Jobs

Don’t nobody give a damn about us!

Mary Magee
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As Supervisor John Avalos’ proposal to mandate local hiring for publicly-funded construction projects heads for a committee hearing next week, local hiring protests continue to break out around UCSF’s Mission Bay groundbreaking celebrations for a $1.5 billion hospital project that the UC Board of Regent recently approved.

The problem, according to community advocates, revolves around UC’s apparent absence of a community hiring plan. Rumor has is that local residents will only get 12-13 percent of the construction jobs, even though the site is only a T-Third ride away from Bayview Hunters Point and other low-income communities where unemployment rates have risen steeply in the last four years.

Yesterday evening, I went to a university-community celebration where UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann was in attendance. So, I asked her about UC’s local hiring plan. Desmond-Hellmann said I’d need to speak to UCSF’s Barbara French, who recently advised community-based organizations that construction at the site won’t start until December, and that the groundbreaking activities are happening now to take advantage of the weather.

So, while I’m waiting to hear back from French, check out a slideshow (see above) of the Oct. 27 local hiring protest at UC Mission Bay. There’s been coverage of how MC Hammer talked to the protesters Oct. 26, when the Secret Service got upset about the local-hiring demonstration outside the groundbreaking that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attended. And how Hammer came back with a “we want jobs” message.

But there has been no coverage of how filmmaker Kevin Epps (who is responsible for Straight Outta Hunters Point and Black Rock) was on hand filming the Oct. 27 protest, or how UC’s Terry Rawlins dropped by, or how Terry Anders of the Anders & Anders Foundation) took part in the local hiring protest saying, “This is the first piñata we want to crack open,” or how  Mindy Kener, who is also with Anders & Anders, added, “We want all the candy to fall out.” Or how Aboriginal Blacks United’s Alex Prince, who led the protest to demand fair and equal access to high-paying union jobs on the UC Mission Bay project near the economically depressed Third Street corridor, was accompanied by Heaven, ABU’s cuter than cute mascot dog.

“We want to make sure folks get trained and everything that’s necessary, so there is no dispute,” Prince told me. “UC has not really been helpful. They just said they want to meet with us.”

Osiris Coalition member Greg Doxey, who helped negotiate labor’s community benefits agreement with Lennar in 2008, emphasized the importance of passing local hiring legislation that has some teeth.
“We’ve found that no matter how much dollars is committed for training, it doesn’t help if developer is not committed to doing any training,” Doxey said. “That’s why we are supporting Local SF, Sup. John Avalos’ legislation. We want some teeth. All we have right now is a good faith policy. Avalos’ legislation will give us teeth to set fines to be put in place.”

Charles Hopkins, another local resident, said all the community wants is its fair share.
“It’s sustainable for San Francisco to have local hire,” Hopkins said.

A group of unemployed Asian-American members of the iron unions also participated in the ABU rally where they held up signs saying “Show us the $$$”.

An employee of Cambridge, which along with San Francisco-based DPR, is one of the prime contractors at the site, did come out to talk to the protesters.
“If folks want to put their names on the list, they can,” the Cambridge employee, who declined to give his name, said. “But the unions have their own procedures, when it comes to who they dispatch, including seniority.”

Mindy Kener of the BVHP-based Anders and Anders Foundation said she’d like to see more women hired on local construction sites.“The women want to work and get off the welfare lines,, they need to work and it’ll make a big difference in our neighborhood if we put people to work who live on the T-Third line,” Kener said. “All we need is for UC to give the green light to put our neighborhood to work.”Carlos Rodriguez, a Local 261 member who has been out of work for two years, worries that workers are being forgotten while deal making is going on.“I see how unions talk to management, they forget about the laborers,” Rodriguez said.

A man on a bicycle stopped to see what was going on.
“It’s not going to work, when they can get illegal aliens to work for $6.50 an hour,” the man said, as he resumed his peddling.

Across the street, filmmaker Kevin Epps also indicated that he thought part of the local hire problem is rooted in racism.
“Deeply rooted, institutionalized racism,” Epps said. “We are talking about power, and power doesn’t give up without another power taking it away.”
Standing nearby was UC contract compliance manager Terry Rawlins, who clarified that UC isn’t currently hiring folks to work on the construction site.
But doesn’t the university have leverage?

“Not directly,” Rawlins said, “We try to establish goals, based on cooperation with unions, and without violating any bargaining agreements.”

But UCSF Director of Design and Construction J.Stuart Eckblad told the Guardian that he thought the workers were asking for the right thing.
“I’m all for maximizing the opportunities and participation of the local community,” Eckblad said.” The question is what is realistic, and there are issues of what is really available with labor and the trades.”

Joshua Arce of the Brightline Defense Project noted that folks have been distracted by Lennar’s shipyard project from the reality that there are 6,000 jobs coming on line, a stone’s throw from the Bayview, the Mission and Market Street.
“What is equitable?” Arce asked. “A good faith approach, a market-based approach or a mandatory approach? At the end of the day, it’s about equity, and no one would dispute that this situation is inequitable. Let’s just agree that it’s not equitable [to have no local hiring plan] on a big project like this in a community that is facing such high unemployment levels.”

“There are hundreds of good-paying, union jobs on this projects while we have people in our communities that are dying for lack of work,” ABU president James Richards told me. “We have qualified union workers standing outside the job site that are ready, willing, and able to work and if the community doesn’t work, no one works.Good faith efforts have never worked and now they want us to be fooled again. So, we are going to step it up, and we don’t give a damn about the unions, either. The person who fights for these jobs, deserves these jobs. So, let’s begin to tell the truth. Many of the folks in the labor unions don’t speak English, they are not from San Francisco, and most are not even from this country. Everyone is dancing around the truth. Everyone knows the truth, but they don’t speak it.”

But ABU’s tent looked inclusive at the protest, Arce noted, as he pointed  out the power of teaming up with all marginalized groups in San Francisco.

“I could go for that,” Richards said.  “We got blacks, Mexicans, Asians, whites, everybody in ABU. It’s ain’t no racist thing.  But let us work, too. “Why do we always have to get in last? Don’t nobody give a damn about us! 

Avalos: I have not buckled to anyone’s pressure over local hiring

Mary Magee
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Avalos: I have not buckled to anyone’s pressure over local hiring

Last week, Sup. John Avalos introduced Local SF legislation to require contractors to meet a local hiring goal of 50 percent. And as the Guardian reported at the time, Avalos’ legislation represents a major departure from the city’s First Source Program, which only requires contractors on publicly subsidized projects to show “good faith” efforts to meet 50 percent goal.  Avalos’ legislation came on the heels of a report from the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development that showed only a 20 percent local hire rate in 29 publicly funded projects, despite the existence of First Source.

“My legislation will ensure that San Franciscans have a guaranteed shot to work on the City’s public works projects and that the local dollars invested in public infrastructure be recycled back into San Francisco’s economy and local communities,” Avalos said last week, noting that his legislation was developed over a series of stakeholders meetings with reps from city agencies, the Mayor’s Office, labor and building trades, the environmental community, neighborhood advocates, contractors, local hiring advocates and unemployed workers. And he vowed to keep this roundtable approach going as his legislation moves forward.

So we were surprised to read a Weekly blog post today that claimed that Avalos had allegedly buckled to union pressure and watered down his local hire requirements. Especially since his legislation hasn’t even had its Nov. 8 hearing before the Board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee…

Reached by phone Avalos clarified that he has not buckled to anyone’s pressure.
“I haven’t backed down on anything,” Avalos said. “And I have not made any amendments to my legislation. I did say when I introduced my legislation that this is a starting point and we’ll see where it ends up. We could pass legislation that wants 50 percent local hiring next year, and it would probably get vetoed and it wouldn’t be realistic. So, we have to phase it in and make sure we are creating a system that is going to push the trades to be more inclusive of local residents.”

Avalos noted that some trades and unions are already doing a good job of hiring San Francisco residents on public works projects, but reiterated that the city’s current policy only requires contractors to present paperwork to show they made a “good faith” effort—and that this approach has fallen far short of the city’s 50 percent local hire goal.

Avalos’ legislation–and his claims about First Source’s shortcomings–are  backed up by two recent studies.

The first report, released by Chinese for Affirmative Action and Brightline Defense Project this August, was titled “The Failure of Good Faith.” It showed that the city’s current policy only “yielded roughly 24 percent on employment opportunities” on public construction projects in San Francisco.

The second report, released by L. Luster & Associates on October 18, was titled “Labor Market Analysis San Francisco Construction Industry.” It confirmed that the construction workforce statewide has been in a “free-fall of job losses for the past four years.”

Noting that the Bay Area has not been as hard hit as other regions in California, the Luster report observed that the tri-county district of San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties, which had 45,100 construction jobs in August 2006, “lost nearly one-third of these jobs falling to 31,200 construction jobs by May 2010.”

“In San Francisco, unemployment in the construction sector has had a particularly negative impact on the city’s less educated residents,” the report stated. “For them, construction has provided access to higher paying jobs in a labor market that otherwise might provide them access mainly to positions paying lower end wages. Any local hire effort will be undertaken against the backdrop of this unprecedented construction job loss, and resulting unemployment among the existing San Francisco construction workers.”

One such group of unemployed workers—some of them in a union, others not—could be seen protesting yesterday outside the gates of the construction site on 16th Street in Mission Bay where UCSF has been celebrating the groundbreaking of its new Medical Center, a $1.5 billion project to be funded “through a combination of debt financing, philanthropic gifts and hospital reserves,” according to UC press releases.

But in an email to Joshua Arce of Brightline Defense, UCSF’s Barbara French noted that though UC is “actively working now to evaluate the workforce needs for every trade, for every phase of the project, and intend to make those public in December”, UC has not started construction on the project and won’t until December.
“ We haven’t signed the contract with the general contractor and we don’t yet have our permits,’ French wrote. “ The community may have believed that the celebrations this week truly marked the start of active construction. Not so. These were community celebrations held now in the hopes of getting good weather. “

Meanwhile, Avalos acknowledges that UC is not under the jurisdiction of San Francisco.
“But I know that they are doing a critical amount of building, and investing tax payer dollars there, so therefore the community should have some benefit from that, even though it’s complicated by this being the state’s money, so you could make the argument that all of California’s workers should have access,” Avalos told the Guardian. “But this land use impacts the surrounding community, so it makes sense that we have local hire legislation and access to serious end-use jobs at the hospital, which will include medical and support staff, building and janitorial maintenance and cafeteria related work.”

Avalos noted that the city is building infrastructure all around that project, including parks, Muni and light rail spruce-ups.
“There are huge surrounding investments,” Avalos said.

Either way, here’s hoping that by December, when folks begin to stress about providing for their families over the holiday season, all the workers in the following video clip will be able to put down their bullhorns and pick up decent-paying work, instead. And that this work will last for more than a couple of days.

Civil rights groups demand Secure-Comm documents from ICE

Mary Magee
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Civil rights groups demand Secure-Comm documents from ICE

In a turnabout from the usual immigration-related situation (in which ICE demands documents from immigrants) civil rights groups in Washington, DC. Arlington, VA. Santa Clara, CA. and San Francisco are requesting the release of documents concerning opt-out procedures in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s controversial “Secure Communities” program.

