Labor

Sorta, maybe an alcoholic

-
0

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

To read about Delancey’s finances, click here.

What exactly is Gavin Newsom doing at Delancey Street?

It’s not counseling, we’re told. It’s not rehab. It’s not detox. It’s not a typical course of treatment at the storied $20 million nonprofit. So what is it beyond a reprieve from the otherwise ugly headlines?

Newsom isn’t talking much about his program. But some mental-health professionals are raising serious questions about his regimen.

San Francisco’s chief executive declared several weeks ago in a public announcement to all the city’s department heads that he was seeking a diluted version of rehab at Delancey Street.

That struck more than a few people as odd. Delancey Street doesn’t do part-time or outpatient treatment. It only takes clients who agree to a long-term, full-time residential program geared entirely toward hardcore alcoholics, drug addicts, and criminals.

It’s not, in other words, a place where someone in Newsom’s condition would typically seek help. And it’s not a place designed to alleviate a comparatively minor thirst for white wine.

The news certainly appalled Dee-Dee Stout.

Stout is a City College of San Francisco professor and an adjunct faculty member at San Francisco State University. It’s her job to train city employees working in any major capacity that involves medically treating alcohol and drug abuse, from San Francisco General Hospital to Community Behavioral Health Services to the Adult Probation Department.

Stout, a certified drug and alcohol counselor, told us friends who’d seen the headlines said, " ‘Oh god, Dee-Dee’s going to hit the roof on this one.’ And they were right."

She struggled to figure out how she could broach the subject to one of her classes at City College — but a student beat her to it, quickly pointing out that it was unethical for credentialed treatment specialists to counsel their close friends. The two-year recertification required of caseworkers in the city includes an ethics update, Stout said.

Delancey Street’s executive director, Mimi Silbert, has been Newsom’s friend since he was a child and knows his father well. Silbert, in fact, has openly discussed Newsom’s progress with the press, including the Guardian, while the mayor’s own ear-piercing silence on the matter enables him to appear repentant.

Stout decided to offer the student extra credit if he drafted a letter outlining the concerns of the class, which she had colleagues review before sending it along to the entire Board of Supervisors, the Mayor’s Office, and pretty much every major newspaper in town.

"This relationship is not acceptable under any applicable code of professional ethics," the letter states. Hardly anyone bothered to write back, save for the auto-response letters Stout received from Sophie Maxwell and the Mayor’s Office, plus a letter from Bevan Dufty urging Stout and her students to empathize with Gavin during this difficult time.

Silbert, for her part, told the Guardian that ethics weren’t a concern for her because Newsom wasn’t a full-tilt drunk and hadn’t submitted completely to a detailed treatment plan when he approached her for help.

"The mayor is not a drug addict," Silbert said. "That’s not what he was looking for…. Having stopped drinking, he wanted to take a look at himself. He drank what people would call ‘socially.’ I’ve seen other people when they stopped drinking — even people who didn’t need detox — and there were physical signs of problems. That’s not the shape the mayor was in."

The mayor is attending both group and solo counseling sessions after work each day, a schedule that Silbert told us is still ongoing.

Dannie Lee, a former Delancey Street resident we interviewed, said that during his own stay he attended group therapy three days a week and they were generally no-holds-barred sessions. Lee lived at Delancey Street for three and a half years after spending much of his adult life in California’s prison system. While the program ultimately worked for him, he insists, he’s skeptical that it could benefit anyone who’s trying to attend as an outpatient.

"Maybe it would be great if [Newsom] was actually there as a client or whatever to really sit in a circle and really share his stuff and listen to the group and let the group really attack," said the 49-year-old Lee, who today is one of Stout’s students. "That probably would be fine. But I don’t see that happening…. I think he would really have to tell things I don’t think he wants to tell."

Press accounts have depicted Delancey Street as an abrasive scrub brush for Newsom’s sinful indulgences. "No Nonsense: Toughness Key to Delancey Street, Silbert’s Success," a Chronicle headline announced Feb. 7. Silbert herself told the Guardian, "No one would come near us if they weren’t serious. I’m old, crotchety, and very direct. I have no time to waste."

That may be true — and it’s clear Delancey Street has had some remarkable success in treating people with severe self-destructive impulses.

San Francisco, on the other hand, years ago eschewed the sort of harsh treatment techniques that have made Delancey Street famous.

H. Westley Clark, director of the federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment and a one-time clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco, told us that federal mental-health bureaucrats are less inclined today to fund groups that use confrontational methods for treating clients.

Any local nonprofit agency that wants to provide help to substance abusers using city money must comply with San Francisco’s harm reduction policy, which discourages hostile interview techniques and was set in stone by the San Francisco Health Commission seven years ago.

The letter from Stout’s class points out that treatment professionals are moving away from tough-love verbal upbraids such as those employed by the Delancey Street model.

" ‘Attack therapy’ often involves yelling at patients who have, in our view, a medical condition…. While we realize that some patients are helped by strong, confrontational methods, we believe that an evidence-based approach offers more consistent successful results."

Silbert’s techniques may be controversial, but she does move easily among Democratic Party rainmakers and philanthropists. Delancey Street enjoys wide popularity with the likes of Robert Redford, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Washington-based Eisenhower Foundation, and executives at the Gap, Pottery Barn, and Bank of America.

Silbert said the mayor deserves credit for whatever help he chooses to pursue. Other prominent friends of Delancey Street have called her before when they needed to "tune themselves up."

"I would never choose to criticize other people’s approaches, so I’m sorry if people are criticizing ours," she said. "We work hard. We do our best…. I’m glad these people feel they have a definitive answer. I don’t, and I’ve been doing it for 35 years."

If Newsom, as Silbert says, isn’t a serious alcoholic, Delancey Street is a peculiar place for him to seek help.

Most people entering the program have hit rock bottom, a step away from death or lifelong incarceration. They’re one-time prostitutes, drug pushers, robbers, and ruthless bangers. Since the organization was formed in the 1970s, it claims to have transformed the lives of 14,000 people through vocational and education assistance in addition to group counseling.

Very few of those people come in for the sort of casual treatment Newsom is seeking. In fact, Delancey Street typically doesn’t accept anyone who isn’t planning on spending a couple years in residence.

Residents living at the Embarcadero Triangle provide labor for several businesses that buoy the nonprofit financially, from its famous Delancey Street Restaurant to a national moving and trucking service.

Newsom for the most part is refusing to answer questions about his now-public battle with booze.

But Stout suggests that Newsom, by allowing the entirety of his treatment to appear on a marquee, has brought the publicity on himself. "Frankly, I don’t think it’s any of our business if he goes to treatment," Stout said. "I wish he would have just quietly gone and did what he needed to do and said he just had some medical things he needed to take care of, period." *

The Wild, Wild West

-
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

As a production assistant for a visual effects studio, Robert Seeley had a job at the Orphanage that was nuts and bolts for the movie industry — handling paperwork, overseeing schedules, arranging deliveries, and making sure folks were fed, clients were happy, and many of the million little logistics for a film project were coordinated.

His days began with an hour-long commute from Pleasant Hill to the Presidio, where the Orphanage is based. Mornings started around 9, and the typical workday ran about 10 hours. Or it did when he started there, in July 2006.

"There was a snowball effect. It started out as a regular 10-hour workday. It slowly built to 12, then 16," Seeley told the Guardian.

At one point, Seeley charges, he was asked to work a 20-hour shift — and return to work two and a half hours later. When he didn’t come in, he was fired.

