Why does GOP bigwig and GAP founder Don Fisher have so much money to pour into the campaign to defeat sound planning in San Francisco? Gee, maybe the fact that his company’s clothes are made by child slaves might have something to do with it.
I love the Onion’s hit on this.
The Bay Guardian is profiling the candidates for the 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.
Mayoral candidate Michael Powers
“As a candidate for Mayor it is my intent to accomplish the following tasks for my fellow residents. I will:
*make Muni free and introduce a community bicycle program with 10,000 bikes
as in Paris.
*protect our city’s skyline through slow growth rather than our present program
of Manhattanization.
*lower our crime rate by increasing the number of police officers we have on our
streets by use of Lateral Transfer hiring and insisting that sworn personnel are not
wasted on administrative duties.
*use our bike program to allow the homeless to become its supervised labor pool
in bike maintenance, thus teaching them a trade.
*encourage the promotion of Harvey Milk’s birthday as a national holiday.”
Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.
› news@sfbg.com
GREEN CITY The average young person doesn’t pay much attention to things like wind turbines and energy efficiency. Friends and family, yes. School or work, sure. Green technology? Probably not. And for youths in underserved communities, where violence and economic hardship are a backdrop for everyday life, the likelihood of thinking green is even lower.
Enter activist groups like the Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and watch as things begin to change. Under the leadership of cofounder Van Jones, the Ella Baker Center has received widespread attention for its role in the development of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps program, set to begin in early 2008.
The Green Jobs Corps will provide training opportunities for hard-to-employ populations (read: at-risk youths, low-income people, and those formerly incarcerated) while supporting the development of a greener economy. It’s no small task. For decades the environmental community has looked for ways to make green relevant to marginalized communities. And it hasn’t been that successful. Ian Kim, campaign director for the Green Jobs initiative, says the program is significant in that it bridges the gap between the environmental and social justice movements.
"The connections are obvious once you start to look at them," Kim told the Guardian. "Just as there are no throwaway resources or species, there are no throwaway people or communities."
The Ella Baker Center has worked closely with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to anchor a larger coalition of activists called the Oakland Apollo Alliance. Together, these groups are propelling the initiative forward. The collaboration is a significant one. Historically, labor activists and environmentalists have been at odds. The assumption: there can be good jobs or a clean environment, not both. Victor Uno, a spokesperson for the IBEW, says that dynamic is changing.
"We think it’s important to partner with community groups, and we need alliances with environmental groups," Uno said. "Economic growth is going to mean green jobs, and we’re working together to create opportunities for people who have been historically locked out."
The Green Jobs Corps program received $250,000 in seed funding from the Oakland City Council in June — part of $2.3 million of unspent settlement funds the city received after the California energy crisis nearly a decade ago. The program will be administered through Oakland’s Community Economic Development Agency, and job training will focus initially on renewable-energy technology and efficiency — a requirement of the settlement funds. Forty young men and women are expected to participate in the nine-month program, which includes six months of training, a three-month paid internship, and services like case management and job placement. Kim says the likelihood of participants obtaining well-paying jobs afterward is good.
"Green-collar employers have jobs that pay a living wage, have benefits and good working conditions," he said. "They offer career ladders and real pathways out of poverty."
While recruitment for the program has not yet begun, Kim is aware that the initial draw will likely be the word job and not the word green. Still, it’s progress.
"There’s no shortage of people looking for job training," Kim said. "It’s within the course of the program that they’ll receive education about environmental awareness and sustainability. We need to educate people where they’re at."
Late last month the Ella Baker Center took the Green Jobs training initiative to the national arena by launching the Green for All campaign.
"We have definitely realized the green job idea is too big for one organization or one group," Kim said. "It’s turning into a really big movement with a lot of players."
The launch comes shortly after Congress approved the Green Jobs Act of 2007 (HR 2847) as part of the proposed energy package. It is legislation that would direct millions of dollars toward green job training and is now awaiting approval or, more likely, a veto from President George W. Bush. Kim said defeat wouldn’t be a surprise.
"We’ll just come back next year," he said. "We’ll come back with more political will and more ideas. There’s a lot to look forward to."
EDITORIAL It’s time for San Francisco to declare war on privatization.
The local threat is very real: as we reported in last week’s special anniversary issue, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration has moved to turn over a long list of city services — from housing for the mentally ill to the operation of the public golf courses — to the private sector. Should this happen, if history is any guide, the city would wind up losing millions, the quality of services would decline, and the economy would suffer as hundreds of well-paid, unionized employees lost their jobs.
Equally important, the public would lose control over the institutions that were and are created and run for its benefit.