Signed by the Arlington Coalition Against “Secure Communities” (S-Comm) Program, Asian Law Caucus, Asian Law Alliance, Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, Causa Justa: Just Cause (CJJC), Center for Employment Training- San Jose, Central American Resource Center, Chinese for Affirmative Action, Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, Communities United Against Violence, DC Jobs with Justice, Empower DC, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Instituto Familiar de la Raza, La Raza Centro Legal , National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, Plymouth Congregational UCC Board of Social Action, Sacred Heart Community Services, San Francisco Day Labor Program Services, Immigrant Rights, and Education Network, Silicon Valley Alliance for Immigration Reform, Silicon Valley DeBug, Somos Mayfair, Steering Committee for Immigration Reform, JFI San Jose Tenants and Workers United and Young Workers United, the statement that these groups released today reads as follows:

”We are four municipalities that have formally requested to opt-out of the federal immigration enforcement, “Secure Communities” (i.e., “S-Comm”) program,” their press release stated. “We did so after participating in town hall meetings, debate, testimony, research, and democratic processes that culminated with representatives in Washington DC, Santa Clara, California, Arlington, Virginia, and San Francisco clearly voting to opt-out of sharing information with ICE. “

“We did so because we believe in preserving public safety for everyone in our diverse cities, and also because we reject a program that disguises a record number of deportations (392,862) as a safety initiative rather than a humanitarian and moral crisis.”

”To be clear, our counties never ‘opted-in’ to this dangerous ICE program in the first place. This program, which has been shrouded in secrecy, was imposed on our counties without the input of our local government, communities, local law enforcement and in the case of San Francisco against their explicit written requests. Now that Washington DC has formally opted out, we ask that ICE immediately and without further delay let our counties and any other counties requesting to do so out of S-Comm.”

”We are committed to moving ahead with the opt out process despite ICE now contradicting itself and claiming the program is compulsory. We support CCR, NDLON, and Cordozo Law School going to court today to demand release of what ICE has refused to divulge. The emergency injunction filed today does what should be automatic in any democracy, it seeks to make public information on S-Comm and our ability to opt-out by stopping the sharing of any fingerprints by these jurisdictions with ICE.. This necessary injunction comes at the beginnings of negotiations with ICE and local jurisdictions scheduled for Nov. 5 to Nov. 9.”

Cash not care

Andrew Lam
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Cash not care

sarah@sfbg.com

With the general election just days away, campaign disclosure reports show that downtown interests are spending huge amounts of money to create a more conservative San Francisco Board of Supervisors and to pass Proposition B, Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s effort to make city workers pay more for their pensions and health insurance.

Much of the spending is coming from sources hostile to programs designed to protect tenants in the city, including rent control and limits on the conversion on rental housing units to condominiums. An ideological flip of the board, which currently has a progressive majority, could also have big implications on who becomes the next mayor if Gavin Newsom wins his race for lieutenant governor.

At press time, downtown groups were far outspending their progressive counterparts through a series of independent expenditure committees, most of which are controlled by notorious local campaign attorney Jim Sutton (see “The political puppeteer,” 2/4/04) in support of supervisorial candidates Mark Farrell in District 2, Theresa Sparks in District 6, Scott Wiener in District 8, and Steve Moss in District 10.

Prop. B has also been a big recipient of downtown’s cash, although labor groups have pushed back strongly with their own spending to try to kill the measure, which is their main target in this election.

But the biggest spender in this election appears to be Thomas J. Coates, 56, a major investor in apartments and mobile homes and a demonstrated enemy of rent control. He alarmed progressive groups by giving at least $250,000 to groups that support Farrell, Sparks, Wiener, Moss, and Prop. G, legislation that Sup. Sean Elsbernd placed on the ballot to cut transit operator wages and change Muni work rules.

Although Coates declines to identify with a political party on his voter registration, he donated $2,000 to President George W. Bush in 2004. More significantly, he was the biggest individual donor in California’s November 2008 election, when he contributed $1 million to Prop. 98, which sought to repeal rent control in California and limit the government’s right to acquire private property by eminent domain.

Coates, who is also a yachting enthusiast and sits on San Francisco’s America’s Cup Organizing Committee (ACOC), donated $100,000 on Oct. 20 for Farrell, $45,000 for Sparks, $45,000 for Moss, and $10,000 for Wiener through third-party independent expenditure committees such as the Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth.

The group has already received thousands of dollars in soft money from the San Francisco Police Officer’s Association, the Building Operators and Managers Association, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, and SEIU-United Healthcare Workers, which supports a high-end hospital and housing complex on Cathedral Hill.

Those downtown groups have spent close to $200,000 on English and Chinese language mailers and robo calls in support of Sparks, Wiener, and Moss in hopes of securing a right-wing shift on the board.

Progressive groups including California Nurses Association, the San Francisco Tenants Union, and the SF Labor Council have tried to fight back in the supervisorial races. While downtown groups spent more than $100,000 promoting Sparks in D6, labor and progressive groups spent $13,000 opposing Sparks and $72,000 supporting progressive D6 candidate Debra Walker.

In D8, progressive groups that include teachers, nurses, and transit riders have outspent the downtown crowd, plunking down $40,000 to oppose Wiener and $90,000 to support progressive candidate Rafael Mandelman. So far, downtown groups have spent about $100,000 to support Wiener.

But in D10, the district with the biggest concentration of low-income families and communities of color, downtown interests spent $52,000 supporting Moss and $5,000 on Lynette Sweet while the Tenants Union was only able to summon $4,000 against Moss. The SF Building and Construction Trades Council spent $4,000 on Malia Cohen.

But that’s small potatoes compared to what downtown’s heavy-hitters are spending. The so-called Coalition for Sensible Government, which got a $100,000 donation from the San Francisco Association of Realtors, has already collectively spent $96,000 in support of Sparks, Wiener, Moss, Sweet, Rebecca Prozan in D8, Prop. G and Prop. L (sit-lie) and to oppose Prop. M (the progressive plan for police foot patrols) and Prop. N (a transfer tax on properties worth more than $5 million).

The Coalition for Responsible Growth, founded by Anthony Guilfoyle, the father of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s ex-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle (who now works as a Fox News personality), has received $85,000 from the Committee on Jobs, $60,000 from the Realtors, and $35,000 from SF Forward. It has focused on spending in support of Prop. G and producing a voter guide for Plan C, the conservative group that supports Sparks, Wiener, Sweet, and Moss

Coates’ donations raise questions about his preferred slate’s views on tenant and landlord rights. A principal in Jackson Square Properties, which specializes in apartments and mobile homes, Coates is the founding partner of Arroya & Coates, a commercial real estate firm whose clients include Walgreens, Circuit City, and J.P. Morgan Investment Management. In 2008, when he backed Prop. 98, Coates told the San Francisco Chronicle that rent control “doesn’t work.”

Ted Gullicksen, director of the SF Tenants Union (SFTU), which has collectively spent $30,000 opposing Sparks, Wiener, and Moss, is disturbed that Coates spent so much in support of this trio.

“Coates was the main funder of Prop. 98,” Gullicksen explained. “His property is in Southern California. He’s pumping a lot of money into supervisors. And he clearly has an agenda that we fear Moss, Sparks, and Wiener share — which is to make the existence of rent control an issue they will take up in the future if elected to the board.”

That threat got progressive and labor groups to organize an Oct. 26 protest outside Coates’ San Francisco law office, with invitations to the event warning, “Be there or be evicted!”

Sparks, Moss, and Wiener all claim to support rent control, despite their support by someone who seeks to abolish it. “I answered such on my questionnaire to the SFTU, which chose to ignore it,” Sparks told the Guardian via text message. “In addition, I’ve been put out of apartments twice in SF, once due to the Ellis Act. They ignore that fact as well.”

Records show that in May 2009, Moss — who bought a rent-controlled apartment building near Dolores Park in D8 for $1.6 million and he lived there from the end of 2007 to the 2010, when he decided to run for office in D10 — served a “notice to quit or cure” on a tenant who complained about the noise from Moss’ apartment. Ultimately, Moss settled without actually evicting his tenant.

“I read about Coats’ [sic] contribution in Bay Citizen,” Moss wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian. “This donation was made to an independent expenditure committee over which I have no control and almost no knowledge. I have stated throughout the campaign, and directly to the Tenants Union, that I believe current rent control policy should remain unmolested.”

But Moss is with downtown on other key issues. He supports Newsom’s sit-lie legislation and the rabidly anti-tenant Small Property Owners Association, whose endorsement he previously called a “mistake.”

Yet Moss, who sold a condo on Potrero Hill in 2007 for the same price he paid for the entire building in 2001, seems to voice more sympathy for property owners than renters, who make up about two-thirds of city residents. He told us, “Landlords feel that they are responsible for maintaining costly older buildings and that they are not provided with ways to upgrade their units in ways that share costs with tenants.”

Another realm where downtown seems to be trying to flip the Board of Supervisors on a significant agenda item is on health care, particularly the California Pacific Medical Center proposal to build a high-end hospital and housing project on Cathedral Hill in exchange for rebuilding St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission.

The project has divided local labor unions. UHW supports the project and a slate of candidates that its parent union, Service Employees International Union, is opposing through SEIU Local 1021, which is supporting more progressive candidates. The California Nurses Association also opposes the project and candidates such as Wiener who back it.

“A recent mailer by CNA falsely says that CPMC is closing St. Luke’s and Davies,” CPMC CEO Warren Browner recently complained in a letter to the Board of Supervisors. “We are not. We are committed to building a state-of-the-art, high-quality replacement hospital at St. Luke’s and continuing to upgrade Davies.”

But the CPMC rebuild is contingent on the board approving the Cathedral Hill project. So the CNA mailer focused on what could happen if the city rejects the CPMC project: “We could lose two San Francisco hospitals if Scott Wiener is elected supervisor.”

SEIU-UHW’s alliance with downtown groups and its use of member dues to attack progressive candidates places it at odds with SEIU Local 1021 and the SF Labor Council, which has endorsed Janet Reilly in D2, Walker in D6, Mandelman in D8, and Cohen (first choice) and Chris Jackson (second choice) in D10.

“We’re really disappointed that there are labor organizations that feel they have to team up with Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which is against health care [it challenged the city’s Healthy San Francisco program all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court], and with CPMC, which is working to keep nurses from joining a union,” Labor Council Director Tim Paulson said. “This alliance does not reflect what the San Francisco labor movement is about.”

Paulson said that the Labor Council values “sharing the wealth … So we don’t want Measure B [Jeff Adachi’s pension reform] or K [Newsom’s hotel tax loophole closure, which has a poison pill that would kill Prop. J, the hotel tax increase pushed by labor] or L [Newsom’s sit-lie legislation],” Paulson said.

CPMC’s plan is headed to the board in the next couple months, although Sup. David Campos is proposing that the city create a health services master plan that would determine what city residents actually need. Hospital projects would then be considered based on that health needs assessment, rather than making it simply a land use decision as it is now.

Moss told the Guardian that UHW endorsed him because of his positions on politicians and unions. “I agreed that politicians should get not involved in union politics,” Moss said. “The United Healthcare Workers seem to be a worthy group,” he added. “All they said was that they wanted to make sure that they had access.”

But CNA member Eileen Prendiville, who has been a registered nurse for 33 years, says she was horrified to see UHW members recently oppose Campos’ healthcare legislation. “I was shocked that they were siding with management,” she said.

Prendiville believes UHW is obliged to support CPMC’s Cathedral Hill plan, which is why it is meddling in local politics. In his letter to the board, Browner noted that his company and its parent company, Sutter Health, can’t legally do so directly. “The fact is that CPMC and Sutter Health are 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, nonpartisan organizations, and we neither endorse nor contribute to candidates,” Browner wrote.

“When UHW settled its contract with its members [as part of its fight with the rival National Union of Healthcare Workers], they had to publicly lobby for Cathedral Hill,” Prendiville claimed.

SEIU 1021 member Ed Kinchley, who works in the emergency room at SF General Hospital, is also furious that UHW is pouring money into downtown’s candidates and measures. “UHW isn’t participating in the Labor Council, it’s doing its own thing,” he said.

Kinchley said UHW, which is currently in trusteeship after a power struggle with its former elected leaders, is being controlled by SEIU’s national leaders, not its local membership, which explains why it’s aligned with downtown groups that have long been the enemy of labor.