Seeley sued, and the case was eventually settled. But along the way, the lawyers for the Orphanage raised a startling argument: since the Presidio is a federal enclave, they said, California labor law, which restricts the length of shifts, doesn’t apply.

"This was a really straightforward, meat and potatoes case," Seeley’s lawyer, Steve Sommers, told the Guardian. "And if he worked across the street, it would have been a slam dunk."

If the legal argument advanced by the studio as a response to Seeley’s lawsuit is right — and some labor experts say it may very well be — then none of the private companies that lease space at the Presidio have to follow any state or local labor laws. That means no California or San Francisco minimum wage, no workplace safety statutes, nothing. And since state law is generally far tougher than federal law, the difference could be profound.

There are hundreds of people working for private companies in the Presidio, which operates under a unique arrangement that allows private, commercial development in a national park.

Federal regulations are almost always weaker than California’s — and not necessarily improving. "Federal laws are evolving backwards for the most part," said Katie Quan, associate chair for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley. "There have been attempts to weaken benefits, Social Security, who can and can’t join unions. Even the new minimum wage that’s been passed — there’s a big question as to whether or not [George W.] Bush will sign it."

While California’s minimum wage is $7.50 and San Francisco’s is $9.14, the federal hourly rate is currently $5.15 — and arguably the only one that applies in the Presidio.

Several employment lawyers contacted by us initially suggested that California’s labor statutes would have to apply in the Presidio, but Chris Cannon, a lawyer familiar with the situation, did not.

"I’ve gotten a lot of people acquitted on a criminal basis applying that same validity," he said of the cases the Orphanage’s lawyers used to back up their argument. "It’s like a little piece of Nevada here in California."

Cannon has litigated several cases in the Presidio, most notably on the controversial issue of where and when dogs can be off leash. "Given the history of the Presidio, I think there’s a very good argument that California laws don’t apply."

It’s easy to extrapolate that nothing that’s been passed in Sacramento or at City Hall would apply to the Presidio, including the recent universal health care plan passed by the Board of Supervisors and the paid sick-leave that voters approved.

The upshot: the author of the bill establishing the Presidio park, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is a big favorite of organized labor, may have created a place where private employers can freely flout state and local laws designed to protect workers.

Lieutenant Jeff Wasserman of the US Park Police, which has exclusive jurisdiction over the Presidio, said, "We only have to follow federal laws. However, the US attorney has in the past asked us to adhere to state laws simply because they think it’s the right thing to do."

One of Wasserman’s examples involved a California law that speed limits may only be adjusted based on recommendations from a traffic engineer, which was established to prevent cops from setting speed traps. To Wasserman’s knowledge, California is the only state with this restriction, and it’s been extended to the Presidio. "The US Attorney felt that it was fair that if the surrounding streets followed it, we should too." He added that juvenile arrests in the Presidio have also stood up in local courts because the federal laws are so weak in that regard.

Two dozen companies contacted by us were asked questions regarding employment protocol, and all said they paid San Francisco’s minimum wage or better and insisted they followed both federal and state labor laws. The largest employer in the Presidio, LucasFilm, did not respond to the questions.

Carsten Sorensen, CEO of the Orphanage, said, "We follow the letter of the law. We were told by our attorneys, being in the Presidio, we fall under the federal labor law."

He did say, "Of course we want our employees to be safe and do whatever we can to make sure that happens. There’s no chronic issue of people who are dissatisfied with the working conditions."

But in responding to the lawsuit, his company didn’t even try to defend its practices. Instead, Judith Droz Keyes, a lawyer with the firm Davis Wright Tremaine, argued in a Jan. 24 letter that "California has no jurisdiction either to legislate or enforce its laws within the federal enclave. The fact that the Orphanage is a private company leasing space within the Presidio makes no difference."

The Presidio Trust — the semiprivate agency that manages the park — did not respond to requests for comment, and it’s unclear how the outfit treats its own workers. Discrimination based on sexual orientation, for example, is not a part of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity laws, but it is a part of California’s, and even the Presidio Trust’s own personnel manual mandates it.

To require anything definitive and absolute would take an act of Congress to mandate the Presidio adhere to state or local ordinances. We tried to reach Pelosi’s office to ask about it, but she didn’t return our calls.

In the meantime, Sommers said, "The Presidio Trust could insist that all vendors abide by California state labor laws. Then large employers in the Presidio would have to treat their workers like citizens of California." *

Law enforcement’s real battles

-
0

OPINION In order to be smart on crime, law enforcement needs to make important choices about where to focus our resources. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has been making poor choices, and those choices are hitting home in San Francisco.

Recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted raids in San Francisco and around the Bay Area, rounding up immigrants at their jobs and schools, in some instances with ICE agents announcing themselves as police. These actions sow fear in the immigrant community among undocumented and documented residents alike.

The raids conducted in San Francisco present many of us in local law enforcement with a great concern. One of law enforcement’s biggest challenges to protecting crime victims in immigrant communities is encouraging them to come forward. Because immigrants are often afraid to report crimes, they can be regarded as easy targets for violent criminals and con artists.

We all suffer when crime victims are isolated from law enforcement. If victims and witnesses do not report crimes or cooperate with law enforcement, criminals remain on the streets, and all of us are put at risk. That is why my office is holding immigrant resource fairs in the Mission District and Chinatown to support immigrant rights and to make clear to community members that they are protected by San Francisco’s Sanctuary Ordinance and that my office will not report them to ICE when they come forward as witnesses or victims of crime. Rather than driving immigrants deeper into the shadows, we need to encourage those who have been victimized by crime to work with us to hold criminals accountable.

At the same time, the US Justice Department is walking down an ominous path by threatening journalists with prison time when they protect their confidential sources. In San Francisco the US attorney has held journalist Josh Wolf in prison since September 2006. Wolf should be released. For very good reasons, 31 states, including California, have shield laws upholding the rights of journalists to protect the secrecy of their sources and unpublished information. We need a federal shield law as well.

Of course, I believe crimes against police officers should be aggressively prosecuted. But I also believe that federal authorities have an obligation to respect the First Amendment. Free speech rights are critical to the work of journalists, university researchers, organized labor, and all of us in a democracy. The Justice Department should recognize the importance of protecting free speech, not only as constitutional and civil liberties issues but as smart public safety policy. Journalists play a key role in connecting us to individuals with information about crimes, and threatening the confidentiality of their sources has a chilling effect. If sources fear their confidentiality will not be protected, they will be less likely to come forward to journalists with information that could expose corruption or assist us in solving violent crimes.

Cities across the country are grappling with serious gang violence. Precious resources should be focused on addressing violence, gun crime, and major white-collar crime, not wasted on prosecuting journalists and conducting immigration raids that sweep up innocent residents, actions that hinder our efforts to build trusting relationships with vulnerable, victimized communities and keep the public safe. *

Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris is the San Francisco district attorney.

A little help from their friends

-
0

The San Francisco Chronicle’s intrepid reporters have insisted repeatedly in recent weeks that the Delancey Street Foundation accepts absolutely no government funds. “Instead, it relies on donations and the profits from its commercial enterprises,” San Francisco’s paper of record wrote on Feb. 6.

A simple search of the city’s vendor database, however, confirms that several local agencies in San Francisco paid Delancey Street amounts totaling well over $1 million for the last two fiscal years alone. The Department of Children, Youth & Their Families gave Delancey Street $98,000 in program grants for each of the last two fiscal years and by the end of 2007 will have given the nonprofit more than $300,000.

And the mayor’s office gave Delancey Street $435,000 in fiscal year 2006 and $483,000 in 2005, the records show.