Privatization is a recipe for corruption. There always has been and always will be some level of graft, corruption, and incompetence in government operations; there will always be the occasional city employee who sleeps on the job, fudges time cards, doesn’t do the job right, and somehow manages to avoid being fired. But that sort of small-time problem amounts to peanuts in comparison to what happens when large amounts of public money are turned over to the private sector.
Private companies are out to make profits — and for the most part they keep their finances secret. Many of the worst scandals in American history have involved kickbacks, backroom deals, and bribery aimed at sending taxpayer dollars into the coffers of big contractors, and these continue today. And the argument that the private sector is more efficient often turns out to be utterly false; the absolute worst waste of money in the nation’s health care system, for example, is the phenomenal overhead involved in private insurance plans. As much as 30¢ of every dollar spent on private-sector health care goes to administrative overhead and profit. The public Medicare system operates on about 5 percent overhead.
Of course, the public has no way of keeping track of where most of the private health care money goes; the insurance companies keep that information to themselves. So do most other private contractors that take public money. And even if you don’t like the way the system is managed, you don’t have much choice — insurance executives aren’t elected by anyone and aren’t accountable to the community.
San Francisco has a history of allowing private operators to take over public resources, and the results have been almost universally bad. One of the reasons the 1906 earthquake caused such devastation was that the private Spring Valley Water Co. — looking only for quick profits and not at long-term maintenance or service — failed to keep its pipes in good repair. When the city really needed water, to put out the postquake fires, it wasn’t available. That fiasco led city officials to develop a municipal water system, which now delivers some of the best, cleanest, and cheapest water in the country.
Of course, Congress gave San Francisco the right to build that water system, which uses a dam in Yosemite National Park, only on the condition that it also develop public electric power. Instead, in the greatest privatization scandal in the history of urban America, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. wound up initially controlling much of the output of the dam, and it still controls the city’s electric grid. The result: some of the highest electric rates in the nation and terrible, unreliable service.
San Francisco officials led the way to the privatization of the Presidio, turning over a national park to an unaccountable quasi-private board that operates as a real estate developer. The results: A giant commercial office complex, built with a $60 million tax break. Plans for high-end condos. Traffic problems, neighborhood problems — and a stiff bill to the city’s taxpayers, who have to subsidize private businesses that operate in a federal enclave without paying local taxes.
And if Newsom has his way, the pattern will continue: the mayor’s signature project this past year, for example, has been an attempt to let a private company control the city’s broadband communications infrastructure. Tens of millions in city contracts go every year to private nonprofits that fight like hell to avoid sunshine and accountability.
Enough is enough — San Franciscans of every political stripe need to organize to fight back. This city needs a new political coalition, a campaign against privatization.
There are all sorts of specific policies and legislation that ought to be on the agenda. For starters, privatization expert Elliott Sclar, a Columbia University economist, argues that any private business that takes city money to provide public services ought to be required to abide by open-government laws. That means every scrap of information related to that contract — including financial projections, executive salaries, profit and loss statements, and operating overhead figures — would be public record. All meetings of boards, panels, or other policy-making entities involved in managing the contract would be open to the public. If a private business doesn’t want to abide by those rules, fine; it can stick to private-sector work and stop bidding on government contracts.
Beyond that, the city needs to set up a task force to look at every private contract San Francisco hands out and determine why the city isn’t doing the work itself. If selling electricity is so profitable (and it clearly is, or PG&E wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep its illegal monopoly), why can’t the city take over the job and bring in some revenue? If there’s money to be made building bus shelters and selling ads on them — and clearly there is, since Clear Channel Communications, a giant private company, went out of its way to get a contract with the city to do so — why can’t San Francisco make that money for the General Fund? If a private company can make money running the golf courses, why can’t the city?
Sure, there are times when it makes sense to bring in an outside contractor. We’d argue, for example, that the Board of Supervisors needs an independent budget analyst, not tied to City Hall, to monitor budgets and spending. But there are millions of dollars going out City Hall’s door every year to private outfits that aren’t accountable to the public. And there are millions of dollars that ought to be available for badly needed public services that the city is losing because some private operator is making a profit on public resources.
Organized labor has every reason to oppose privatization and ought to play a lead role in creating a new coalition. So should the public-power coalition and the folks who have been demanding sunshine for the nonprofits. But everyone who uses public services and pays taxes in San Francisco is affected when city money gets stolen, wasted, or diverted. It ought to be a broad-based coalition.
There’s an opportunity to turn things around here and make San Francisco the model city that it ought to be. There’s no time to waste.
