school barbecue who traded a Butterfinger for a second helping of grilled zucchini. After our interview, as Harris left the grocery store where she’ll teach her class to distinguish between processed and fresh food, a Ruus student in pigtails greeted her excitedly. "Miss Rachel!" she cried, throwing her head back with a wide grin. "I like garden!"
Leno, Migden, and the Newsom cuts
EDITORIAL The closure this week of the venerable Haight Ashbury Food Program, which for more than a quarter century has served hot meals to hundreds of people a day, is another bitter reminder of what a rotten time it is to be poor in San Francisco.
Mayor Gavin Newsom’s approach to the city’s budget problems is to cut programs that serve the needy: Buster’s Place, the city’s only 24-hour drop-in center for homeless people, is closed. The public health nursing program is shutting down. Frontline city workers are getting laid off, and jobs will go unfilled. And there is no talk in the mayor’s office of any sort of comprehensive plan to raise new revenue to close what has become a structural budget gap of more than $300 million.
Yes, a big part of the fault lies in Washington DC and Sacramento. The federal government has abandoned American cities. The state is wracked with its own paralyzing budget problems (caused in large part by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to eliminate the vehicle license fee). So money that San Francisco used to get without any direct effort — that is, without asking local residents and businesses to pay for it — is gone. And while San Francisco’s representatives in Sacramento have worked hard to win back money for cities and force the governor to moderate his cuts, the fact is that it’s unlikely San Francisco can count on any outside help during the next few years. The ugly budget choices have to be made at home.
That’s why it’s critical that every progressive leader in town be willing to take on the mayor’s brutal budget cuts and push for humane alternatives. That includes the two people running in a highly contested race for state Senate.
Carole Migden and Mark Leno are both seeking progressive support in the June primary. Both have good cases to make based on their records. But we need to see more than just good votes (and good legislation) in the state capital; like a lot of voters, we’re also looking to see which candidate will use the powerful seat and its bully pulpit to promote progressive values in the city.
Both candidates have long connections to the powerful forces that seek to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Migden is close to Don Fisher, the Republican who pours huge gobs of money into regressive local measures and candidates. Leno has been endorsed by Newsom.
But with the election less than two months away, we’d like to hear both of them say, loudly and publicly, that the Newsom cuts are wrong and unacceptable, that the budget pain should be shared by the wealthy, and that the city needs to look at new taxes before it eliminates any more programs for the needy.