The city has paid the foundation more than $200,000 so far this year, and there’s another $64,000 in outstanding payments. The Guardian obtained copies of the grant agreements through sunshine requests made last week.

Mayor Newsom is receiving “counseling” for a self-diagnosed excessive love of white wine from Delancey Street’s politically well-connected executive director, Mimi Silbert, who has known Newsom and his family for years.

The foundation’s easily accessible federal tax forms reflect the hundreds of thousands in annual government dollars paid to Delancey Street.

After local blogger Michael Petrelis began contesting the claims, a Chronicle reporter clarified for Petrelis following a call to Silbert that grant money from the city supports a charter school on Treasure Island called the Life Learning Academy. The academy is managed by Delancey Street and targets troublesome teens – half of them on probation – who have had problems elsewhere in the school district. Silbert told us that the school was designed in part to emulate Delancey Street by operating businesses like its organic produce subscription service and bike maintenance shop.

She said, as Delancey Street has for years, that program residents living at the nonprofit’s Embarcadero Street headquarters depend on one another to keep the place operating through its variety of undertakings.

“We structured it without a staff and without day-to-day funding so that people could help each other,” Silbert said. “And it’s in the helping of each other that you begin to find your strength. And since they run the organization and go from department to department to department, they eventually find what they are good at.”

But there’s more. According to Delancey Street’s tax forms and deed records maintained by the county recorder, the Mayor’s Office of Housing facilitated a $4 million loan for Delancey Street in 1989 using city money to help with the construction of its sprawling residential and commercial center on the Embarcadero, which cost $20 million to build, not including donated labor. As long as Delancey Street complied with a series of terms, the loan, plus interest, would be forgiven after 20 years. Free government money, in other words.

The city’s mayor at that time was Art Agnos. Delancey Street leveraged $18 million more through the private sector to cover the rest of its construction costs for the Embarcadero Triangle Project, according to its tax forms.

They did so using a cash-generating scheme known as a “leaseback” agreement. A third party purchased the property for $18.7 million paid to Delancey Street and also covered the expense of the $4 million loan made by the city. The whole transaction took place only on paper, and in exchange, the third party got to take advantage of the property’s low-income housing tax credits by technically owning 600 Embarcadero St. while the nonprofit continued to operate Delancey Street at the location.

Silbert wields far-reaching connections inside the Democratic Party and among moneyed philanthropists including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen Dianne Feinstein and even Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair. When Silbert announced plans to expand nationally, Delancey Street’s longtime supporter, Feinstein, vowed to secure a $1 million grant from the U.S. Justice Department to help in the effort, according to a 2002 LA Times profile of the organization.

The foundation is headquartered in a burnt umber stucco building on Embarcadero Street fringed with decorative iron gates and planters beneath French-style windows. Overlaying the property is a grid of sun-baked courtyards. Its design complies neatly with the principles of New Urbanism encouraged in the northeastern neighborhood with a walkable row of ground-floor businesses and densely packed dwellings. According to lore, it was built entirely by residents of Delancey Street.

If you didn’t know it was a treatment center, frankly, you’d mistake it for another of the innumerable yuppie enclaves that have sprouted in the neighborhood over the last two decades.

Five hundred residents live on site and conduct all of the program’s day-to-day operations as part of their commitment to an intensive two-year program. They provide labor for several Delancey Street businesses that buoy the nonprofit, from its famous Delancey Street Restaurant to a national moving and trucking service.

Leaseback agreements, such as the one entered into by Delancey Street to build its hub on the Embarcadero, are a common financing mechanism for low-income housing construction. But the forgivable loan from the city shows that a little sleuthing on the part of reporters would have gone a long way in confirming the extent of the nonprofit’s professed independence

Guess who supports term limits?

-
0

By Tim Redmond

I’ve never been a big fan of legislative term limits. Sending legislators packing after a few years shifts to much power to the lobbyists and the executive branch. So I’m glad to see that labor is pushing to modify San Francisco’s term-limits law. Bevan Dufty, who says he is only going to serve two terms anyway, is taking the political heat and leading the charge on this; good for him.

Who do you suppose is leading the campaign to keep the current two-term limits? It’s Wade Randlett and the folks at SFSOS! No surprise: They desperately want to get rid of sups. Aaron Peskin, Chris Daly and Jake McGoldrick, and since they can’t seem to do it the old-fashioned way, by winning elections, they want to make sure the progressives are termed out.

That puts them right up there with the Republicans in Sacramento.

Wolf needs a Shield, and so do you

-
1

By Sarah Phelan

With the Chronicle reporters off the hook, what’s going to happen to jailed freelancer Josh Wolf? News that a mediator has been brought in is a ray of hope. But people should not forget that Wolf’s credentials as a journalist have been repeatedly challenged, and even mocked, by the US Attorney’s Office. What’s particularly disturbing is that all this is going down against a backdrop of increased media consolidation. How many journalists have full time jobs? How many photographers? How many can even afford to make journalism their full -time job? Sure, journalism is a profession for which you can get credentialed up the kazoo, but the truth is that many great reporters and videographers are self-taught, and/or are freelancers, working their craft in between another job, and rarely and barely getting paid for their labor. And what about the person who sees something going down, and picks up a notebook or camera, and faithfully records it? Many a great career started that way.
Right now, Rep. John Conyers has a bill in the works that would define a journalist as someone who is engaged in gathering and reporting on news, written, photography, video, regardless of whether the person was paid for their work or not and regardless of what media they published in. Maybe you’re reading this and thinking of extra categories and definitions that need to be included in the bill. If so, great: now would be the perfect time to speak out. That way, we can get a federal shield law that will give news gatherers the strongest protections possible. The last few years has been a really dark Dark Age for the press. Let’s free Josh Wolf and get a free press, while we’re at it.

TUESDAY

-
0

FEB. 13

EVENT

Robert Pinsky

Don’t try to tell Robert Pinsky poetry doesn’t matter. The former poet laureate has worked tirelessly to convey poetry’s importance in a way that transcends the esoteric. Beyond writing his own poems and essays, Pinsky has applied himself as a teacher, speaker, and translator. The Center for the Art of Translation spotlights the last endeavor, bringing grave-voiced Pinsky to its free Lit and Lunch series to read from his award-winning version of Dante’s Inferno. (Max Goldberg)

12:30 p.m.
111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna, SF
(415) 512-8812
www.catranslation.org

EVENT

“What Ever Happened
to the Eight-Hour Day?”

In today’s 24-hour, telecommute, CrackBerry world, the eight-hour workday sounds like a relic. San Francisco historian, activist, and cyclist Chris Carlsson explores San Francisco’s labor history in his lecture “What Ever Happened to the Eight-Hour Day?,” sponsored by the SF Museum and Historical Society. Carlsson, founder and editor of Processed World magazine, gives a multimedia tour of the city’s labor movement and the class wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. (Elaine Santore)

7:00 p.m., $10
UCSF Laurel Heights
3333 California, auditorium, SF
(415) 775-1111
www.sfhistory.org

Valentine’s Day events

-
0

PARTIES, EVENTS, AND BENEFITS

"Amor del Mar" Aquarium of the Bay at Pier 39, Embarcadero at Bay; 623-5323, www.aquariumofthebay.com. Wed/14, 7pm, $125 single, $200 couple. Support the nonprofit Aquarium of the Bay Foundation during this romantic evening featuring cocktails, culinary delights, and a live salsa band.