THE MONASTERY: THINKING BIG WITH VIG
All of my prior attempts to write about The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun came to a screeching halt on describing the physical presence of the man at the documentary’s center, Jørgen Lauersen Vig. The sullenness of Vig’s features (accentuated by long white hair that, together with an outrageously wild-looking beard, forms a halo of sorts around his face) and his tall, slender, and raggedy-clothed figure cause him to resemble a hero from a novel by Nikolay Gogol. But unlike the Russian writer’s characters, Vig is very much real. His harsh, imposing appearance is hard to overlook.
The enigmatic Vig’s attachment to the run-down castle he’s determined to convert into a monastery only adds to his mystique. The Monastery‘s basic scenario suits its crude aesthetics. As if the presentation of a hard-boiled, aged man who spends his days alone in his slowly decaying shelter weren’t enough, the documentary’s rough human and physical landscape is completed by Sister Amvrosija, the leader of a delegation of nuns that the Russian Patriarchate sends to Denmark in order to evaluate the castle and help with its renovation.
Clad in her long black gown and immersed in her ascetic ways, Sister Amvrosija is as stubborn and opinionated as Vig. Filming their difficult coexistence with a sometimes unobtrusive and other times questioning camera, Danish filmmaker Pernille Rose Grønkjær clearly intends to add a bit of lyricism to this true story. She observes as the childlike energy and enthusiasm that the octogenarian initially brings to all of the bureaucratic and material needs of his estate give way to stronger displays of frustration. It’s clear that the numerous confrontations Vig has with Sister Amvrosija are gradually wearing him down.
Although Vig’s initial motives for forming a monastery are hard to comprehend (at one point it’s even suggested that he turned to the church as a source of free labor), it becomes evident that he urgently wants to create something enduring. Grønkjær’s film reveals a sensitive person in great distress. Faced with the revelation that fighting his mortality is hopeless, he reevaluates (and sometimes even shows signs of regretting) his past and is under the painful and somewhat false impression that he’s emotionally crippled. This man — fierce looking, socially awkward, romantically immature, with the temperament of a little boy — is one of the most fascinating and inspiring characters to emerge from a film in some time.
THE MONASTERY: MR. VIG AND THE NUN
Oct. 26–31
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th St., SF
(415) 431-3611
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
› tredmond@sfbg.com
Gavin Newsom will never live down his drunken affair with a close friend’s wife. It’s not a factor in this year’s mayoral race (which shows that San Francisco still has some class), but it’ll come back to haunt him someday, when he runs for governor or senator or wherever he goes next. Bill Clinton’s got the same curse — for all the good and bad things he did as president and everything he’s done since and will do, when he dies the world’s most famous blow job will be in the first paragraph of his obituary. Dumb stuff never goes away.
On the other hand, Clear Channel Communications is one of the most evil corporations in the United States, a sleazy outfit that is trying to destroy radio here and has gone a long way toward monopolizing the industry. Clear Channel treats its workers badly and is notoriously antiunion. It’s the worst sort of unaccountable conglomerate — many of its radio stations operate on remote control, with virtually no local staff, and it’s almost impossible to get through to anyone at corporate headquarters in San Antonio. Lowry Mays, its chairperson, is a big contributor to the Republican Party and to right-wing causes.
And yet none of that stopped the Board of Supervisors from giving Clear Channel tentative approval for a lucrative contract to build and sell ads on bus shelters in San Francisco. The whole thing annoyed me. If there’s so much money in bus shelters, why can’t the city build them and sell the ads and make some cash for the General Fund? But that aside, I have to ask: Why are we doing business with these people? Shouldn’t corporations, which want to be treated legally the same as individuals, be held accountable for their actions and their history?
At least Sup. Tom Ammiano brought up some of Clear Channel’s record. Some labor leaders tried to scuttle the deal. But the bus drivers’ union really wanted the contract approved, because Clear Channel will dump a bunch of money into Muni, so it went through, 9–1, with only Sup. Ross Mirkarimi opposed (and Sup. Chris Daly absent).
Then there’s Sutter Health.
On Saturday, Oct. 20, when nobody read the newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Sutter is going to effectively shut down St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission by turning it into an ambulatory clinic with an emergency room. No hospital beds, no place to put very sick people, nothing resembling the sort of service the district has counted on for decades. Instead, Sutter — which is allegedly a nonprofit but acts like a rapacious and greedy corporation — is going to stick San Francisco General with all of the uninsured sick people in the southeast neighborhoods while it gussies up its properties in the wealthier northern part of town.