“Sutter wants a monopoly on private healthcare and people like Rafael Mandelman and Debra Walker have been strong supporters of public healthcare,” Kinchley said. “I want someone who can straight-up say, here’s what’s important for families in San Francisco, especially something as important as healthcare. But it sounds like UHW is teaming up with the Chamber and supporting people who are not progressive.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Moss: the big duck

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Steve Moss: the big duck

WORKING DOGGEDLY TO PIN DOWN THE EDITOR OF THE POTRERO VIEW WHO IS ALSO A CANDIDATE FOR SUPERVISOR FROM DISTRICT 10

We’ve been trying to pin Steve Moss down on some key questions.  Over the weekend, I sent him some questions by email.  He responded, but ducked or ignored the real points and never gave us any straight answers.

Here’s our exchange, my questions and his answers — unedited,  followed by some comments from me as we doggedly try to make sense of where Steve Moss really stands on key issues in the district.

 

Dear Steve,

In your October, pre-election issue of the Potrero View, your signed column
compares the Guardian with Fox News and states that we are both  “advocacy groups disguised as news purveyors” who “whip mostly anonymous commentators on their websites to call political candidates ‘weasle, lying, doucebags’ and worse.” You also state that “these same outlets barely take the time to edit–much less fact check–their stories.”

As you know, our reporter Sarah Phelan has done factual reporting on you and your campaign (http://www.sfbg.com/2010/09/14/five-things-you-should-know-about-steve-moss) and she and I have both checked with you to respond to our points before publication.  We will continue our policy by submitting these email questions to you in advance of publication. Our deadline is 5 p.m. on Monday

l. What specific facts do you find inaccurate in our previous reporting on you and your campaign? (You mixed up a comment on a blog with Phelan’s actual story and reporting. Was this intentional?)

2. How much money have you and your various profit and nonprofit enterprises accepted from PG&E during this past year?

How much money have you accepted in total from PG&E during your many years of operating  your profit and nonprofit enterprises? Why did you change the pro-public power View of Ruth Passen to a PG&E-friendly View under your ownership?  (For example, Passen always supported public power but you as the new owner  refused to support the last public power initiative and said it was “too contentious.”)

3. Campaign finance records show that Thomas Coates, a Republican who spent $l million trying to overturn rent control in California in 2008, has just dumped
$45,000 into the so-called Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth in support of your candidacy.  Public records also show that you served a cure or quit notice
to a tenant in your rent-controlled building in District 8. Would you comment on this? And would you state whether you support or oppose rent control?

4.  On the front page of the October View, your lead story reported on the troubles of the Neighborhood House under the headline, “NABE Reeling Under City Budget Cuts.” Your story noted that the Nabe had lost “nearly $400,000 in funding from the Department of Human Services (DHS) and the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families” and that individual donations had dropped by 75 per cent. The result, your story noted, was that the NABE “has been forced to eliminate teen-focused programming, reduce elementary school offerings by 25 per cent, lay-off staff and impose pay cuts.”

Each year, the NABE sponsors the Potrero Hill festival as a benefit to raise much-needed funds. This year the benefit was more critical than ever to reduce its  crippling deficit. Just as the View was going to press earlier this month,  I got a call at the Guardian from a representative of the festival with a startling bit of information. I was told that you, as the owner and editor-publisher of the View, and a candidate for supervisor from our district, were  refusing to run a full page ad for the festival, a key piece of the NABE’s promotion on the hill,if the ad contained the logo of the Guardian as a festival sponsor. 

The representative was concerned that, if you wouldn’t run the NABE ad, that the Guardian as a media sponsor wouldn’t run a NABE ad in the Guardian.
(I told him not to worry, do what he had to do to get the ad in the View, and that the Guardian would run the ad and double up on its promotion for the festival. The Guardian logo did not appear on the Nabe ad in the View but did appear on all other NABE promotions.)

Why did you make this threat to the NABE and its festival benefit? Were you serious?

5. You said in your endorsement interview at the Guardian that, if you were elected supervisor, you would give up the View. Do you still plan to do that, if elected? If so, how would you do that?

 
 Steve Moss responds:

1.  The entire way you’ve covered the District 10 election has been slanted towards the candidate you prefer, and against the candidates you dislike.  From this perspective the Guardian is not serving the role of a newspaper, but rather is acting as an independent expenditure committee on behalf of its chosen candidates and causes.  I’d be happy to select a panel of five independent journalists — you pick two, I’ll pick two, and the four can pick one — to render an opinion about how you’ve run the Guardian during this election cycle, and how I’ve run the View.

2.  In 2010 I believe SF Power has received less than $25,000 in payments related to the small business demand-response program it operates, as sanctioned by the California Public Utility Commission.  I’ve already provided you and your reporter with multiple responses to your requests about SF Power’s successfull advocacy related to CPUC orders requiring PG&E to fund programs focusing on working families and small businesses, all of which, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, are a matter of public record.

The View has published several articles about community-based energy systems, and effective ways to achieve local control over the power grid, during my tenure as publisher. They are available on our website.

3.  I read about Coats’ contribution in Bay Citizen.  As you know, this donation was made to an independent expenditure committee over which I have no control and almost no knowledge.  I have stated throughout the campaign, and directly to the Tenants Union, that I believe current rent control policy should remain unmolested.

4.  I made no threat to the NABE.  In fact, the festival was featured on the front page of the November issue, with a story inside, and a full page ad.

5.  Yes.  A new editor will be found to run the View if I’m elected to office.

 

Okay, You aren’t responsive.   Let me try again, point by point:

l. I am not running for office. You are.  Please tell me where we are factually wrong in any of our reporting on you and your campaign.

As you know, we have contacted you in advance of publication for comment. And you have written us twice with generalities but no specifics on inaccurate reporting.

2. You defend your PG&E payments on the basis that it’s actually money from the California Public Utilities Commission that PG&E is required by law to put up for energy efficiency projects. However, Loretta Lynch, former president of the CPUC, told me that PG&E decides who gets the money and that fund recipients that “cross PG&E” are in danger of getting their funds cut off.

In other words, if  you  want to continue to fund your organization with upwards of more than $l million over three years, you must avoid angering the utility.  This may explain why the Potrero View under your ownership has switched from its historic position supporting public power under former owner Ruth Passen to going easy on PG&E and ducking a position on the most recent public power initiative (Proposition H).

The background: Your  non profit collected  $1,290,000 from the CPUC for energy efficiency projects over the past three years, according to SF Power’s annual revenues and estimated budgets from 2008 to 2010 as provided on its website.

The breakdown: $500,000 in 2008, $440,000 in 2009, $350,000 in 2010.

You  also got $150,000 from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission in 2008 and $125,000 in 2009.  Your  non profit also got $50,000 chunks each year from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman fund, where his wife Debbie Findling works.   The Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund kicked in $5,000 in 2008 and 2009.  The  Potrero View contributed $5,000 in 2008, $4,500 in 2009, and $5,000 in 2010.  A footnote stated that SF Power “is also informally negotiating with the California Air Resources Board, San Francisco’s Office of the Mayor, Mirant Corporation, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company, among others, for project funding support.”  Did you get any additional money from Mirant, PG&E,  the Mayor, or anybody else? Are you still negotiating? If not, when did you stop?

Lynch explained that “all energy efficiency programs in California are funded by ratepayer dollars that are collected by the utilities as part of each ratepayer’s utility bill.  Thus, California ratepayers, big and small, pay for all energy efficiency programs and each and every program is funded by ratepayers, not utilities.”

She said that the CPUC “sets broad parameters for each utility concerning the amount of overall energy efficiency savings to be achieved and in what customer classes (residential, small business, large business,etc.). But the utilities choose the program providers. The CPUC simply reviews the overall package provided by the utilities to check to see whether the energy efficiency savings targets are met.”

Thus, PG&E each year decides  the amount of money going to SF Community Power. Lynch noted that  some non profit people told her, when she was a commissioner, that “if you crossed PG&E, they would stop the funding.”
 
Lynch mentioned a meeting with you  that showed  PG&E’s influence on you, your non profit and the View. .
She said that, shortly after she was termed out as a CPUC  commissioner in 2009, you  asked her to meet with  him at Farleys coffee shop and asked her to serve on the board of his nonprofit. “I thanked him and said that he should consider my relationship with PG&E before making that offer if he was funded through PG&E, as PG&E and I have a very contentious relationship,  and that they would not be happy if I were on the board. He thanked me for telling him and agreed that I should not serve on the board.”  Lynch lives on Potrero Hill.

3. I followed up my rent control question:  “If state law were amended to allow it, would you support extending rent control to vacant apartments?”  No answer.

4. I got a call from Keith Goldstein, president of the Potrero Hill Association of Merchants and Businesses and co-chair of the festival. He had gotten an email from you  that read: “Please have the festival’s pr agent remove the Guardian’s logo from any complimentary ad the View is providing the festival in this month’s paper.” Why did you make  such an unprofessional move?   Would you have backed out of sponsoring this event if the Guardian logo had remained? Is that how you would behave as a supervisor?

5. If elected, do you plan to sell the View?  Will you continue to operate your non profit and take chunks of money from PG&E? If elected, would your income from PG&E disquality you from voting on PG&E and energy issues? At what point would you sever your relations, if at all,  with your non profit and PG&E?

6. If  you lose, will you (as your wife suggested in an email to friends) move back to your house on Liberty St in Distict 8?

We anxiously  await your response. B3

sfbg radio: the jobs picture

Zelda Bronstein
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3
sfbg radio: the jobs picture

Today Johnny talks to economist Johnny Venom about the jobs picture. Listen after the jump.

sfbgradio10/212010 by endorsements2010

D10 candidate Eric Smith on Local SF

Mary Magee
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22
D10 candidate Eric Smith on Local SF

Coming into work this morning, I was greeted by the sight of D10 candidate Eric Smith standing under a San Francisco Bike Coalition tent near the railroad/freeway intersection at 16th and 7th Street in Potrero Hill.

Curious, I stopped by their tent where I was greeted by a hearty handshake from Smith, and plenty of input from the Bike Coalition’s Marc Caswell and League of Conservation Voters president Amandeep Jawa about why they support Smith.

“Eric is about integrity and sustainability,” Jawa said. “In a district like D10 that so desperately needs those things, Eric is the obvious choice.”

“D10 has a lot of really great street projects that are already approved by the MTA,” Caswell added. “So we are looking for strong leadership from Eric on the Board of Supervisors around biking, walking and transportation.”

Smith for his part chatted about Sup. John Avalos’ recently introduced Local SF legislation, which would require contractors to meet local hiring goals that will be phased in over the next few years.

Smith supports Avalos’ legislation—and thinks it needs to go even further.

“A lot of the folks who are clamoring for jobs don’t have the skills,” Smith said, noting that only John O’Connell High School of Technology has vocational training.

“Idle union workers could train folks for prime time, that’s the basic premise of the work that Raquel Pinderhughes did,” Smith said, referring to the efforts of Pinderhughes, an urban studies professor at San Francisco State, to secure truly green-collar local jobs.
“There has to be a mechanism to train folks who need skills, to get them truly trained and ready to take the union tests. That would be a sustainable approach and a huge part of the solution.”

Republican who wants to overturn rent control pumps $200,000 into district elections

Mary Magee
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25
Republican who wants to overturn rent control pumps $200,000 into district elections

Thomas J, Coates, a big time investor in apartments and mobile homes, has dropped a total of $225,000 into five independent expenditure committees that are trying to push conservative-friendly candidates and measures over the victory line this fall.

Coates, a 56-year-old Republican (he donated $2,000 to George Bush in the 2004 presidential election) and yacht racing enthusiast, was the biggest single spender in the November 2008 election, when he contributed nearly $1 million to Prop. 98, a statewide measure that sought to repeal rent control in California and limit government’s right to seize private property by eminent domain.