"Cupid Stunt — Club Neon’s Third Annual Valentine’s Day Underwear Party" Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell; 861-2011, www.neonsf.com. Wed/14, 9pm, $10. A chance to dance with no pants, featuring DJs, a lingerie fashion show and trunk sale by designer Danielle Rodriguez, and Valentine’s visuals by Chris Golden.

"Isn’t It Romantic: New Connections Valentine’s Day Benefit Concert" Castro Theatre, 429 Castro; www.newconnections.org. Wed/14, 7:30pm, $20. Local chanteuse Nancy Gilliland sings love songs from the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s to benefit New Connections’ HIV/AIDS healthcare services. Tickets available via www.ticketweb.com.

"Love Your Way to Abolition: Party with Saint Valentine" El Rio, 3158 Mission; www.elriosf.com. Thurs/15, 6pm, $5-50. This benefit for Justice Now, an organization that works with incarcerated women and local communities to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons, will feature speakers and live music.

"Pink’s Valentine’s Party: Cupid’s Back" 296 Liberty; www.pinkmag.com. Sat/10, 8pm, $25. This party will raise funds to support the GLBT Historical Society’s world-class archives of queer history. Romance tips given by Clint Griess, life coach on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and an open bar provided by Bulldog Gin and Peroni Beer. Space is limited.

"Randall Museum Presents a Valentine’s Day Sex Tour" Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way; 554-9600, www.randallmuseum.org. Thurs/15, 7:30pm, free, donations encouraged. Guest speaker Jane Tollini of the San Francisco Zoo leads an entertaining and educational romp through the wild kingdom, featuring fairly explicit photos and her own blend of knowledge and humor.

"Sea of Love Scavenger Hunt" California Academy of Sciences, 875 Howard; 321-8000, www.calacademy.org. Sat/10-Thurs/15, 10am-5pm, free with museum admission. Embark on a self-guided scavenger hunt to find the museum’s most amorous creatures and earn fun prizes. G-rated tours available for children.

"The Sweet Cheat Gone — a Free Public Street Game" Meet at corner of Steuart and Market; www.sfzero.org. Sat/10, 7pm, free. Participants take sides in the prosecution of a defendant accused of committing a crime. Teams will travel by foot, bike, or Muni (no cars or taxis) to various San Francisco locations, competing with each other to collect or destroy evidence and prove their case.

"Valentines, Fashion, and You" Nordstrom San Francisco Center, 865 Market; 243-8500, ext 1240. Sat/10, 12pm, free. Event features live models, the hottest fashions in lingerie, refreshments, and prize drawings. Space is limited to the first 100 who RSVP to the number listed above.

"The Vampire Tour of San Francisco" Meet at corner of California and Taylor; (650) 279-1840 (reservations), www.sfvampiretour.com. Wed/14, 8pm, $15-20. Spend Valentine’s Day in the company of a vampire, and take an amorous walk through beautiful Nob Hill. A few special guests are dying to meet you.

"Woo at the Zoo" San Francisco Zoo; Sloat Blvd at 47th St; 753-7263, www.sfzoo.org. Sun/11, 12pm, Tues/13-Wed/14, 6pm, $70. This new and dynamic multimedia event provides an entertaining approach to the erotic life of animals, including how they choose their mates and raise their families. The 90-minute tour features up-close animal encounters and romantic refreshments. Admission includes presentation, refreshments, parking, and zoo admission.

BAY AREA

"Have a Heart" MOCHA — Museum of Children’s Art, 528 Ninth St, Oakl; 510-465-8770, www.mocha.org. Sat/10-Sun/11, 1pm-4pm, $5 per child. Make a papier-mâché heart sculpture or a lacy wire heart mobile and design unique cards for your loved ones.

"Nils Peterson’s Valentine’s Day Poetry Reading" Le Petit Trianon Theatre, 72 N Fifth St, San Jose; www.pcsj.org. Wed/14, 5:30pm, $10 includes glass of wine. The Poetry Center San Jose presents Nils Peterson, whose long literary career includes a 30-year tenure teaching creative writing at San Jose State University. Also featuring Sally Ashton.

"Saint Valentine’s Day Poetry Reading" Frank Bette Center for the Arts, 1601 Paru, Alameda; (510) 523-6957, www.frankbettecenter.org. Wed/14, 7pm, free. Alameda’s poet laureate Mary Ridge and others will read about people they have loved and welcomed.

"Week of Valentines at Habitot Children’s Museum" Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge, Berk; (510) 647-1111, www.habitot.org. Wed/7-Wed/14, $6 per child and $5 for accompanying adult. Add your unique artistic touch to a large heart sculpture and create handmade Valentine cards for your family and loved ones using recycled materials at this award-winning discovery museum for young adults.

FILM, MUSIC, AND PERFORMANCE

"BATS Improv Special Valentine’s Day Performance" Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, bldg B, Marina at Laguna; 474-8935, www.improv.com. Wed/14, 8pm, $10 advance, $15 at the door. In the first half of the show, audience suggestions will spark scenes and improv games that illustrate the humor in romance. In the second half, the audience will supply a title and a theme for an improvised story that will be created on the spot by BATS’s improv troupe.

"Club Chuckles Presents: Soft Rock vs. Smooth Jazz Valentine’s Day Bash" Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk; 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com. Wed/14, 9pm, $5. A battle of the bands that pits the forces of soft rock against smooth jazz, as played by bands Cool Nites and the Sound Painters, respectively. Moderated by comedy duo Carole Murphy and Mitzi Fitzsimmons, who will also dispense advice to the lovelorn and romantically challenged.

"Love Bites the Hand That Feeds It" Theatre Rhinoceros, 2940 16th St; 861-5079, www.therhino.org. Fri/9-Sat/10, 8pm, $15-$30. The Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco presents its annual anti-Valentine’s Day cabaret. Both evenings feature a variety of solo, duet, and group performances and will include a fifty-fifty raffle. The Feb. 10 event features a live auction.

"The Love Show by the Un-Scripted Theater Company" Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason; www.un-scripted.com. Wed/14, 8pm, $15-40. "The Love Show" will feature songs, scenes, and love-themed fun, all completely improvised. Couples and singles are encouraged to come. (There will even be a "quirky alone" seating section.)

"Mortified: Doomed Valentine’s Show" Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St; www.makeoutroom.com. Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm, $12. Frequently featured on This American Life, Mortified is a comic excavation of teen angst artifacts (journals, poems, letters, lyrics, and home movies), as shared by their original authors. More information at www.getmortified.com.

"Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad" Red Devil Lounge, 1695 Polk; www.nicejewishgirlsgonebad.com. Wed/14, 9pm, $12. Featuring comedy, music, spoken word, and burlesque from performers seen on Comedy Central, HBO, and MTV. These girls thrill everyone but their mothers.

"Valentine’s Day Film Program: Labor of Love" Exploratorium, McBean Theater, 3601 Lyon; www.exploratorium.edu. Sat/10, 2pm, free with museum admission. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, the Exploratorium presents a program of short, expressive films about people who love what they do.

BAY AREA

"Comedy Night in Novato" Pacheco Playhouse, 484 Ignacio Blvd, Novato; 883-4498, www.pachecoplayhouse.org. Wed/14, 6:30pm and 8:30pm, $15. Local comics bring levity to this most romantic of nights. A champagne celebration will close the evening.

"Valentine’s Day Comedy with Johnny Steele and Pals" Village Theater, 223 Front, Danville; (925) 314-3400; www.johnnysteele.com; Wed/14, 8pm, $18. Winner of the San Francisco International Comedy Competition, Johnny Steele has been plying his trade for nearly 20 years. A cavalcade of comics joins him for the third annual event.