The nurses have had to go on strike to demand better care for patients at Sutter. Even Mitch Katz, the city’s public health director, who is not known for blasting the private sector, has complained loudly that Sutter is doing a disservice to San Francisco.
And while all of this is going on, this allegedly nonprofit behemoth wants to build a $1.7 billion, 425-bed hospital at the old Cathedral Hill Hotel site at Van Ness and Geary.
Sutter only likes sick people who have good health insurance or are rich enough to pay cash. Perhaps the supervisors can remember that and hold these assholes accountable when they come to City Hall for a building permit.
Tim Redmond recently reviewed former labor secretary Robert Reich’s new book Supercapitalism — below, he talks to Reich about economics, industry, and the pervasive creep of new capitalism’s moral degradations.
tredmond@sfbg.com
Click here for the Guardian‘s interview with Robert Reich.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led a lot of pundits to talk about “the end of History.” The big battle of our lives, the defining philosophical and political conflict of the century, was over. Communism lost. Capitalism won.
But in the United States, the real war was just getting under way, a conflict between two visions of society: in one, the public sector, operating under a democratic system, dominated economic and political life; in the other, the central players in the game of life were private corporations. This war, which drags on today, poses a profound question: does the capitalist economy work for us — or are we slaves to its whims? The answer continues to transform almost every aspect of American life.
Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich, now a professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, takes on a big piece of this epic struggle in his new book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life. The cogent, well-documented, and critically important argument he makes is that the American people have prospered as consumers and investors at the expense of their role as citizens.
And in the end, we’ve been hurting ourselves.
This is the essential paradox of modern global capitalism: you can buy high-end electronics cheap, get amazing bargains at Wal-Mart, enjoy the growth of your 401(k) plan — and in the process, become poorer. Because the race to the bottom of the price chain and the top of the market has costs, and in the end, we’re all paying them. The only solution, Reich says, is a more aggressive government: more regulation, higher taxes, and, quite possibly, some consumer and investor sacrifices.
Reich goes back to what he calls the “Not Quite Golden Age,” the roughly 25 years after the end of World War II that were marked by continuous economic growth, relative prosperity, and remarkable (compared with today) economic equality. The top tax rate, for the very rich, was 91 percent (compared with 35 percent today). American industry was controlled by an oligopoly, in which a handful of businesses held the reins — and because they faced little competition, they were able to share their profits with labor. Back then, companies didn’t distribute their wealth to investors; it went to the employees.
For all the denunciation of socialism and idolization of the free market that goes on in American politics today, Reich points out that cold war America was defined by centralized economic planning. It just wasn’t the government doing that job; it was private industry.
He doesn’t contend that the model in operation back then was perfect — and anyone who has followed the postwar transformation of San Francisco, driven by secret private-sector planning, knows the painful impacts of such policies. But public resources were adequate to pay for massive infrastructure advances (the interstate highway system), gigantic educational benefits (the GI bill), and phenomenal tax breaks for home ownership. Labor unions, dealing with domestic companies that didn’t face competitors with cheaper offshore labor, were able to negotiate a division of the wealth that helped create the modern American middle class.
The gap between rich and poor was much, much smaller during that period than it is today; as Reich notes, “the potent incentive of great wealth was often absent,” so the economy was far more equitable and stable. High taxes on the rich didn’t slow a period of remarkable economic growth. And in 1964, 75 percent of the American public thought the government could be trusted to do the right thing most of the time — a statistic that seems inconceivable today.
That was, of course, before Vietnam, before Watergate, before the (first) energy crisis, stagflation, the California tax revolt, and cultural disillusion with the public sector, factors Reich doesn’t discuss in great detail.
But he does point to the changes that came in the 1980s and later: Deregulation, which transformed the banking industry, turning savers into investors. Globalization, which created a cutthroat type of capitalism promoting low prices and high returns at any cost. And government policies — such as the creation of private retirement plans and the promotion of the stock market as the central tool of investment — that encouraged Americans to focus on their own bottom line and ignore the larger issues facing society.
The result today, Reich says, is a supercapitalist world, in which you can fill your house with amazing piles of cheap stuff — but in the end those bargains wind up hurting you. “Consumers get great deals because workers get shafted,” he notes. “Ironically, they’re often the same people.”
Unlike a lot of people on the left, Reich doesn’t go around bashing big corporations and blaming them for society’s ills. In today’s ultracompetitive world, he says, corporations are simply doing what they have to do to survive: cutting costs, fighting for the bottom line, striving for the best possible returns for investors. There is no such thing as corporate social responsibility, he argues; under supercapitalism, it’s all about making money.