And with only 11 days until the election, Coates has given local Republican war chests an enormous last-minute boost: He plunked $100,000 into Common Sense Voters, a committee in support of Mark Farrell in D2. He plunked $10,000 into the Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth’s committee in support of Scott Wiener in D8. He plunked $45,000 into the Alliance’s committee in support of Theresa Sparks in D6. He dropped $45,000 into the Alliance’s committee in support of Steve Moss in D10. And he dropped another $25,000 into San Franciscans for a Better Muni, a committee in support of Measure G, which attempts to reform Muni by focusing on transit operator wages.

As the Guardian previously reported, this Alliance has received thousands from the SF Police Officer’s Association, the Building Operators and Managers Association, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, and SEIU-United Healthcare Workers, which supports a mega-hospital on Cathedral Hill.

But Coates’ donation raises questions about his choices’ commitment to rent control. As Coates told the Chronicle in an interview in 2008, “There is a reason why 35 of 50 states expressly prohibit rent control by law – and the reason is it doesn’t work.”

Coates, who is a principal in Jackson Square Properties, which specializes in apartments and mobile homes, is also the founding partner of Arroya & Coates, a commercial real estate brokerage and investment firm whose clients include Walgreens, Circuit City, and J.P. Morgan Investment Management. And as campaign disclosures show, he’s dumped a large part of his money into the same conservative alliance that has already collectively spent almost $170,000 on Moss, Sparks and Wiener.

So far, labor has countered the Republican money by spending $70,000 in support of Debra Walker in D6 and $90,000 on Mandelman in D8, and the SF Tenants Union has spent a total of $20,000 on mailers opposing Moss, Sparks and Wiener. But collectively the downtown money, which is also being funnelled into several other independent expenditure committees, continues to massively outweigh the progressive bucks.

Coates’ phone line continues to register a “busy” signal, making it impossible to leave him a message, but I’d be happy to include his comments here, if and when I talk to him.

But Gullicksen said he was disturbed by Coates’ heavy spending on the supervisors’ races.

“Coates is the main funder of Prop. 98, his property is in Southern California, he’s pumping a lot of money into supervisors and he clearly has an agenda that we fear Moss, Sparks and Wiener share, which is to make the existence of rent control an issue the Board will take up, if those supervisors are elected.”

It will be interesting to see if Moss, Sparks and Wiener are prepared to pledge that they have no intention to attack rent control….so, stay tuned.

Meanwhile, labor is organizing a protest outside Coates office at 500 Washington Street at 5 p.m on Tuesday, Oct. 26.

“Be there or be evicted!” labor warned.

 

Wall Street hold ’em

Andrew Lam
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0
Wall Street hold ’em

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Inside Job is director Charles Ferguson’s second investigative documentary after his 2007 analysis of the Iraq War, No End in Sight, but it feels more like the follow-up to Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005). Keeping with the law of sequels, more shit blows up the second time around. As with No End in Sight, Ferguson adeptly packages a broad overview of complex events in two hours, respecting the audience’s intelligence while making sure to explain securities exchanges, derivatives, and leveraging laws in clear English (doubly important when so many Wall Street executives hide behind the intricacy of markets).

The revolving door between banks, government, and academia is the key to Inside Job‘s account of financial deregulation. At times borrowing heist-film conventions (it is called Inside Job, after all), Ferguson keeps the primary players in view throughout his history so that the eventual meltdown seems anything but an accident. Even apparent detours prove narrowly targeted. The subject of Wall Street’s venal appetites for drugs and prostitutes, for instance, is introduced first as farce and second as potential traction for broader criminal investigations. Presumably a junior partner might give up valuable information so as not to be made into another Eliot Spitzer, who, incidentally, comes off quite well in Inside Man.

While the fat cats only show up thanks to the CSPAN archive, several free market economists do sit for interviews with Ferguson. They probably regret doing so now — he reserves special scorn for the academic class of boosters. Frederic Mishkin is a typical case. Formerly a member of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve, he quickly becomes a muttering mess under Ferguson’s questioning. Mishkin quit the Treasury in August 2008, at the height of the crisis, to return to Columbia University to finish more pressing work: a textbook. In 2006, Mishkin coauthored a rosy report on Iceland’s doomed markets, pocketing a nice commission from the country’s Chamber of Commerce. Mysteriously, the title of the report changed from “Financial Stability in Iceland” to “Financial Instability in Iceland” on Mishkin’s CV — confronted with the discrepancy, he croaks something about a typo.

Ferguson’s relentless focus on the insiders isn’t foolproof. Tarring Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and Timothy Geithner as “made” guys, for example, isn’t a substitute for evaluating their varied performances over the last two years. Inside Job makes it seem that the entire crisis was caused by the financial sector’s bad behavior, and this too is reductive. To take just one example, China figures into the film only as laborers losing their jobs due to market volatility — part of the story, certainly, but so is that government’s devaluation of its currency.

Furthermore, Ferguson does not come to terms with the politicized nature of the economic fallout. In Inside Job, there are only two kinds of people: those who get it and those who refuse to. The political reality is considerably more contentious. Americans on the right and left may well share disgust at the bailouts, but they’re drawing very different conclusions from the government’s cash infusions. Ferguson builds something of a false consensus between his talking heads, never asking them, for example, whether they think Fannie Mae or Countrywide was a bigger boogeyman (politically, the answer says a lot). In this regard, a general assessment in a recent article by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells holds for Inside Job: “Books on the Great Recession are still pouring off the presses … but they don’t offer much guidance on the most pressing problem at hand, which is how to deal with the continuing consequences of the last [bubble].” 

INSIDE JOB opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters.

On the margins

Andrew Lam
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3
On the margins

Sarah@sfbg.com

Franklin is a 20-something computer programmer who shares an apartment with 10 other people around his age, an arrangement that helps him and his housemates come up with $3,500 each month for rent in the Mission, a rapidly gentrifying part of town.

“Everyone is pretty much working, but they are in and out at different times so the house isn’t ever really empty. But there’s usually only three or four of us at a time, ” Franklin told the Guardian, speaking on his cell phone as he rode his bike to work.

But how does an apartment that officially has only one bedroom sleep 10 people? Franklin said there are other rooms in the house — including a dining room and a double parlor that splits into two with sliding doors — and that each of these spaces has a couple sleeping in it. “And there is one person sleeping in a closet and another sleeping in a space atop the bathroom.”

While overcrowding has been a problem in immigrant communities in San Francisco, it’s reaching a new area: young people who have for generations flocked to the city to escape uncomfortable home lives, find a supportive community, and make a new start in life.

Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, said at least 1,250 housing units annually were lost to condominium and tenancy-in-common conversions in the dot.com and housing bubble years, a loss rate that has slowed only slightly since then.

“Right now, it’s about 1,000 units a year,” he said.

It’s become more common for young people to struggle to pay rent in a town where well-paying jobs are scarce and educational programs have been cut — a triple whammy that means youth with additional challenges are at risk of becoming homeless and getting trapped in vicious cycle of abuse and incarceration.

COMPOUNDING THE PROBLEM

Sherilyn Adams, executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services, which provides housing, medical, social, and educational services to at-risk homeless and runaway youth, says all young people in San Francisco face the same basic challenges.

“And if, in addition, these youth are part of a group like LGBTQ youth, or are youth of color, or immigrant youth, documented or not, then the circumstances and barriers are much more exacerbated,” she said.

Adams said San Francisco has done a lot to add resources for transitional age youth, a group that traditionally has been defined as ages 12 to 24. “But there is still a significant gap in resources, especially for the more disenfranchised groups, because the longer you’ve been on the street, the more complex your issues in terms of substance abuse and mental health.”

Civic leaders, including California Assembly member Tom Ammiano, recently held a rally and candlelight march to raise awareness of the tragic rise in homelessness and suicides among LGBTQ youth. Shortly after, Adams told us, “Youth who came here escaping homophobia in their family or city then face the harsh reality of San Francisco.”

Adams understands that some people see Proposition L, legislation on the November ballot to criminalize sitting or lying on city sidewalks, as a way to address disruptive and aggressive behavior on the streets. “But it becomes part of the larger divide, because youth who come here and are on the street are mostly there because they have no other place. So penalizing them in the absence of services, housing, and education is ineffective at best and really harmful at worst,” Adams said.

Many young people on the brink of homelessness are “somewhat invisible,” and therefore at high risk, she said. “Youth will double, triple up. They will couch surf as a way to be off the streets. And we hear the stories where youth are faced with a Sophie’s choice: Do you sleep on the street, or do you barter with what you have available so as to get shelter? And LGBTQ youth are at particular risk because the more disenfranchised and disconnected you are, the more you have to make impossible choices to survive.”

Jodi Schwartz, executive director at Lyric, an SF nonprofit that focuses on building community and inspiring change in LGBTQ youth, said the group serves 500 youth and reaches out to 800 to 1,000 more each year. “We go into classrooms and talk about hate speech, putting it in the context of racism and other forms of oppression,” she said.

“There’s a misconception that because we live in San Francisco and have a lot more dialogue and interaction with the LGBTQ community, that young people’s experience here is so much better. It may be different, but I wouldn’t say it’s better,” Schwartz said, noting that harassment levels, especially for transgendered youth in local schools, are very high.

HELPING THOSE IN NEED

Young women are another at-risk group, especially if they are pregnant, have kids, or are in the foster or juvenile justice system.

As executive director of the Center for Young Women’s Development in San Francisco’s gritty SoMa district, Marlene Sanchez tries to stabilize at-risk young women, then engage them in policy work so they can advocate for other young people they know.

“We work with young women who are involved in the underground street economies, doing prostitution, drug sales, and selling stolen goods like clothes,” Sanchez said. “We try to reach them on the streets and inside Juvenile Hall, so we take an inside-outside approach.”

Leajay Harper, who coordinates CYWD’s Young Mothers United program, works with young pregnant women inside Juvenile Hall.

“We have all experienced poverty, parents on drugs, and having to take care of younger siblings,” Harper said. “When young moms get incarcerated, they are at risk of having their children taken away at much higher rates. So we started parenting classes that are age and culturally relevant.”

City records show that while only about 12 percent of Juvenile Hall detainees are female, they are twice as likely as their male counterparts to land back in custody for probation violations.

“There are lots of young women with felonies struggling to pay their bills and feed their kids who look out the window and see they can sell drugs. And that often seems like the only option,” Sanchez explained.

City statistics also show that of the overwhelmingly male population at Juvenile Hall, almost half is African American, and that many are inside for what appear to be gang-related offenses.

Easop Winston, a 35-year-old local musician, church pastor, and member of the Visitacion Valley Peacekeepers, regularly visits young men inside Juvenile Hall, where gangs are a topic of discussion every week.

“The same guys that they have been fighting with, they are now incarcerated with,” Winston observed. “So one of the approaches I try to take is rehabilitating how they think about their neighbor. You are killing/fighting with someone who lives one block over. It’s plain genocide”

He credits the juvenile justice system for doing its best, but worries that it fails to rehabilitate youthful offenders with jobs skills, education, and counseling before sending them back into society.

He blames the churches for not doing a better job of making youth feel welcome. “Churches are part of the fabric of our community,” he said. “They need to do more outreach and not have so many rules. They need to accept youth as they are, with their tattoos, piercings, and styles of clothing.”

Winston believes politicians need to do a better job of making sure community-based organizations deliver on their promises to help working class communities of color. At the same time, as he acknowledges, “We can’t cure the world in one day.”

“Over the last five to 10 years, the African American population in SF has shrunk,” he observed. “Everybody is moving to Antioch and Fairfield because people can’t afford to live here. People are losing their jobs. And San Francisco has almost become impossible to live in unless you have a college degree. A lot of what I hear from youth is about economics. They want jobs. They want to be trained.”

PUSHING THEM OUT

Political disputes over the city’s sanctuary city policies on undocumented immigrants — which have left in limbo the question of whether arrested immigrants will get their days in court before being turned over to the federal government for possible deportation — have also been a source of instability for immigrant teens, many of whom are homeless and/or LGBTQ.