ART SHOWS

BAY AREA

"All Heart" Expressions Gallery, 2035 Ashby, Berk; (510) 644-4930, www.expressionsgallery.org. Fri/10, 6pm, free. A collaborative art show with Children’s Hospital Oakland and Art for Life Foundation. The show runs through March 9. Presenting the work of patients participating in Art for Life programs as part of their care and rehabilitation. *

Nurturing the drive

-
0

› culture@sfbg.com

Sheri Wetherby was working at a casino in Tahoe when she decided to become a computer programmer. So she left Tahoe and came to the Bay Area to study. A few years later, she had a job at Microsoft.

Wetherby had hardly a lick of programming background before she got her MA in computer science at Mills College. Her undergraduate degree was in German and French. She’d taken some graduate courses at the University of New Hampshire, including a computer science course that inspired her to envision a second career in the field. But how, she wondered, could she find a program that would allow her to master computers, coming from a liberal arts background?

A friend told her about New Horizons, a reentry program at Mills that teaches computer programming to students with nontechnical backgrounds. "I found the small classes and individual attention helped me get a grounding" in computer science, she says, "before moving on to more advanced topics."

The New Horizons program is specially designed for grad students who don’t have an undergraduate degree in computer science. It consists of two undergraduate-level computer science classes per semester for students who also hold down jobs and family responsibilities. Students can choose to finish the New Horizons program with a certificate but most go on to pursue a master’s degree from the Interdisciplinary Computer Science program at Mills. The ICS program aims to build bridges between computer science and computer users and offers graduate coursework as well as a master’s thesis track.

Some New Horizons students find computer science too difficult or different than they expected, "but the majority are successful and happy," Mills computer science associate professor Ellen Spertus says. She recommends students with no CS experience try taking some community college courses in the subject first — to see if their eyes are bigger than their stomachs, in programming terms.

At a community college, students can take the prerequisite math and CS classes at a fraction of the cost before going to Mills, says Constance Conner, an instructor in the Computer Science Department at City College of San Francisco who studied in the ICS program at Mills. Community college "is also a good place to start if a student is not 100 percent sure" about a CS degree, she says. Then, if students’ appetites are still whet, the Mills program will guide them along a new career path.

CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE


Computer science is seen by many hopefuls as a lucrative but daunting field. In the public’s mind successful programmers are young, mostly male wizards who almost cosmically penetrate thickets of computer languages and database engineering to manifest unfathomable products. Spertus finds that many students going into her program suffer from low self-esteem — especially female students. She says they’ll be earning A’s in the program’s classes but will be convinced they’re not doing well and somehow "don’t belong." Her teaching style, simultaneously rigorous and nurturing, helps change their opinion, she hopes.

Introductory CS classes at most universities "act like weeder courses," scaring away all but the most confident students, Spertus says. Typically, up to half the students fail or drop out of introductory CS classes at other institutions. Spertus says this phenomenon hits women hardest because they may have less computer experience as well as less confidence.

Also, some students apologize for not having undergrad degrees in CS. Spertus always tells them computer scientists with a narrow focus are "a dime a dozen." But people like them, who know CS along with another field, are unique.

RIGHTING THE BALANCE


Erica Rios has been an activist since she was a teenager but became frustrated that activists were still using the same methods of organizing Martin Luther King Jr. employed back in the ’60s. She had a political science degree and a minor in Chicano studies from UC Davis. As a labor activist for small community nonprofits, she had to teach herself to use computers because nobody else knew how. She saw how technology was changing her native San Jose. She wanted to learn "how tech could be used to engage people in the issues that impact them but they don’t necessarily have a direct voice on."

Though Mills is a women’s undergrad college, it accepts male graduate students. Men typically make up roughly a third of the participants in the ICS program, but the majority-female environment creates a unique classroom culture. The different gender balance was helpful to Rios because she had a nine-month-old child when she started the program. She felt more comfortable bringing her daughter to her Java class than she would have in a male-dominated classroom — and less apt to fall behind on coursework.

The few men enrolled during Rios’s time brought a balance to the learning environment, she believes, while showing her that she need not feel uncomfortable as a woman in the computer science field. "There were two other men in class with me and about seven going through the whole program," says Barton Friedland, one of the men who just completed the ICS program. For him, it felt very different to study "with a preponderance of women, but that’s something you can learn from."

Friedland took some classes at Stanford before going to Mills. "There seemed to be this attitude where if you asked questions in class, people looked at you funny." If students admitted they didn’t know something, they would lose status, and they were supposed to figure out things on your own. Despite Stanford’s reputation as one of the top schools in the country, Friedland found Mills’s curriculum more thorough.

The smaller class sizes at Mills were also helpful, Rios says. At UC Davis the average class size is 300 in lower-level courses and 75 to 100 in upper-level classes; a class size of 12 to 15 students is more conducive to learning, she found.

It "felt like everyone belonged there and [was] equally capable of learning. I didn’t always feel that in larger classes."

The Mills professors "don’t throw too much jargon at you, making you feel like you’re not smart enough," Rios adds. Instead, the professors step back to observe how students approach problems, then help them learn to problem solve from a more hard-science perspective. Rios now works as an Internet project manager at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, using her activism background to "explore ways in which we can use technology to advance women."

"I felt comfortable speaking in class and asking questions, where in a typical classroom I would not," says former ICS student Lisa Cowan, who has a BA in anthropology and is now pursuing a computer science PhD at UC San Diego. "The professors taught class in a highly interactive way, asking questions and encouraging discussion, helping us solve problems together, making sure all students thoroughly understood the material being covered."

PAVING THE WAY


The ICS program at Mills isn’t the first reentry program of its kind in the Bay Area. UC Berkeley opened a program in 1983 as a pathway to graduate study in computer science for women and minority students who were underrepresented in Berkeley’s crowded and competitive program. Two female Berkeley graduates, Paula Hawthorn and Barbara Simons, noticed in 1982 that the number of female graduate students entering the CS program was actually decreasing over time as the requirements became more geared toward people who had pursued a standard math or engineering track.

The Computer Science Reentry Program at Berkeley gave 159 students a concentrated education in upper-level computer science classes. Ten of those students have gone on to get PhDs. But the program had to fold in 1998 when California passed Proposition 209, which prohibited any state-funded programs that discriminate based on gender and ethnicity.

MULTIPLE PATHS


The interdisciplinary part of the Mills College ICS program’s name means students combine computer science with another area of study to produce their master’s theses. "It gives you a really broad brush," says Wetherby, the former casino worker. When a student comes to Spertus with a thesis idea, she always asks how it uses what the student has learned about computer science. But she also asks why the thesis is something that she, a narrowly trained computer scientist, couldn’t do. She finds the interdisciplinary approach helps students make more of a contribution and also realize they can do things that Spertus, who has a PhD from MIT, can’t.

While still at Mills, Wetherby had internships at IBM and Apple Research. When she was job hunting after the program, someone from Microsoft called her because her studies had combined computer science and education. Microsoft needed someone who could write educational programs to teach programmers about Microsoft tools.

Another Mills student, Liz Quigg, had already been an applications programmer at science labs before joining the ICS program. She’d crunched high-energy physics and moon-walk data. But the program’s interdisciplinary focus also helped her get into writing educational software. Afterward, she was able to help create educational programs for the science center at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

"It was very useful because my job now is very interdisciplinary," Quigg says. "I work with scientists, teachers, and students. I cross different worlds." *

The deadline to apply for the New Horizons–ICS program this term is Feb. 1. You can find information and application forms online at www.mills.edu/admission/graduate.