Instead of complaining about corporate greed, he says, we need to think as citizens and demand new rules, new laws and regulations, that force companies to do what we want them to do. We have to take back control of the American economy — and to do that, we have to reclaim democracy.
Reich places a large part of the blame on the role money has assumed in politics. He suggests that corporations, which are in reality just paper constructs, should be stripped of any rights to legal standing, any rights to participate in the public process — any rights to act as anything but pieces of paper. Campaign contributions should all be put into blind trusts: anyone could give money to a candidate, but that candidate would never be allowed to know who gave what.
Those reforms would be tough, and they might not happen anytime soon. But the value of this book isn’t in promoting any specific policy prescription. It’s about waking up and educating several generations of Americans who can’t seem to understand that you can’t have it all for free: that a decent society with universal health care, good public education, safe cities, and a commitment to protecting the environment requires some sacrifice; that the very rich (and even the run-of-the-mill well-off) among us have to pay taxes and accept responsibility for a decent nation and a decent world. That means creating a public sector we can trust — and not dismissing out of hand the notion that government has a positive role to play.
It’s the most important message anyone can impart today to the deluded, selfish population that makes up so much of modern America.
READING
Oct. 16, 7:30 p.m., free
Moe’s Books
2476 Telegraph, Berk.
(510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com
SUPERCAPITALISM: THE TRANSFORMATION OF BUSINESS, DEMOCRACY AND EVERYDAY LIFE
By Robert Reich
Knopf
272 pages
$25
So the folks at SFist have decided that we’re all commies over here because we think it’s okay to tax the rich and provide services for the homeless.
I thought we were all too intelligent in these circles to resort to stupid quips about the “proletariat,” and I’ve posted a response on SFist. But since I’ve had to have this fight since I was an economics major at Wesleyan way back in the dark ages, I have to make a point here:
The Soviet Union as we knew it in the post-War era was not built by Karl Marx. There were some guys named Lenin and Stalin who built a political system in the name of his economic theories. Neither of them had much use for democracy or freedom. One of them was a savage butcher.
That said, you have to admit that Marx was, and remains, one of the most important economists of the modern era. You can’t understand capitalism just by reading Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. The critique of capital that Marx put forward was brilliant; I never fully understood the role of labor in productivity and the way labor-price theory actually works until I studied Marx. So yeah, he should be on the reading list of anyone who wants to talk intelligently about economics.
I would add Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism to Steve’s reading list, too; I did an interview with him last week which will be posted on sfbg.com shortly.
The theory of money — how it’s created, what it is, how it effects the economy — is that stuff of dozens of textbooks and a thousand doctoral theses. But the bottom line is, money today is not a direct measure of labor productivity; it’s a far more artifical construct, as Steve points out. Money is created by the federal reserve and by private banks. At times, the government in effect prints more money at the mint to inject it into the economy. In practice, money — the dollar — is an internationally traded commodity, and the money supply in the United States is desperately hard to even track,much less manage or control.
Yes, taxes come from labor. But these days, a sane system would tax investment income and speculative income much higher than what we typically think of as labor. And a lot of the economy today is built on investment income and speculation that has nothing to do with productive labor.
Yeah, it’s all more complicated than that, but folks: If you can’t understand that money doesn’t directly equal labor, and that you can use Marx’s economic analysis without being a commie .. geez. I thought people in San Francisco were smarter than that.
› tredmond@sfbg.com
The Blue Angels buzzed the Castro Street Fair on Oct. 7, one of the planes missing the top of Twin Peaks by what looked like a few feet. And almost nobody seemed to notice.
The roar of the jets couldn’t possibly compete with the energy onstage, where Cookie Dough and the Monster Show were acting out a Wizard of Oz sketch to the sounds of "Boogie Oogie Oogie." I only saw one guy in the crowd even looking up, and he was just kind of shaking his head. Sailors are, of course, always popular in the Castro, but the United States Navy really isn’t.
A former Naval officer I know understands exactly why. She was drummed out years ago; the Naval Investigative Service followed her to a lesbian bar in New Orleans, and suddenly a talented and successful ensign who had just been promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) was tossed ashore, all benefits lost. She can joke about it now, but she’s still pissed.
The crazy thing of it all, she tells me, is that the Navy is "by far the gayest of all the services, and everyone knows it." If even this one branch just gave up the pretense and allowed queers to serve openly, she says, Fleet Week would take on a whole new meaning in San Francisco. But that’s not the only issue with Fleet Week, obviously. Like a lot of people in this town (and much of the queer community), I’m not terribly into the military, and I don’t like turning San Francisco into a giant, expensive recruitment ad. Besides, as we used to say about nuclear weapons, one Blue Angel can ruin your whole day: a few feet lower, a tiny mistake, and that F-A/18 flying toward Twin Peaks loaded with explosive jet fuel could have taken out hundreds of homes, killed thousands of people. It’s not as if it doesn’t happen; twice in the past year members of the Navy’s expert precision flying team have crashed.