Police Commissioner Angela Chan, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, decried Mayor Gavin Newsom for refusing to implement Sup. David Campos’ due process legislation, which the board approved in November 2009.

“It’s been a little bit upsetting for the many groups that took the democratic process seriously. But these groups are still very committed to these kids,” Chan said. “We are hoping to work with the new U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag to clarify this issue and explain that the top priority of the Obama administration is not to deport undocumented youth.”

Other so-called tough-on-crime initiatives also threaten local at-risk young people. In September, City Attorney Dennis Herrera secured an injunction against 41 alleged gang members in Visitacion Valley, a strategy that progressives fear will accelerate the ongoing displacement of the African American community.

Court documents show that 66 percent of the men named in the injunction are 18 to 25 years old and that many have children in public housing, where lease holders are predominantly women of color.

San Francisco City College Trustee Chris Jackson, 27, is running for the District 10 seat on the Board of Supervisors. Noting that the southeast SF district has some of the highest numbers of poor people and children citywide, Jackson said that youth issues are similar to challenges that other voters face.

“But the context is different,” said Jackson, who previously served on the San Francisco Youth Commission. “Young people care about safe streets because it’s us or our friends who are on them. We care about schools because we are in them and want to go to college. And we are concerned about the future of employment because how do you tell folks to go to school if there are no jobs?”

Jackson notes that in the Bayview-Hunters Point, home to the city’s largest remaining African American community, kids don’t come back if they leave for college. “We see a brain drain. It’s really difficult to retain young people, so it’s important to first make sure that youth’s housing needs are met. And they also need access to careers so that when they graduate, they know there is a job in the city. But right now, youth can’t even find a summer job because of the recession.”

He called for city policies that are based on the needs of current city residents rather than developers’ profits or the desires of well-off outsiders to move here.

“San Francisco is more of an opportunity for Silicon Valley residents than for youth who were born and raised here. And part of the problem is city policies, ineffective programs, and a failure to provide job opportunities for youth,” he said. “Everything for youth has been gutted.”

And those evaporating opportunities are compounded by punitive policies like Prop. L, Jackson said, further alienating young people. “It comes down to how much money you have,” Jackson observes. “If you are rich, you can enjoy the parks, the clubs, the transit. But if you are low-income, especially low-income youth of color, it’s very hard to take advantage of everything the city has to offer.”

Noting that both City College and the San Francisco Unified School District canceled their summer school program, Jackson said, “it doesn’t look like youth are prioritized.”

Jackson was recently at Double Rock (a.k.a. the Alice Griffith Public Housing Project) and he saw four kids under 10 who were at home while their parents were at work. “Why aren’t they in school or in child care? And don’t give me the line that these are hard to serve communities. We have to serve them.”

N’tanya Lee, executive director of Coleman Advocates, agrees that while all young people are struggling in the city, African American children and youth are having one of the worst times.

“We don’t need 5,000 different strategies and initiatives when 90 percent of these kids live in extreme poverty, mostly concentrated in public housing, and you could fit the city’s entire black high school student population into one auditorium,” Lee said.

She wants the city to create a database of these youth and develop specific strategies to help this population before it’s too late.

“No one in city government feels accountable for the outcomes for black children and youth,” she said. “Instead you have one group who are about young people and another who are about economic development — and they have nothing to do with each other. Meanwhile, we’ve lost half of all black families with children in this city in the past 20 years.”

Our 44th Anniversary Issue also includes stories by Rebecca Bowe on ageing out of the foster care system, Caitlin Donohue’s account of the Haight street kids, and Tim Redmond’s editorial on the issues facing our rising generation

On the edge

Andrew Lam
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0
On the edge

rebeccab@sfbg.com

It’s a strange and daunting time for anyone just starting out, but youth who age out of foster care are up against particularly harsh challenges.

In July, the national unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds reached a staggering 51 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A recent article in The New York Times Magazine described how, in the face of a bleak job market, 20-somethings today are far more likely than those in past generations to go back to school, travel, volunteer, or complete unpaid internships — extending a phase of impermanence and financial dependency for years beyond what used to be considered the norm. Studies show that nearly half of youth between ages 18 and 25 move back home with their parents at least once.

But young people aging out of the foster care system typically have to face this world of churning uncertainty without the benefit of a safety net. Many post-foster care youth don’t have the luxury of “failing to launch,” embarking on an early career path without pay, or landing back home if nothing else pans out. Foster youth lose their support base at 18, when the state ceases to be their legal guardian. For these young people, who are often the least equipped to achieve financial self-sufficiency, becoming emancipated as a legal adult is no cause for celebration; rather, it’s a source of anxiety.

Most foster youth lack the skills, connections, and resources they would need to transition to independence at age 18 — a prospect that would be difficult even for youth with greater access to resources and no major family history problems. Studies measuring the outcomes for this population paint a grim picture: many wind up homeless, incarcerated, or at risk of losing children of their own by the time they reach their early 20s.

There’s a growing awareness that many of the approximately 5,000 youth who age out of foster care in California every year are slipping through the cracks. Local and state programs have been initiated to improve their chances of achieving independence, but efforts on both fronts have run up against obstacles.

In Sacramento, Assembly Bill 12 — which extends key services for foster youth to age 21 — was signed into law several weeks ago, but the intentions behind it were undermined when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a line-item veto of $80 million in funding for child welfare programs. In San Francisco, a housing facility designed for youth at risk of homelessness seems to hold promise as an effective model, yet it has encountered resistance from local neighborhood organizations.

The plight of these young people is both a measure of our compassion and potentially a harbinger of larger societal problems to come.

HIGH STAKES

Kirsten Johnson-Bell is an emancipated youth who turned 18 in January. She has six siblings still in foster care in the East Bay, and she says she has been in more than 20 foster care placements since 2007.

Johnson-Bell told the Guardian that she has housing assistance that will last for 18 months — but she’s already beginning to wonder what will happen after that. “Where am I supposed to go?” Johnson-Bell wondered. If the experience of her peers who’ve exited the system is any indication, her concern is well founded.

Nationwide, nearly 40 percent of post-foster-care youth have been homeless at some point by the time they turn 24, according to survey results released by the University of Chicago and Partners for Our Children at the University of Washington. Just 6 percent had completed college degrees by that age, and only 48 percent were working — mostly in low-wage jobs. More than half of the young men had been convicted of crimes, and roughly three-quarters of the young women had received government benefits to meet basic needs. Teen pregnancy is statistically higher among young women exiting foster care.

Most youth in foster care aren’t housed continuously with a single caregiver, but bounce from place to place, making it tough to form long-lasting relationships. “It’s a fairly rare experience that youth stay in one home, and that means moving schools and moving friends,” notes Rachel Antrobus, executive director of Transitional Age Youth San Francisco (TAY SF), a city-funded nonprofit. Many foster kids take medication for behavioral problems, and it’s common for them to experience emotional upheaval.

“It’s practically inevitable that they’re going to have long-term emotional impacts,” Antrobus said, noting many bear the long-term scars of abuse, neglect, or forced separation from their families for some other reason. “It’s a much longer road, and they have to do it with deeper wounds. Even the kids that are the most together … will likely experience some really dark places in their 20s.”

In San Francisco, there are 1,400 young people in the foster care system, and all but about 500 are in placements outside the city. Lynette Davis, who turned 18 this year, moved from San Francisco to Oakland when she first entered foster care in the eighth grade. Davis acknowledges that she was one of the lucky ones. Rather than move in with a stranger, she went to live with her godmother and remained there until her 18th birthday.

Davis is now living with her boyfriend and his family in Oakland — and the household was in the process of moving when the Guardian spoke with her. Her godmother offered to continue housing her after she turned 18, Davis noted. “But she’s got her own kids. I felt like I should be able to go off and do my own thing.” The requirement in either housing situation is that she must work, go to school, or both, Davis said. She’s attending classes at Oakland’s Merritt College. In the meantime, she’s mired in the frustrating exercise of applying for job after job.

“It’s been pretty ridiculous,” Davis said of her fruitless job hunt. “Sometimes it makes me want to stop and give up. But as long as you’ve got people around you who care about you, it’s okay.”

Many foster kids who didn’t have the support network that Davis did are up against alarmingly high stakes as they age out. “Some people are mothers and they have to pay rent and are looking for more than two jobs,” she said. Asked what she thought were the greatest challenges facing foster youth in San Francisco, she mentioned poverty, gangs, and a lack of job opportunities.

“To be successful, you have to be financially stable,” she said. “With some youth, that’s hard. They don’t have jobs, or they can’t get jobs. They want to find an easy way out.” That’s when they become more susceptible to gangs or drugs, she said. Davis says she was a “rebellious youth” at a younger age, but now she’s focused on her goal of obtaining a degree in psychology so that one day she can go into counseling. When she became a member of California Youth Connections, which aids youth with transitional support, she met other foster youth and realized she could really have an impact.

HELP OR HARM?

The difference between ages 18 and 21 can be critical, so foster youth advocates throughout the state cheered Sept. 30 when AB12, California’s Fostering Connections to Success Act, was signed into law. It allows California to make use of federal matching funds to provide transitional support for qualifying foster youth until age 21. It also authorizes the state to take advantage of a federal subsidy for an existing guardianship program for relatives of foster youth who want to become caregivers. Many foster youth advocates have thrown support behind the kin caregiver model — it can be less traumatic for youth to move in with a grandparent than being suddenly dropped into a strange place.

A major sponsor of A 12 was the John Burton Foundation for Children Without Homes, and policy director Amy Lemley hailed its passage as “the biggest child-welfare improvement in 20 years.” Studies show that youth who receive support beyond 18 are 200 percent more likely to be working toward completion of a high school diploma, 65 percent less likely to have been arrested, and 54 percent less likely to have been incarcerated than those who exit with no support. The benefits could also generate savings by reducing the number of people in prison, on welfare, or in need of publicly funded health and human services. The law will be implemented in 2012.

The law also will provide new housing options. The federal government will chip in to cover more placements in the Transitional Housing Program Plus — nearly axed during the last budget cycle — which offers supervised transitional housing for emancipated youth. Youth may also receive a rent subsidy that could apply in a dorm, a shared-living situation, or another arrangement that fits the youth’s needs. This flexibility is a positive change, Lemley noted. “We’re not telling young people ‘it’s our way or the highway,'<0x2009>” she said.

“If a state like California can do this in the context of its current fiscal deficit, it sends a strong signal to other states,” Lemley said. However, an unexpected line-item veto put a damper on the landmark achievement. Schwarzenegger dealt a blow to the child-welfare system by cutting $80 million in funding for programs the California Legislature had restored, which actually amounts to more like $133 million due to the loss of federal matching funds.

“It’s really just a schizophrenic policy on the governor’s part,” Lemley said. “We were hoping he would have a legacy of the foster care governor, but now it doesn’t seem as if he will have that legacy at all.”

While the deep budget cut isn’t aimed at AB12 directly, Lemley said, it erodes funding for child-welfare workers and forces counties to make painful funding cuts. The overarching effect is that abuse and neglect may go undetected more often, and youth in the system will have fewer available resources once they’re placed.

ANOTHER CHANCE

Of all the challenges facing foster youth who age out of the system, housing is among the most critical, particularly in San Francisco. A partnership between the city, Larkin Street Youth Services, and nonprofit developer Community Housing Partnership (CHP) aims to address this by providing a space for transitional-age youth who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford housing in the city. Located at the King Edward II Inn near Cow Hollow and the Marina district, the facility would house 24 young people, ages 18 to 24, who are at risk of homelessness.

“By definition, that includes youth aging out of foster care,” explains David Schnur of CHP. The nonprofits are working in tandem with the city’s Human Services Agency and Mayor’s Office of Housing.

Youth housed at Edward II would have access to physical and mental health care, substance abuse and HIV-related services, education and job training, coaching in basic life skills such as budgeting and personal hygiene, and case management, Schnur said. They would be required to contribute a portion of their income, whatever the amount, toward rent.