Careers and Ed: Nurturing the drive

-
0

› culture@sfbg.com

Sheri Wetherby was working at a casino in Tahoe when she decided to become a computer programmer. So she left Tahoe and came to the Bay Area to study. A few years later, she had a job at Microsoft.

Wetherby had hardly a lick of programming background before she got her MA in computer science at Mills College. Her undergraduate degree was in German and French. She’d taken some graduate courses at the University of New Hampshire, including a computer science course that inspired her to envision a second career in the field. But how, she wondered, could she find a program that would allow her to master computers, coming from a liberal arts background?

A friend told her about New Horizons, a reentry program at Mills that teaches computer programming to students with nontechnical backgrounds. "I found the small classes and individual attention helped me get a grounding" in computer science, she says, "before moving on to more advanced topics."

The New Horizons program is specially designed for grad students who don’t have an undergraduate degree in computer science. It consists of two undergraduate-level computer science classes per semester for students who also hold down jobs and family responsibilities. Students can choose to finish the New Horizons program with a certificate but most go on to pursue a master’s degree from the Interdisciplinary Computer Science program at Mills. The ICS program aims to build bridges between computer science and computer users and offers graduate coursework as well as a master’s thesis track.

Some New Horizons students find computer science too difficult or different than they expected, "but the majority are successful and happy," Mills computer science associate professor Ellen Spertus says. She recommends students with no CS experience try taking some community college courses in the subject first — to see if their eyes are bigger than their stomachs, in programming terms.

At a community college, students can take the prerequisite math and CS classes at a fraction of the cost before going to Mills, says Constance Conner, an instructor in the Computer Science Department at City College of San Francisco who studied in the ICS program at Mills. Community college "is also a good place to start if a student is not 100 percent sure" about a CS degree, she says. Then, if students’ appetites are still whet, the Mills program will guide them along a new career path.

CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE


Computer science is seen by many hopefuls as a lucrative but daunting field. In the public’s mind successful programmers are young, mostly male wizards who almost cosmically penetrate thickets of computer languages and database engineering to manifest unfathomable products. Spertus finds that many students going into her program suffer from low self-esteem — especially female students. She says they’ll be earning A’s in the program’s classes but will be convinced they’re not doing well and somehow "don’t belong." Her teaching style, simultaneously rigorous and nurturing, helps change their opinion, she hopes.

Introductory CS classes at most universities "act like weeder courses," scaring away all but the most confident students, Spertus says. Typically, up to half the students fail or drop out of introductory CS classes at other institutions. Spertus says this phenomenon hits women hardest because they may have less computer experience as well as less confidence.

Also, some students apologize for not having undergrad degrees in CS. Spertus always tells them computer scientists with a narrow focus are "a dime a dozen." But people like them, who know CS along with another field, are unique.

RIGHTING THE BALANCE


Erica Rios has been an activist since she was a teenager but became frustrated that activists were still using the same methods of organizing Martin Luther King Jr. employed back in the ’60s. She had a political science degree and a minor in Chicano studies from UC Davis. As a labor activist for small community nonprofits, she had to teach herself to use computers because nobody else knew how. She saw how technology was changing her native San Jose. She wanted to learn "how tech could be used to engage people in the issues that impact them but they don’t necessarily have a direct voice on."

Though Mills is a women’s undergrad college, it accepts male graduate students. Men typically make up roughly a third of the participants in the ICS program, but the majority-female environment creates a unique classroom culture. The different gender balance was helpful to Rios because she had a nine-month-old child when she started the program. She felt more comfortable bringing her daughter to her Java class than she would have in a male-dominated classroom — and less apt to fall behind on coursework.

The few men enrolled during Rios’s time brought a balance to the learning environment, she believes, while showing her that she need not feel uncomfortable as a woman in the computer science field. "There were two other men in class with me and about seven going through the whole program," says Barton Friedland, one of the men who just completed the ICS program. For him, it felt very different to study "with a preponderance of women, but that’s something you can learn from."

Friedland took some classes at Stanford before going to Mills. "There seemed to be this attitude where if you asked questions in class, people looked at you funny." If students admitted they didn’t know something, they would lose status, and they were supposed to figure out things on your own. Despite Stanford’s reputation as one of the top schools in the country, Friedland found Mills’s curriculum more thorough.

The smaller class sizes at Mills were also helpful, Rios says. At UC Davis the average class size is 300 in lower-level courses and 75 to 100 in upper-level classes; a class size of 12 to 15 students is more conducive to learning, she found.

It "felt like everyone belonged there and [was] equally capable of learning. I didn’t always feel that in larger classes."

The Mills professors "don’t throw too much jargon at you, making you feel like you’re not smart enough," Rios adds. Instead, the professors step back to observe how students approach problems, then help them learn to problem solve from a more hard-science perspective. Rios now works as an Internet project manager at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, using her activism background to "explore ways in which we can use technology to advance women."

"I felt comfortable speaking in class and asking questions, where in a typical classroom I would not," says former ICS student Lisa Cowan, who has a BA in anthropology and is now pursuing a computer science PhD at UC San Diego. "The professors taught class in a highly interactive way, asking questions and encouraging discussion, helping us solve problems together, making sure all students thoroughly understood the material being covered."

PAVING THE WAY


The ICS program at Mills isn’t the first reentry program of its kind in the Bay Area. UC Berkeley opened a program in 1983 as a pathway to graduate study in computer science for women and minority students who were underrepresented in Berkeley’s crowded and competitive program. Two female Berkeley graduates, Paula Hawthorn and Barbara Simons, noticed in 1982 that the number of female graduate students entering the CS program was actually decreasing over time as the requirements became more geared toward people who had pursued a standard math or engineering track.

The Computer Science Reentry Program at Berkeley gave 159 students a concentrated education in upper-level computer science classes. Ten of those students have gone on to get PhDs. But the program had to fold in 1998 when California passed Proposition 209, which prohibited any state-funded programs that discriminate based on gender and ethnicity.

MULTIPLE PATHS


The interdisciplinary part of the Mills College ICS program’s name means students combine computer science with another area of study to produce their master’s theses. "It gives you a really broad brush," says Wetherby, the former casino worker. When a student comes to Spertus with a thesis idea, she always asks how it uses what the student has learned about computer science. But she also asks why the thesis is something that she, a narrowly trained computer scientist, couldn’t do. She finds the interdisciplinary approach helps students make more of a contribution and also realize they can do things that Spertus, who has a PhD from MIT, can’t.

While still at Mills, Wetherby had internships at IBM and Apple Research. When she was job hunting after the program, someone from Microsoft called her because her studies had combined computer science and education. Microsoft needed someone who could write educational programs to teach programmers about Microsoft tools.

Another Mills student, Liz Quigg, had already been an applications programmer at science labs before joining the ICS program. She’d crunched high-energy physics and moon-walk data. But the program’s interdisciplinary focus also helped her get into writing educational software. Afterward, she was able to help create educational programs for the science center at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

"It was very useful because my job now is very interdisciplinary," Quigg says. "I work with scientists, teachers, and students. I cross different worlds." *

The deadline to apply for the New Horizons–ICS program this term is Feb. 1. You can find information and application forms online at www.mills.edu/admission/graduate.

P&J jam

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Icons come and go, with all the fanfare, dressers, and folderol that legends demand, you know — with a wiggle of a ruddy nose, the flash of a cape, a blast of TNT, the slam of the estate gates. Goodbye, James Brown (RIP Godfather of Soul, Dec. 25, 2006), may you work a little less in heaven than

you did on earth. Fare thee well, Village Music (music geeks’ vinyl treasure trove), readying to close Sept. 30, due to the high rent demanded in Mill Valley. Next?