There’s also the fact that this is a city overwhelmingly opposed to the war and to military adventurism in general. San Francisco’s idea of supporting the troops is bringing them home and giving them honorable discharges, medical care, and education benefits.
I’m always astonished that more local political leaders don’t just come out and say that. In fact, I’m astonished (although I probably shouldn’t be) that Mayor Gavin Newsom and Rep. Nancy Pelosi act as if Fleet Week is a wonderful San Francisco event, with no mention of the issues involved.
In fact, on June 11, after Sup. Chris Daly tried to ground the Blue Angels, Newsom wrote directly to David Winter, the secretary of the Navy, rolling out the red carpet. "My office and the community could not be more supportive of the Navy and their representatives, the Blue Angels," he wrote.
Nothing from Mr. Same-Sex Marriage about don’t ask, don’t tell. Nothing about the war. Nothing about San Francisco’s long and noble history as a center of the peace movement. Just praise for military might. He’s sounding a lot like Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
And by the way, on the contradictions beat: San Francisco is poised to give a huge, lucrative contract to Clear Channel Communications, one of the worst corporations in the country. Labor leaders are pissed, and they should be. I wonder: If there’s a lot of money to be made selling ads on bus shelters, why doesn’t the city just run the program itself? Why share the profits with the likes of Clear Channel?
The San Francisco Press Club has the newsiest blog in the Bay Area
By Bruce B. Brugmann
I have always had a fondness for the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.
I was an early member back in the middle 1960s in the good old days when there was real daily newspaper competition on the Peninsula.
I was a young reporter on the old Redwood City Tribune, fresh from a tour of reporting duty on the Milwaukee Journal and getting the local experience I needed to found the Bay Guardian in San Francisco.
I spent three years on the Trib, from 1964 to 1966, as a liberal conservation-oriented reporter under the aegis of Publisher Ray Spangler and Managing Editor Dave Schutz. Let us say that my views and reporting habits differed from theirs, but I nonetheless had a field day covering the scandals of the era.
I picked up on how PG&E operated as it worked with Stanford University and the Atomic Energy Commission to impose high powered transmission lines through Woodside and the gunsights of Attorney Pete McCloskey.
I spent late Monday and Tuesday nights covering the council and planning commission meetings in Belmont and San Carlos and later in Redwood City. (If I left early, the council s would often roll some bad stuff through. But I would check the next day and do a juicy follow story on the late night chicanery.) There were wonderful save the bay stories: the dirthaulers would scoop up the dirt in the green hills of the Peninsula, haul it in double gondola dirt-hauling trucks down Ralston Avenue in Belmont, and dump it into the bay for fill for Foster City and Redwood
Shores. And, through it all, Mayor Wallace Benson of Belmont would hold pre-council meetings at the old Villa Chartier restaurant in nearby San Mateo and polish the policies to keep the dirt flowing from the hills to the bay.
When I called him on his indiscretions, Benson would wave his cigar and say, “Bruce, if you don’t think I deserve some champagne and Maine lobster for running the city of Belmont, then you just go and vote me out office.”
I was having a field day. Spangler and Schutz were quite nervous about my aggressive reporting, but each told me in his own way that I could do the stories as long as my facts were straight. I also had an excellent city editor, Michael Kernan, who protected me. Years later, after I sent Spangler a copy of a Guardian expose, he wrote me a letter in longhand, “Bruce, you were a pain in the ass. But you were always worth it.” That was probably the nicest compliment I ever got from a publisher.
Well, the reporters and editors from the Peninsula papers would meet now and then in a hotel bar off the Bayshore Freeway for drinks. It was a convivial affair, even though we competed and there was real daily competition and the San Mateo Times of J. Hart Clinton was in head to head competition with the Redwood City Tribune and Burlingame Advance-Star (which with the Palo Alto Times were under the umbrella of an organization known as PNI , Peninsula Newspapers Inc.) This group became a press club and ultimately the proud San Francisco Peninsula Press Club, despite the sad sad deaths of three PNI papers and the gutting of the San Mateo Times/Singleton and deathly journalism until the Palo Alto Weekly of Bill Johnson. The club is, I am happy to report, still going strong under the stewardship of Darryl Compton and a batch of fugitives and expats from Singleton and Knight-Ridder journalism. They produce a vigorous annual newspaper contest, some zesty parties, the most newsy blog in the Bay Area, and the feel that there is still some real watchdog journalism on the Peninsula.