However, an organized force of opposition has already surfaced from the surrounding community, which comprises one of San Francisco’s wealthiest neighborhoods. “I think people are just nervous about what it means to have a building of this type in the neighborhood,” Schnur noted. To assuage neighborhood concerns, the nonprofits have set up a project advisory committee in hopes of talking it out and bringing everyone on board.

Patricia Vaughey, with the Marina-Cow Hollow Neighbors, is actively opposed to the project but insists that it isn’t out of NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) concerns. “We are not NIMBYs,” she told the Guardian. “We want to find a location that’s suitable. We want to make sure those kids are safe.” She said that criminal activity in the neighborhood made the inn a poor choice. Yet advocates insist that for the youth, the program could mean the difference between a lifetime of hardship and a chance to get their lives on track at a crucial age. “The safety net for these young people is so thin,” Lemley noted. “You might have one person, you might have another. But then the winds of change blow and suddenly the bloom falls off the rose.”

Our 44th Anniversary Issue also includes stories by Sarah Phelan on SF’s disadvantaged youth, Caitlin Donohue’s account of the Haight street kids, and Tim Redmond’s editorial on the issues facing our rising generation

Labor’s outreach

David Talbot
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0

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

Never have the nation’s younger workers been more in need of unionization. And never have the nation’s unions been more in need of the membership growth that recruiting younger workers can bring them.

Here’s how it looks, and it’s not a pretty picture for labor: Last year, unions lost 10 percent of their members in private employment –  the biggest drop in more than 25 years.  That cut union membership by 834,000 workers, down to 15.7 million workers.

Which means that overall, counting public as well as private employment, unions now represent only a little more than 12 percent of the country’s workers. Just 20 years ago, 20 percent of all workers were unionized.

So, how can organized labor add significantly to its numbers and thus add significantly to labor’s political and economic strength.

The answer should be obvious, and it certainly is to union leaders: Sign up the younger workers aged 18 to 29 who are especially hurting economically. They need unions as much as unions need them.

A recent survey commissioned by the AFL-CIO shows that fully half of the young workers surveyed said they had only enough savings to cover their living expenses for two months should they become unemployed, as of course many workers of all ages have in recent months.

Many of the young surveyed also were concerned that whatever the jobs they find, they’ll do worse than workers of other generations have done when they retired.

Unions hope to attract such workers to their ranks in part with recent academic studies showing that unionized workers invariably do better than non-union workers when they retire and in virtually all other ways.  For instance, studies show that the average wage of unionized younger workers is about $15 an hour – more than 12 percent or about $1.75 an hour more than non-union workers of the same age.

 Forty percent of the unionized younger workers had employer-financed health care, while only 20 percent of those outside unions had such a benefit.

Whatever the occupation, and however they were measured, unionized younger workers did better – unionized men better than non-union men, unionized women better than non-union women, unionized African Americans and Latinos better than non-union workers in those categories.

Yet despite the obvious advantages of union membership that has brought better pay and benefits to the younger workers who’ve joined, younger workers generally have had the lowest unionization rate of any age group. Only about 7 percent are in unions.

But that could very well change. Other new studies indicate that the economic situation for younger workers is worsening, and that well over half the workers now say they hope to avoid that by unionizing. Joining a union would not only help them improve their own status and help reverse what’s been a steady decline in union strength. It also would bring new strength to union efforts in behalf of important social, economic and political reforms.

The AFL-CIO has established a program aimed at recruiting the younger members that its affiliated unions badly need – as badly as the younger workers need unions. And as badly as we need the benefits that a strong labor movement can bring to all of us, whatever our age.

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

The myth of the overpaid public employee

Zelda Bronstein
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31
The myth of the overpaid public employee

Lots of press — as there should be  — on the new UC Berkeley study that debunks the myth of the overpaid public employee. The Chron had a decent story this morning, The Bay Citizen, which has been reporting pretty heavily on high wages and pensions in the public sector, acknowledged the study today. It’s a pretty big deal: Since much of the poltics of 2010 seems to be about bashing public employees and complaining about bloated pensions, some hard reality — backed up with a sophisticated regression analysis — was badly needed.

And the study is prettty clear: public employee salaries and pensions are not the cause of California’s (or San Francisco’s) budget problems:

The Great Recession continues to leave a great deal of economic pain and scarring in its wake. But, the
vilification of government workers is sorely misplaced and has left the real culprits of this devastating
downturn off the hook. Compensation received by public sector employees is neither the cause—nor can
it be the solution—to the state’s financial problems. Only an economic recovery can begin to plug the hole
in the state’s budget. Unfortunately, the current budget balancing efforts in California are anti-simulative
and further act to depress demand in an economy already operating way below capacity. Budget cuts have
helped to keep California’s unemployment rate well into the double-digits for over a year and a half—and
there is no end in sight. Thousands of California public employees have lost their jobs and many more
have forgone pay through forced furloughs and their families have experience considerable pain and disruption.
All the workers who have lost their jobs or took cuts in pay or benefits were made to do so not
because of their work performance, or because their services were no longer needed, nor because they were
overpaid. They were simply causalities among a list of millions of hard working innocent victims of a financial
system run amuck. Public sector workers help our communities to thrive and provide services that
make it worthwhile to live in them—it is wrong to blame them for the fallout from the greatest economic
downturn since the Great Depression. 

The study’s out in enough time to make a potential difference in the election — on both the state and the local level, attacks on public employees are driving major campaigns. Meg Whitman is all about tying Jerry Brown to those evil unions, and Prop.B, the measure to cut health care and pensions for city employees, is a wedge issue. A little logic shows that it’s not only misleading but factually wrong to blame the public-sector workers for the recession.

SFBG Radio: a WPA for musicians

Zelda Bronstein
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5
SFBG Radio: a WPA for musicians

Today we talk about jobs, the economy — and why Obama should create a WPA for musicians. Listen after the break.

sfbgradio10152010 by endorsements2010

Get angry and make ’em do it!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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9
Get angry and make ’em do it!

After crashing the country’s economy and turning the world against us, Republicans are clawing their way back into power by stoking voter anger at political and economic systems that are stacked against the common citizen, a tactic that progressives need to adopt if we ever hope to move our agenda forward.

“Anger, not hope, is the fuel of political and economic change,” Jamie Court, head of Consumer Watchdog, writes in his new book, The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell: How to win grassroots campaigns, pass ballot box laws, and get the change we voted for (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010).

Court writes that progressives are rightfully disappointed and disillusioned that after helping to elect President Barack Obama, he and Congressional Democrats turned around and gave Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and the health insurance companies everything they wanted, with Obama even caving in on requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance, something he opposed as a candidate.


Yet Court said politicians never do the right thing and push progressive political change unless they’re forced to do so. He opened the book with a scene in which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with progressive political leaders, listened to their proposals, and then told them, “I agree. I am all for your plan. Now make me do it.”

It’s a concept that the conservative Tea Party movement understands well, and even though they may be crazy and wrongheaded in their utterly unsustainable and destabilizing policy agenda, they have effectively used anger as a political tool, and as a result, the NY Times reports they are poised to wield a disproportionate amount of political power after this election.

It’s the same story on the local level, where the only real anger in this election cycle is coming from those mad at public employee unions and their pension deals, and vagrants who sit uncivilly on sidewalks. These people will keep pushing for what they expect, but many progressives act as if it’s enough to prevent truly heinous Republicans like Meg Whitman from taking power, rather than trying to push Jerry Brown or Board of Supervisors’ progressives from day one to start empowering people over corporations.

“After the vote, power vacuums fill with familiar values, if not faces. Promises give way to fiscal realities, hope succumbs to pragmatism, and ambition concedes to inertia. The old tricks of interest group – confuse, diffuse, scare – prevail over the better angels of American nature,” Court writes, relaying a familiar electoral pattern.

Yet in this election, when the best outcome seems to be simply dodging a bullet, is there any hope for progressive political change? Isn’t the system just too broken? I asked Court these questions when he stopped by the Guardian office for a chat recently, and he retains a belief that with the right kind of tactics and agenda, progressives can still seize the political initiative and power.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3RD0YObHok

“I wrote it to reengage progressives because they are so despondent,” Court told me. “It’s about how to use anger and focus anger…Politicians don’t answer polite mobs, they only answer angry mobs and the Tea Party is the only angry mob in the room.”

Progressive have understandable doubts about the responsiveness of the current political system, but Court said, “I know if we don’t try to make it work, we’re never going to get there.”

And his book lays out the path to get there, step by step, based on some of the legislative and political successes that Consumer Watchdog and other progressives have had in recent years, such as rejecting the well-funded corporate con jobs in Propositions 16 and 17 earlier this year. Yet it involves an approach based on principle and not parties, and with being relentless in pursuing the kind of world we need.

“If you want to fight corporate power, you have to fight Democrats and Republicans,” Court said.

Specifically, Court is calling for progressives to push a California ballot measure that would establish a public health care option here, the very thing that Obama and the Democrats failed to include in their health reform package, and which will dash any hopes of it working if the people are forced to rely on unregulated insurance company products.

“The biggest thing is mandatory health insurance, which is a ticking time bomb,” Court said, one set to go off in 2014 when that aspect of Obama’s health care reform kicks in.

Corporate and political power working together seem to be a force too strong to overcome, but as Court writes, “Public opinion is the most powerful force in the world. While it can be muted, distracted, and co-opted, it cannot be controlled, except by the public.”

Downtown massively outspends progressives

Mary Magee
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17
Downtown massively outspends progressives

With only three weeks until the election, downtown interests are massively outspending progressive groups.(Conservative estimates suggest a 5:1 ratio, based on an analysis of campaign finance disclosures at the Ethics Commission.) And these downtown interests have plenty in reserve, as cash is funneled into a bunch of improbably-named political action committees that hope to influence the outcome of district elections and local measures on the fall ballot.

The Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth, which is backed by the Chamber of Commerce, the SF Police Officers Association, and United Health Care Workers, recently got an infusion of cash from the conservative-minded Building Owners and Managers Association and Golden Gate Restaurant Association. And the alliance is already spending gobs of money in support of Theresa Sparks in D6, Scott Wiener in D8 and Steve Moss in D10.

The Coalition for Sensible Government, which recently received a $100,000 injection of cash from the SF Association of Realtors, is spending in support of Sparks in D6, Wiener and Rebecca Prozan in D8, and Lynette Sweet and Moss in D10. The coalition is also spending in support of Proposition G (transit operator wages) and Prop. L (Newsom’s sit-lie legislation)  and in opposition to Prop. M (community policing/ foot patrols) and Prop N (property transfer tax).

And a PAC consisting of the Coalition for Responsible Growth, Plan C, San Franciscans for a Better Muni, SF Forward (sponsored by the SF Chamber of Commerce and SPUR) received $85,000 from the Committee on Jobs, $60,000 from the SF Association of Realtors, and $35,000 from SF Forward.

This PAC, which has already spent $466,000 this year, recently plunked down $1,000 to produce a voter guide for Plan C–a group that focuses on condo conversions and is endorsing Sparks in D6, Wiener in D8, and Sweet (as its first ranked choice) and Moss (as its second ranked choice) in D10.

It isn’t surprising that downtown PACs have deep pockets and almost identical slates. But it is a bit of a shocker that their slates are apparently almost identical to the Small Business Advocates, a group that has somewhat differing values and only a couple hundred members.

Reached by phone, SBA director Scott Hauge said the group has a couple hundred members–and claimed that SBA’s Board supports Sparks in D6, Moss in D10, and supports Measures G, K, L and opposes Measures J, M & N.

Hauge acknowledged that these positions are identical to those of downtown interests.
“We have been working with large companies,” Hauge said, claiming that small and big business’ interests are “the same” in this particular election cycle.