I was ready to say hasta luego to that mammoth warhorse of all critics’ polls, the Village Voice‘s Pazz and Jop. The massive compendium of top 10 album and song lists and legitimizer of toiling, stinking music crit midgets the nation over, the creature seemed to be next on the list of endangered species when creator-caretaker Robert Christgau (dean of American rock critics) and Voice music editor Chuck Eddy were fired last year after the New Times’ purchase of Village Voice Media.

Still, the yearly e-mail appeared again early last month — "Hello. You are one of the 1,500-odd critics we’d like to include …" — this time signed by the Voice‘s new music editor, Rob Harvilla, who got the NT corporate relocation orders from the East Bay Express.

Is it the same poll without Christgau keeping tempo? Honestly, few envy Harvilla, who has had a tough shoe to polish in pleasing Voice readers and filling his well-established predecessors’ boots while boasting little of sheer record-reviewing chops and logging a fraction of the critical thought that has gone into the careers of Eddy and Christgau. The latter for good reason dubbed his graded music review column Consumer’s Guide. Ever the idealistic, outraged, yet overthinking lot, music writers were conflicted — torn between their loyalty to the old Voice editors and the scent of a continuing or future paycheck. The notion of alternate polls was batted around on the blogosphere.

Still, when Gawker Media actually began one, who suspected the brouhaha that would ensue? Gawker’s music blog, Idolator, announced its startlingly similar Jackin’ Pop Critics Poll with the cheeky, gauntlet-tossing headline "Time to Raze the Village," called out Christgau’s and Eddy’s cannings, and issued the salvo "For those who had long turned to the Voice to help guide them through the realm of pop, rock, and hip-hop, the 51-year-old alt-weekly now had about as much musical credibility as, say, a three-month-old blog." Shortly after that, Idolator poll editor and ex–Seattle Weekly music editor Michaelangelo Matos was informed, through a multiple-source grapevine at the NT-VV Media–owned Minneapolis–St. Paul City Pages (the alt-weekly at which he began his career) that he has been banned from that paper.

Gawker-Idolator later reported that word quickly went out to NT-VV music staffers that they’re not allowed to vote in the Idolator poll. "When we announced the poll, that day, I saw an e-mail from John Lomax, who is the Houston Press music editor — he’s head of New Times music editors — instructing all music editors and staff writers that hourly and salaried staffers of New Times were not allowed to vote in the Idolator poll," Matos told me from Seattle.

Matos added that despite NT-VV being "obviously hardball kind of guys," he took umbrage at the fact that "they didn’t tell me I was banned. I heard it from somebody else. I think the way they handled it was chickenshit, but from the way I can tell, that’s one way they operate, through fear and imprecation." At press time, Lomax and City Pages music editor Sarah Askari had not responded to inquiries.

Is this just a matter of new media versus New Times? Corporate print media fending off the pricks of a million busy blogging digits? To make matters even more complicated, Christgau himself, whose Consumer Guide was recently picked up by MSN, has voted in both polls. "I have told people who’ve asked to do what they wish," he e-mailed me, adding that Eddy, now at Billboard, is not voting in P&J.

Yet other aboveboard and down-low boycotts of P&J abound, Matos said. Ex–Voice staffer and current Pop Conference organizer Eric Weisbard is skipping the poll because, the former P&J pooh-bah e-mailed, "participating in Pazz & Jop validates the New Times neanderthals who now run Village Voice Media. They may want to keep alive a poll that generates more Web hits than anything else they do, but in all other ways, they hate and are trying to eradicate everything that the Village Voice music section stood for: intellectual discussion of popular music and popular culture."

"A number of people who aren’t voting in the Voice poll are older and better established," added Matos, describing an argument he recently had with a friend. "I heatedly called it a labor issue, and my friend said, ‘If I vote in the Voice poll, am I a scab?’ It’s probably not that cut-and-dried…. Everyone in New York knows how bad the Voice has gotten, but for a lot of people, the Voice still represents a decent paycheck. It’s a hard thing to argue with. People who don’t want to piss off the Village Voice, and frankly, till this poll came along, I was one of them."

Vote in both, don’t vote in P&J, or vote in P&J and pen protest too? I’ve always internally chafed against the voice of critical authority, inclusive yet contentious, implied with P&J. Perhaps that sense of center is a bastion of the past, along with traditional music industry models. Yet even the first P&J Matos ever read — from 1990, with De La Soul on the cover — included an essay by a writer who refused to participate in the group grope. The gathering was that quirky and open to dissent.

An alien concert in the new order of NT-VV? "Good going, champions of the free press!" Idolator crowed after announcing the NT-VV response, excerpting a supposed example e-mail from a NT-VV music editor to writer. "To get revenge, we plan to not patronize the porn ads in the back of your magazines for the next week. You have no idea how much that’s gonna cost you."

One long-tenured P&J pooh-bah continues to watch over the proceedings, if from afar. "I look forward with considerable curiosity to both polls," Christgau wrote to me. "I very much doubt either will be as good as the last PJ, but we shall see." Nonetheless, it seems unlikely the boycotted and participation-by-dictate P&J will, as Matos put it, "open things up for you," as good critics and past polls have. *

Localize it

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

In what some experts are hailing as a first for sustainability movements in the United States, a coalition of policy organizations has unveiled a comprehensive campaign to reduce the Bay Area’s reliance on global markets in favor of a more locally based economy.

If the plan is embraced by local government agencies and brought to fruition, it could be the first significant reversal of the decades-long march toward globalization, which encourages powerful multinational corporations to exploit cheap labor and transport goods long distances.

The Bay Area is rife with testaments to globalization, from the rusty shells of once prosperous manufacturing plants to the gleaming big-box chain stores filled with cheap Chinese-made clothing and gadgets, from the customer service call answered in India to the foreign parts in our "American made" cars and computers.

Yet at the same time, there are the countervailing forces of localism. For every grocery store stocked with out-of-season produce grown across the world with petrochemicals by big agricultural corporations, there is a community farmers market selling locally grown organic fruit.

Most of globalism’s many faces have a local equivalent. Consumers can buy a burrito at Taco Bell or El Toro, a hammer at Home Depot or Cole Hardware, a new shirt from the Gap or a recycled garment from Held Over, and a bicycle assembled at a factory in China or Freewheel Cyclery.

Or on a grander scale, utilities can import kilowatts of energy from a coal-fired plant in Utah or buy wind and solar power generated in the Bay Area, city governments can contract with out-of-state corporations or locals, and financial institutions can push the status quo or value a more diversified (if less profitable) economic system.

The idea of the localization movement is to analyze the impacts of those choices and start a discussion of how local governments can facilitate the creation of an economy that is more sustainable and less exploitive, one that is unique to the Bay Area.

BEGINNING THE PROCESS


The coalition, which formed in spring 2006, recently released a 30-page report that details the purpose of its campaign and the group’s initial strategy for achieving its goals. The report, titled "Building a Resilient and Equitable Bay Area," and a two-page summary are available online at www.regionalprogress.org. More than two dozen organizations have already endorsed the report, including Oakland’s and Berkeley’s respective sustainability offices.

The coalition’s members include Redefining Progress, Bay Localize, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), the International Forum on Globalization, and the Center for Sustainable Economy. With the exception of the last, which is in Santa Fe, NM, all of the groups are located in either San Francisco or Oakland.