Let me make the point with some headlines from the club’s Tuesday Oct. 2 blog edition:
Media News profits up; Singleton gets $l.8 million
Rosenthal: Journalists are being eliminated
Ridder disappointed by today’s Merc (B3: what did he expect?)
Ex-Merc editor finds herself in a firestorm
Station group urges rejection of Hearst bid
Citing finances, KQED cancels ‘Pacific Time”
Clint Reilly gets free space from Media News (B3: hot news: remember the Singleton exec saying Reilly was a liar and that he would have to pay for his columns according to the terms of his antitrust suit settlement. The blog even runs a Reilly column with the telling admission. Does this count as a Singleton lie?)
Merc accounting error means cuts
Guild files new charge against MediaNews (B3: when will our daily newspapers ever hire a fulltime labor reporter to report on all the major labor issues of the day?)
In short, the Peninsula Press Club blog shows what a good media column can be. Now it needs to check and see how many reporters are regularly covering the council and planning commission meetings till 2 a.m. from Brisbane down to Palo Alto. That would be a good story. B3
Click here for Peninsula press club blog.
By Amber Peckham
One of the first waves of protest over the move in Congress to remove transgender people from an anti-discrimination bill came from the labor movement. Members of Pride at Work, an LGBT-focused labor coalition and the newest member of the AFL-CIO, held a press conference Sept 28 to announce they are withdrawing their support from the ENDA bill, and encouraging other LGBT advocacy groups to do the same.
The advocacy is having an impact – already, more than 20 LGBT organizations have come out against the move, and it’s entirely possible that the one-time landmark workplace-discrimination bill will lose almost all of queer community support.
“The need for gender provisions in this bill doesn’t apply only to those who are transgender, but also to, say, effeminate gay men, or lesbians who are ‘too butch’” said Robert Haaland, a representative of Pride at Work. “By picking and choosing who to include in their non-discrimination bill, these legislators are discriminating. It’s self-contradicting.”
“With the transgender community as arguably the most marginalized part of the LGBT community, they are really the ones who need the support of this bill the most,” added Masen Davis, a board member of the Transgender Law Center board. “Over 60% of transgenders in San Francisco are unemployed.”
Davis also expressed gratitude for the support of the labor community.
“If anyone is familiar with the ‘divide and conquer’ tactics being used on the LGBT community right now, it’s the labor movement.” he said. “It really heartens me to hear this voice of support from the labor community, because it means that maybe the bill won’t have to be divided, it can stay one, unified proposition.”
Pride at Work is calling on Pelosi to withdraw her support for the bill if transgender provisions are removed before ENDA is voted on, and is holding a vigil outside her office. If she were to do so, it is likely the bill would not pack the punch required to make it through a Congressional vote, and none of the LGBT community would benefit.
“That’s how the labor movement works; if you injure one, you injure all.” said Haaland. “And it looks like that’s how this bill is going to end up working as well.”
Slate has a great piece by Tim Wu, author of “Who Owns the Internet,” that points out why Mayor Newsom’s public-private partnership idea for municipal wifi will never work.
Wu’s point (also bloggednicely in leftinsf)
“The basic idea of offering Internet access as a public service is sound. The problem is that cities haven’t thought of the Internet as a form of public infrastructure that—like subway lines, sewers, or roads—must be paid for. Instead, cities have labored under the illusion that, somehow, everything could be built easily and for free by private parties. That illusion has run straight into the ancient economics of infrastructure and natural monopoly. The bottom line: City dwellers won’t be able to get high-quality wireless Internet access for free. If they want it, collectively, they’ll have to pay for it.”
And yet, Newsom’s crew are out raising money for a ballot measure, Prop. J, that would lock the city in to a “public-private” free-lunch partnership. I’ve just looked at the Ethics Commission filings on it, and in many ways it’s the usual Newsom bunch: Eric Jaye of Storefront Media, Newsom’s chief consultant, is running the campaign. Jim Sutton is doing the legal work. The money’s come from downtown types (the Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe law firm gave $500), Newsom’s father (who gave $1,000) Newsom’s political allies (Assessor Phil TIng gave $250) and labor groups that want to stay on the mayor’s good side or owe him favors (Sign painters, transport workers, and firefighters). What a waste of time and money — unless this whole thing is about providing a back-channel way to give cash to the mayor.