To date, neither the Chamber’s Steve Falk nor UHW’s Leon Chow have replied to the Guardian’s calls about the genesis of their so-called Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth (Chow posted a comment on our politics blog and that is really not the same as a live conversation.)

But Tim Paulson, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council wasn’t afraid to go on record in opposition to the Alliance and its 2010 slate.

“We’re really disappointed that there are labor organizations that feel they have to team up with Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which is against healthcare, and with CPMC [California Pacific Medical Center], which is working to keep nurses from joining a union,” Paulson said. “This alliance does not reflect what the San Francisco labor movement is about.”

A door hanger that the Labor Council distributed in conjunction with the SF Democratic Party confirms that both organizations support Debra Walker in D6 and Rafael Mandelman in D8. But while the Dem Party supports DeWitt Lacy, Malia Cohen and Eric Smith (in that order) in D10, the Labor Council only supports Cohen and Chris Jackson (in that order) in D10.

But despite their differing D10 candidate slate, both these progressive groups support Measures J, M and N, and oppose Measures B, K and L.

“When we see the Hotel Council stoop to attack Mike Casey, one of the greatest labor leaders in SF history, for fighting hotels who want to take away healthcare and diminish the retirement benefits for workers who make $25K to $30K a year, that’s really disturbing,” Paulson said, referring to a recent op-ed in the SF Examiner that was written by Patricia Breslin, executive director of the Hotel Council.

“And any union that makes an alignment with groups that don’t share the values of the San Francisco Labor Council, that’s really disturbing to me and the Labor Council,” Paulson said.

Noting that downtown is spending buckets of money on the election, Paulson observed that the Labor Council’s values are about “sharing the wealth.”

“So we don’t want Measure B [Jeff Adachi’s pension reform] or K (Newsom’s hotel tax) or L (Newsom’s sit-lie legislation),” Paulson concluded. “And we have three solid weeks to do this.”

Big Oil’s false choice

Andrew Lam
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0
Big Oil’s false choice

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Tapping into voters’ economic insecurities at a time of record high unemployment rates, out-of-state oil interests say addressing global warming will cost California more jobs. But a broad coalition that includes environmentalists and top business groups argue that just the opposite is true, saying the economy will suffer if we suddenly kill the incentives now driving the clean energy industry, one business sector that actually grew during the recession.

Proposition 23 would indefinitely suspend Assembly Bill 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act. Texas oil companies are bankrolling the initiative, spending millions of dollars to convince voters that they must choose between saving jobs and saving the environment. Since jobs are more important right now, they argue, the environment will have to wait.

But the other side — which includes groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, whose top priority is always job creation — is promoting the compelling idea that the path to economic recovery lies in rising to the challenge of climate change. They argue that addressing global warming now isn’t just about avoiding more out-of-control wildfires, diminishing crop yields, prolonged intense droughts, coastal flooding, and other calamities that climate scientists say global warming will bring to California. It’s also about creating jobs now and trying to lower California’s 12.4 percent unemployment rate, the third highest nationwide.

The push to defeat Prop. 23 has brought together prominent business people, public-health advocates like the American Lung Association, big green organizations such as the Sierra Club, and environmental-justice advocates who are pushing for green jobs as a way to fend off poverty and tackle air quality problems in disadvantaged neighborhoods. If the coalition of unlikely allies is successful, Big Oil’s comfortable lock on the energy market could be thrown off balance by California’s emerging green economy.

“Ultimately, we think it’s going to be a David vs. Goliath battle, because they have very deep pockets,” said No on 23 campaign spokesperson Steve Maviglio. “The proponents are playing to the fears of those most affected by the economy.”

When voters decide on this one, it will signify a choice to proceed down one of two paths at an important crossroads. A global climate summit in Copenhagen late last year failed to produce an effective response to climate change. A push for a federal cap-and-trade system to combat global warming yielded similarly disappointing results. AB32 presents a third chance to set a new standard, and a precedent, for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. But if Prop. 23 passes, environmentalists will have struck out.

A report issued in July by the National Academy of Sciences lays bare the far-reaching implications of policy decisions around climate change. “Emissions reductions choices made today matter in determining impacts experienced not just over the next few decades,” the report notes, “but in coming centuries and millennia.”

 

CLOSE RACE

In 2006, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB32, mandating a statewide reduction of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The law is slated to go into full effect in January 2012, when a cap-and-trade system will make it more costly and burdensome for major polluters to continue burning high quantities of fossil fuels, among other strategies.

The law helps alternative energy companies and creates incentives for large and small businesses to green their operations. Prop. 23, deceptively titled the “California Jobs Initiative,” would suspend AB32 until the state’s unemployment rate drops to 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters. A decade could pass before such a market condition is in place — in the past 40 years, it’s occurred just three times.

Speaking at the Commonwealth Club in Santa Clara in September, Schwarzenegger blasted Texas-based oil companies Tesoro Corporation and Valero Energy Corporation, which have contributed a combined $5.6 million to the Prop. 23 campaign, for trying to deceive California voters. “They are creating a shell argument that this is about saving jobs,” Schwarzenegger said. “Does anybody really believe that these companies, out of the goodness of their black oil hearts, are spending millions and millions of dollars to protect jobs? It’s not about jobs at all, ladies and gentlemen. It is about their ability to pollute and thus protect their profits.”

Prop. 23 has been unpopular even among many traditional right-wing and business interests. Oil giants Chevron and BP have remained neutral on it. Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman also renounced it, but straddled the fence by vowing to suspend AB32 for a year anyway.

According to a breakdown of campaign spending issued by opponents, oil interests contributed 97 percent of the funding for Prop. 23, while out-of-state interests were responsible for 89 percent. Kansas-based Koch Industries, run by billionaire siblings David and Charles Koch, dropped $1 million into the effort. The Koch brothers have been singled out as the financial backbone of the Tea Party.

Yet despite bipartisan opposition in Sacramento, polls suggest Prop. 23 could be a close race. A recent Los Angeles Times poll showed a dead heat among California voters, with 40 percent in favor, 38 percent opposed, and about one-fifth of likely voters undecided. The television commercials advocating Yes on 23 drive home a simple yet misleading message: “Save jobs. Stop the energy tax.” A spokesperson from the Yes on 23 campaign did not return the Guardian’s calls seeking comment.

Ironically, jobs are also the cornerstone of the No on 23 campaign’s arguments. “We have very heavy hitters who see this as a job killer,” Maviglio said. The campaign is highlighting the fact that the only economic area that has experienced growth amid the recession is green tech.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown referenced green jobs as a bright hope for economic recovery in a televised debate against Whitman, and the prospect of green job creation as a way to alleviate poverty is clearly articulated in The Green Collar Economy, a widely influential book by Green for All founder Van Jones. Green for All has joined the Greenlining Institute and a host of 80 organizations statewide in a united front against Prop. 23, called Communities United Against Prop. 23, which is part of the larger opposition campaign dubbed Communities United Against the Dirty Energy Prop.

Low-income communities and communities of color will be disproportionately affected if Prop. 23 wins, said Orson Aguilar, executive director of the Greenlining Institute. “The communities we represent are feeling a double impact,” Aguilar noted. “They’re suffering from pollution,” since power plants and polluting industries tend to be sited in low-income communities, “and they’re suffering from unemployment and the economic crisis. There definitely is a double-whammy.”

 

LOCAL MOMENTUM

At a recent green business symposium hosted by Urban Solutions, a nonprofit that aids small businesses and seeks to create job opportunities in low-income communities, a Castro District merchant explained her decision to enter green-business certification process. “I’m dedicated to going green because, No. 1, it’s the right thing to do,” said Elaine Jennings, who runs Small Potatoes Catering & Events. “No. 2, it’s the right thing to do. And No. 3, it’s the right thing to do.”

But the moderator of the panel, a business reporter, wasn’t as interested in the moral rationale — instead, she followed up by asking whether going green was a wise financial move. Anthony Tsai, green business program manager at Urban Solutions, made the case that it is. Water bills have gone up 40 percent since 2000, Tsai said. Electricity costs have gone up 60 percent and waste disposal fees have increased 250 percent. By conserving energy and water and reducing waste, small businesses can save money during tough economic times.

Aguilar sees energy-efficiency building retrofits as an opportunity to create jobs for disadvantaged populations. In order to comply with the climate regulations under AB32, energy-efficiency retrofits would have to be completed to hit conservation targets. “We have thousands, if not millions, of buildings in California that need to be retrofitted,” he said. “A lot of people who are out of work are in the construction industry. Latinos and African Americans were hit hard when construction fell.” With energy retrofits and solar-panel installations on the agenda, AB32 could be good news for electricians, too, Aguilar said.

There are signs that AB32 is already giving green business a lift. A manufacturer of electric delivery trucks, for example, relocated from Mexico to California’s Central Valley late last year. A wind-energy company recently relocated to San Diego from Spain. The solar industry is growing faster in California, particularly in the Bay Area, than anywhere else nationwide. And in the past five years, roughly $9 billion in venture capital investment has gone into clean tech industries, with more going to California than any other state.

“Prop. 23 would essentially pull the rug out from under this explosive growth, which we’re experiencing during a recession,” Maviglio noted.

Jeanine Cotter, CEO of Luminalt, an independently owned San Francisco solar and installation company, is active in the campaign to defeat Prop. 23. “There is an entire ecosystem that feeds off of good policy,” Cotter said. If Prop. 23 passes, “we will lose the spark that we have and we will go backward.”

Despite the economic downturn, Luminalt experienced its best year in 2009 in the six-year history of the company, and if AB32 goes into effect in 2012 as planned, the demand for new solar installations will only grow. But with less than a month to go before the election, Cotter said she was alarmed by the lack of awareness about Prop. 23, even among environmentalists.

“We were at West Coast Green with No on 23 literature,” she said, referencing a widely attended green-business conference, “and I was shocked at how many people didn’t know what it is.”

 

RISKING IT

Small business owners and conscience-driven activists aren’t the only ones touting this theory of a new energy economy. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, a fiscally conservative business association that is often at odds with environmentalists and progressives, is actively campaigning against Prop. 23 — and it’s not out of any sense of moral duty.

If Prop. 23 succeeds, explained Chamber spokesperson Rob Black, it will scare off the venture capitalists. “For them, water’s like money,” he explained. “It will flow to the easiest place to invest.” Regulation like AB32 guarantees a return on investment for climate-friendly technology, he added. But if that regulatory structure is thrown into question, investors may flee overseas because investing would be too risky. “If we walk away from clean tech, the next Microsoft will be a Chinese company,” Black said.

Donnie Fowler, a political consultant who has worked for Al Gore and other top Democrats, is a senior adviser to the Clean Economy Network and a leader in the effort to defeat Prop. 23. Oil companies “went to Washington and spent hundreds of millions” lobbying against climate change regulations, Fowler pointed out. “Now they’ve opened up a second front. If California goes backward, all of those senators and Congressional representatives will say, ‘No way … I’m surely not taking a political risk. If they went backward, there’s no reason we should go forward.'”

Fowler said that for environmentalists, voting No on 23 could be seen as an affirmation of statewide efforts to address climate change in a meaningful way. “This is a real opportunity,” he said, “for Californians to stand up and say we’ve had enough. We are going to take a stand — right now.”

www.stopdirtyenergyprop.com

www.communitiesagainstprop23.com

Labor’s promise

David Talbot
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0

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


The AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions know what they must do to grow and strengthen the labor movement for the benefit of all Americans. They must recruit and train millions of young workers, particularly young women and minority workers.  It is they who will join with others to shape our future.

Union organizers are already focusing clearly on reaching out to young would-be members who are often skeptical of union promises to help them win, not only better pay and working conditions, but also a meaningful voice in community affairs.
Participants in one of several recent AFL-CIO meetings on the subject noted that a key issue among young workers, as among so any others in these perilous economic times, is their inability to find a job or to pay for higher education. While unionization, of course, does not guarantee workers jobs or money to pay for higher education, it certainly gives them to at least a good chance of finding work or earning a college degree.

AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Liz Shuler told another gathering that outreach to young people is a top labor priority. But she said that, even though young workers need unions, they generally don’ t know much about them. That’s in part because they are less likely than young people in earlier generations to have a family member or neighbor to talk to them about unionization and its rewards.

Unions, of course, usually win agreements from employers for, among other fringe benefits, health insurance.  But recent surveys show that about one-third of young workers have no health insurance.  The surveys show in general “a massive decline” in the economic situation of the young. One-third of those surveyed say they often can’t pay their bills, for instance. Only about half have paid sick days and must work so even if ill.

A survey done recently by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics cautions that  “unions must become more diverse and open up more opportunities for young workers and women in leadership or they will move on to other social justice organizations.”

The AFL-CIO’s James Parks noted that “while acknowledging the significant gains for women in the workplace made possible by unions and their growing diversity in the union movement, the federal report urges unions to do even more to become more open.”

The national AFL-CIO has moved further in that direction by requiring state and local AFL-CIO bodies to establish concrete goals for diversifying the leadership of their member unions.

There’s also been efforts to movement to meet the complaints of young members and would-be members that union leaders  are often able to stay in office far too long, blocking younger candidates for union office from assuming leadership posts. .  That would be eased by an AFL-CIO proposal for unions to set term limits for elective leadership positions.

At any rate, this much is very, very clear: Unions need the young if they are to prosper and grow, and the young need unions if they are to realize their full potential as citizens. Together, unions and the young can bring important new strength to the country.

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

SFBG Radio: The market’s up, but jobs are down

Zelda Bronstein
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2
SFBG Radio: The market’s up, but jobs are down

So if the unemployment rate keeps going up, and the recession is in full swing, why is the stock market doing so well — and what does that say about American politics? Check out out after the jump.

sfbgradio1082010 by endorsements2010

Whitman’s global warming positions leave her stand unclear

Sasha Cuttler
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Whitman’s global warming positions leave her stand unclear

Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman is playing both sides of the fence on the issue of global warming, belatedly opposing Prop. 23 – the measure that would suspend AB 32, California’s long-term plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting clean technology – but promising to delay implementation of AB 32 for a year anyway.

Yet the California Air Resources Board, the department tasked with drafting the regulations for the bill, isn’t even scheduled to finish drafting all the rules for the measure until Jan 1, 2011, and those rules wouldn’t go into effect for another year anyway. So it appears that Whitman’s stand is simply pandering to those who don’t see global warming as a pressing problem, in the process leaving uncertainty about how she would handle the issue if elected.

Still, her stance worries a swath of businesses that were hoping to cash in on a renewable-friendly economy. “There are already 500,000 Clifornian’s working in the clean energy sector and around 160,000 of them are in construction and manufacturing,” Donnie Fowler, senior advisor at the Clean Economy Network, told us.

Fowler is part of a campaign to promote the growth of the renewable economy. However, their pressing task is raising awareness of the potentially damaging effects if Prop 23 is passed. The measure would suspend the regulations within AB32 indefinitely and require, potentially, a citizen’s initiative to overturn it. The other option would be to wait until the unemployment rate drops below 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters – a rare occurrence – at which point the suspension would automatically be lifted.

The LA Times released a poll last week that has Prop 23 winning by a slight margin, with 40 percent in favor of the initiative and 38 percent opposed. The proposition’s current success is largely a result of large donations from Texas based oil companies Tesoro Corp and Valero Energy Corp. and multibillionaire libertarian brothers David and Charles Koch.

Much of the opposition to AB32, however, has arisen from the anti-tax fervor sweeping the country – which Whitman has played on. Before she started making her rhetorical sojourn to the middle, coming out against Prop. 23 just last month, she told the San Jose Mercury that “I probably would today, I need to think about that,” when asked whether she would veto AB32. Well, she thought about it and has since maintained that she would only suspend the bill long enough to assess what impact it would have on California jobs. Yet, the phrase “job killer” remains on her website.

Derek Walker, Director of the California Climate Initiative, thinks she is probably smart enough to understand what kind of impact suspending AB32 would have on renewable energy businesses currently operating in California.

But, if she is elected, will she have the political will to renege on her promised moratorium? And what would her position be if Prop 23 is passed?  Would renewable energy companies be left high and dry? Would she come to their aid?

“It would be very uncertain in the absence of AB32. However, the overwhelming support would almost require a plan to keep California’s clean energy economy growing,” Walker said.

SFBG Radio: A modest (boycott) proposal

Zelda Bronstein
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3
SFBG Radio: A modest (boycott) proposal

In today’s episode, Johnny puts forth a modest proposal. Plenty of big American companies are sitting on piles of cash right now, money they’ve made in part because they aren’t hiring anyone. Of course, businesses don’t exist to create jobs, they exist to make money — but consumers ought to have a say, too. So Johnny suggests that we all boycott big companies that have lots of money on hand, but refuse to spend it in a productive way — that is, by hiring people. You can listen to his proposal after the jump.

sfbgradio10/6/2010 by endorsements2010

D8 debate: “Filling Harvey’s Shoes”

Zelda Bronstein
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0
D8 debate: “Filling Harvey’s Shoes”

Editors note: I ran out of space for opinion pieces this week (endorsements just ran too long) so I’m posting this timely oped here.

By Jeff Sheehy

Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, a public elementary school in the heart of the Castro, is hosting a debate between the four candidates for District 8 Supervisor on Friday, October 8 at 7 pm.   The school, formerly Douglass Elementary, was named for Milk in 1996. 

The community that comprises the school has adopted an unique mission to honor Milk’s life: to empower student learning by teaching tolerance and non-violence, celebrating our diversity, achieving academic excellence, and fostering strong family-school-community connections.
 
The theme of the debate—“Filling Harvey’s Shoes”— centers on the values inspired by Harvey Milk’s life that have now been enshrined in the mission of the school named after him. Cynthia Laird, the editor of the Bay Area Reporter, and Christina Velasco, principal of Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, will moderate, asking questions themselves, taking questions from the audience and reading questions submitted by Harvey Milk students.

One of the candidates was quoted in this paper a couple of weeks ago saying about the race: “It’s a definitional fight about what the queer community is about in 2010.”  This debate offers the candidates the opportunity to directly address this “definitional” question.

In many ways, the LGBT community is at a crossroads. For those with good jobs and good incomes and the means to rent or own a house in District 8, much of the struggle for LGBT civil rights in San Francisco must feel more like history than a critically important issue for someone who seeks election in his former district.

However, I wonder if Harvey’s oft-referenced kid from Altoona hopping a bus to San Francisco in search of freedom would feel the same way. The kids arriving here are much more likely to be kids of color, transgender or undocumented. To what degree does District 8 or even San Francisco offer a place to live or real economic opportunity? Is Harvey’s legacy a gentrified Oz, great for those who can afford it, but little solace to those desperately seeking haven?

Plus, what is Harvey’s larger legacy?  Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy defines one vision. Kids from under-resourced areas and under-represented communities are actively recruited to the school as part of its commitment to teaching tolerance and diversity. The LGBT experience is presented as one among the many struggles that communities of color, women, the undocumented and working people have fought in America to create a more just and tolerant society. Consciousness of shared struggle and the necessity of creating community amongst the disenfranchised and marginalized are crucial values inculcated at the school. The school’s pledge sums up this vision of Harvey’s legacy:  “I pledge allegiance to the world, to cherish every living thing, to care for earth and sea and air with peace and freedom everywhere.”

My husband and I thought deeply about community and values when we were deciding where to send our daughter to school. We felt that our daughter should begin to understand the world and how to act in it in the context of struggles for civil rights and social justice.  

I hope others in the LGBT community will take a moment and think about their values, hopefully attend the debate on Friday, and recognize that the election for this seat is about the future direction of the community.

Indeed, next May would have been Harvey’s 80th birthday and one wonders which candidate he would have endorsed and in what direction he would have advised the LGBT community to take had he lived.

Sheehy is the parent of a kindergartener at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy 

The debate will be held in the auditorium at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy at the corner of 19th and Collingwood, in the Castro.

Fantasy girl

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Fantasy girl

It was one of those knockout weekends during which rabid electro kids and throbbing bluegrass fans, twirling gay flaggers and hot-pink breast cancer walkers all blurred into, well, a blur. Hell if I remember most of it. But it’s a dazzling blur, a blur you can really take a shine to, kind of Brazil-shaped with opalescent edges, undulating there in the partially cloudy air, a 4G jellyfish lingering on the event horizon.

I.e., a blackout. So anyway, what’s my favorite multi-gifted, ultra-busty local transsexual performer Cassandra Cass (www.cassandracass.com) doing lately? In case you hadn’t heard, her talents are blossoming every Thursday at midnight on the Showtime network, in an outrageously entertaining reality show called “Wild Things.”

“You mean my two biggest talents are blossoming,” Ms. Cass breathes into my ear — and I swear I hear her shake her boobs over the phone. Cassandra’s one of those beautiful SF nightlife unicorns you spot whisking through random parties on the arm of a handsome gentleman, or pay good money well-spent to see lip-synch lustily at Harry Denton’s packed Sunday’s A Drag brunch buffets (Sundays, noon and 2:30 p.m., $39.95. Starlight Room, 450 Powell, SF. www.harrydenton.com). She’s fantastical, and now she’s the world’s.

On “Wild Things,” Cass and two other trans bombshells, Maria Roman and Tiara Russell, hit the road in a Winnebago, traveling through the West working odd jobs to raise money for Maria’s brother’s kidney disease treatment. Hair-flipping bronco busting, slaughterhouse mishaps, sexy hotdog sales, half-naked car washes, cop-attracting catfights, flirty lube jobs, and more ensue.

Notably missing on their trips into backcountry? Rampant transphobia. “Sure, here we come, these transgender Amazons with impossible figures into your tiny town. But once people got to know us, they loved us, laughed along with us” Cassandra dished. “That’s why I think the show’s so important. We’re the only trans reality show that’s reaching the nation, our ratings are through the roof. And we’re real people. We’re not just standing on a corner looking bitter.”

Cassandra just auditioned for ABC’s “Wipeout”(!) and is currently working on a 2011 edition of her infamously smokin’ calendar. “Mama’s off the chain for that one — put me in a bikini and I’ll do anything,” she purrs. “My goal is to be someone that people look at and go crazy for. Men, women, gay, straight, whatever — I want them to see me and question why they put themselves in a niche, why they think they have to be just one thing.”

 

B.Y.O.F. CINEMA ORGY

A primo opportunity to check out new performance space Ark221 (www.ark221.com), this monthly “bring your own film” fest — nay, orgy — will open your eyes to great local video talent. Moderators J. Douglas Smith and Gregg Golding, a.k.a. transdimensional rapper Odynophagia, reel you in.

Wed/6, 8 p.m., $3. Ark221, 221 11th St., SF. www.cinemaorgy.com

 

MAURICE FULTON

Eccentric Baltimorean tunesmith has lately specialized in a Chicago-looking brand of burbling, red-lit, obsessively detailed house — so nice. He’ll be headlining the invaluable No Way Back monthly with DJs Conor and Solar.

Sat/9, 9:30, $10. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com

 

GASLIGHT

Is SF ready for a lounge revival? It is if it’s this aurally sensuous and intellectually stimulating. DJs Delachaux and FACT.50 plumb the depths, from Angelo Badalamenti and Astor Piazzolla to Hooverphonic and Beirut.

Sat/9, 9:30 p.m., $5. Medici Lounge, 299 9th St., SF

 

EL RIO’S 32ND ANNIVERSARY SHINDIG

Hard to believe one of my favorite dives is twice as old as I am! Celebrate all evening with eats, treats, and beats from rockin’ bands Mighty Slim Pickens, The Ex Boyfriends, Bronze, and tons more.

Sat/9, 3 p.m., free. El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. www.elriosf.com

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