Last night I had the classic single journalist’s dilemma: who to take to a work event? In particular, this was Taste of the Town, a swanky food-and-fashion gala thrown annually by the politically evil but socially entertaining Golden Gate Restaurant Association (don’t worry – since I had press passes, I wasn’t supporting their anti-labor lobbying efforts, towards which proceeds of everyone else’s $150 tickets went).
The debate always goes something like this: I have an extra pass to a potentially cool event that I (and my potential date) might not otherwise get to attend. But I have to go there to actually work. If I bring a date I’m interested in, I’ll either ignore my date or ignore my work. So I decide to bring a platonic friend. But then I have to choose the right friend, someone fun, independent, and capable of using restraint at an open bar. Not always easy, and the right Plus One for one event may not be right for another.
I want candy. Models show off confection-themed wedding dresses co-created by Elizabeth Falkner of Citizen Cake. Of particular interest were cotton-candy hair pieces and chocolate “tattoos.”
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Some films glean artful pleasure from the pains of labor. One flourishing subgenre or strain of documentary tackles working conditions in countries across the world, highlighting the plight of the marginalized to make ends meet and maintain dignity in the face of unjust or extreme conditions. In a sense, Ghosts and Numbers and Luchando, two features at this year’s San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, belong to this group, but they are most interesting for the ways that they differ from it, in content and style. Both movies highlight the precariousness of labor and favor a less direct and centralized consideration of employment’s role in shaping an individual’s existence.
Ghosts and Numbers and Luchando are like distant cousins; they are blood-bound by an integral interest in the working class, but they reside in different lands and possess divergent personalities. In fact, the title of each film suggests something about its filmmaker’s approach to theme.
Alan Klima’s Ghosts and Numbers is a bit cryptic, with a penchant for interweaving ostensibly unrelated elements. One may wonder what the relationship is between ghosts and numbers, but the more relevant inquiry relates to that between labor and modernity. Convictions and a critique can be discerned amid Klima’s clever array of images and concerns, but no easy conclusions are reached.
Noelle Stout’s Luchando, on the other hand, is more up-front and focused in its presentation of the titular subject matter. Of course, the title’s meaning is obscure for non-Spanish speakers, and, even in Spanish, the term is slang instead of a standard word for people who get paid for having sex. But once the slang is understood (it is explained onscreen by one of the subjects), there is no uncertainty that Luchando is a clear and determined depiction of the lives of Cuban hustlers, without any overt class analysis.
These films share a relatively subtle sense of subversion. Klima’s Thailand-set documentary presents the quagmires of modernization and shows compassion for its victims at a time when the more popular sentiment is to rally patriotically around the Asian country’s entrance into the global community (and thus celebrate a preference for glistening urbania over a bucolic tradition). Klima observes lottery-ticket sellers as they discuss the vulnerable state of their occupation in the face of human-replacing technology and governmental limitations. Their earnest and desperate presence contrasts powerfully with other more reflective components and is part of an almost unsettling mixture of elements. Shots of unfinished Bangkok skyscrapers are matched with a voice-over concerning the Thai economy. Abstracted imagery is paired with stories of encounters with ghosts. Vérité-style footage is used for political protest and for a visit to a fortune-teller. At worst, these methods are a bit desultory, with some scenes in need of truncation. But aside from those moments, Ghosts and Numbers glimmers with a rare blend of mystery and humanity.
The humanity of Luchando is more intimate. Whereas Klima’s film uses cinepoetic musings to break up its direct human engagement, Stout’s presents pure portraiture — though it is difficult not to succumb to awe before Havana’s photogenic splendor. Stout surreptitiously captures the daily lives of four prostitutes, hesitantly heeding the warning of subjects when cops appear on the scene. These moments and bits of testimony give the sense that her subjects exist on the outskirts of safety, perpetually in a danger zone because of their gay identity or association. This is most poignant in the case of the transgender woman who is verbally assaulted as the film opens and later talks about being forced to dress as a man. Perhaps Luchando would be enhanced by a look outside the immediate scope of its subjects, in order to get a larger sense of the social conditions in which they are struggling. But there is also satisfaction to be found in its tightly focused account of lives that are both ordinary and foreign.
The sixth SF DocFest runs Sept. 28–Oct. 10 at the Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF. Information about tickets ($10) and a complete schedule can be obtained by calling (415) 820-3907 or visiting www.sfindie.com.
GHOSTS AND NUMBERS
Tues/2, 7 p.m.; Oct. 7, 2:45 p.m.; $10
LUCHANDO
Sat/29 and Oct. 5, 9:15 p.m.; Oct. 6, 7 p.m.; $10
For an interview with Luchando director Noelle Stout, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