A key feature of the campaign — and the reason some experts describe the initiative as unique in the United States — is its scope. Efforts to localize individual sectors of regional economies have been under way for years. Berkeley, for instance, is considered a leader in the growing movement to shift from a food system dominated by a handful of giant agribusinesses propped up by federal crop subsidies to a system that relies more on local production and procurement of food. Similarly, many areas are considering ways of creating and encouraging the use of alternative — and local — energy sources to limit dependence on imported oil.

What sets the new Bay Area campaign apart from other localization initiatives is that it seeks to effect change across several sectors of the region’s economy simultaneously. It hopes to do so, in part, by achieving the cooperation and coordination of businesses, government officials, and community leaders at the federal, state, and local levels.

The report defines economic localization as "the process by which a region … frees itself from an overdependence on the global economy and invests in its own resources to produce a significant portion of the goods, services, food, and energy it consumes."

In an interview with the Guardian, John Talberth, one of the report’s primary authors and a PhD economist at Redefining Progress, stressed that economic "isolationism is not the goal of the campaign."

Instead, he said the goal is "reestablishing an efficient balance between imports and products made locally for local consumption." In other words, even if the Bay Area localizes its economy according to the strategy proposed by the coalition, many products would still be imported. The economy would, therefore, remain dependent on global markets — but much less so than it is now.

And that could have significant ramifications for the region, humans, and the planet.

THE PRICE OF PROGRESS


The report acknowledges the benefits of globalization, which has kept consumer prices low and forced corporations to become more efficient. But, the authors note, "it has come at a steep price."

That price includes "a loss of economic diversity, declining real wages and working conditions, increasing inequality, offshoring of environmental degradation, and a concentration of financial capital and economic decision-making in global corporations." The changes have left people "vulnerable to inevitable supply and price shocks in the post peak oil era."

In other words, perhaps global capitalism is reaching the point of diminishing returns. The coalition posits that the antidote is localization, which has great potential "for creating a wider range of local jobs and institutions, shielding our economy from global shifts, increasing the diversity and quality of goods and services we consume, distributing economic benefits in a more equitable manner, and protecting our environment."

The Bay Area is the focus of the coalition’s campaign because its member organizations are located here and because those members believe there is already a great deal of public support in the region for such a project.

Kirsten Schwind, programs coordinator at Bay Localize, told the Guardian there was an "overwhelmingly positive response" to a recent project targeted at supporting local food producers. Both Schwind and Don Shaffer, executive director of BALLE, cited Oakland’s Kaiser Permanente as an example of the increasing number of businesses that are altering their buying habits to favor local sellers. Shaffer also said the Oakland and San Francisco school boards are buying locally produced food and the Oakland City Council is setting targets for local energy production.

But even if much of the Bay Area is receptive to the idea of economic localization, other groups are not. There remains a powerful current of support in government, business, and academia for a predominantly global economy.

Traditional economists, for instance, are reflexively hostile to localization initiatives because such projects do not conform to the concepts embodied in so-called free-trade and free-market theories.

NAYSAYERS


The Guardian interviewed three UC Berkeley professors who do not agree with the report’s view of globalism. None of the professors had read the report — despite the fact that the Guardian forwarded it to them before the interviews — but all said they were familiar with the basic ideas behind localization.

Each expressed a knee-jerk hostility to the concept, but once they began discussing the details of localization, they agreed with the coalition on many points. And the professors’ initial objections to localization — including the notion that it would return economies to a more primitive state and that it is isolationist in principle — were mostly rhetorical and unrelated to the coalition’s specific recommendations.

Two of the professors — Daniel M. Kammen, who teaches in the Energy Resources Group as well as the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Department of Nuclear Engineering, and David Vogel, who teaches in the Haas School of Business, the Political Science Department, and the Goldman School — were immediately opposed to the idea of a comprehensive localization strategy.

Vogel, in particular, seemed at first to make light of economic localization, calling it a "romantic notion that periodically resurfaces," and more than once asked laughingly whether the coalition "expects Bay Area residents to watch only movies made in the Bay Area."

Another professor, Lee Friedman, a PhD economist who teaches at the Goldman School, said, "Globalization is a lot like the problem of gays in the military: mend it, don’t end it."

But Friedman likes the idea — a central one in the report — of including all costs in the price of goods. That’s particularly true of environmental costs. This might raise the price of electronics to pay for their disposal or of gas-guzzling vehicles to pay for their global-warming impacts — both ideas being explored by the European Union.

All three professors also had some very positive things to say about economic localization. Kammen, like Friedman, strongly believes that communities should pursue local — and low-carbon — energy production because the environmental impact associated with producing in a foreign country and shipping to the United States is far greater than that of local production.

"Localization advocates are making some excellent points that people ought to pay attention to," Friedman said. He agreed the Bay Area imports too much of its food. Vogel expressed a similar sentiment, saying that buying locally is a "great idea." He also said localization could help to address urban sprawl. By the end of the interview, Vogel softened his initially dismissive attitude toward localization, deeming "aspects of it interesting and attractive."

Talberth and other coalition members say challenging the economic concepts supporting globalization — like those taught by Friedman and most other economics scholars — is a central task of their campaign.

Critics of traditional economic theory have for a long time been saying that too many economists base their research and resulting recommendations on economic models that bear little resemblance to the way the real world operates.

Although economists often bristle at that criticism, Friedman has acknowledged to his students the flaws in prevailing economic models but said, "Until someone comes up with better models, people shouldn’t complain about the existing ones."

Yet Hazel Henderson, a coalition member and the author of Beyond Globalization, and Talberth say alternatives to the current models are well established and have been around for years. They criticize the fact that economic growth is measured by the gross domestic product (GDP), a simplistic calculus that doesn’t take into account economic activity that is harmful to people or the planet.

They prefer new indicators, like the genuine progress indicator (GPI), that account for costs and benefits the traditional indicators do not factor in. The report calculates the GPI for each of the Bay Area’s nine counties. The European Union has already adopted this kind of alternative measure of an economy’s well-being.

WHAT’S NEXT?


Engaging the public is the coalition’s next big goal. Despite the overall support that Schwind and others say already exists in the Bay Area for localization, they admit there are challenges to mobilizing citizens.

"It’s well documented that people tend not to act unless there is a crisis," Shaffer said. But he also said that "giving people Armageddon scenarios" will not work because such stories are depressing and, more importantly, "people are too busy to think comprehensively about that sort of thing."

Instead, Shaffer and Schwind said the coalition plans on putting out a "positive, hopeful" message focusing on the benefits that will accrue to individuals and communities if they adopt localization.

Beyond getting the public involved, the coalition is encouraging local, state, and federal government organizations to conduct studies assessing the challenges and true costs of relying so heavily on global markets. Talberth acknowledged that:

"Getting [those] assessments done is a big challenge."

Ultimately, the coalition would like the Bay Area to serve as a model of localization for other areas in the United States. Shaffer said the group is "not looking to put a formulaic stamp on other regions" but hopes instead that such places will be influenced to adopt localization measures in light of the Bay Area’s success.

Shaffer said the food and energy sectors, along with retail, are already understood well by consumers, at least intuitively. So he predicts the coalition could achieve significant results in those sectors within five years. Spreading those advances to other parts of the economy could take another 10 years after that.

Shaffer, Talberth, and Schwind all said that change is coming whether people want it or not, mostly due to global warming. So they argue for the Bay Area to embrace change now and begin to make the needed changes gradually, before they are painfully thrust upon us. We can localize our world or simply accept whatever the global economy dishes out. *

Toward a sustainable San Francisco

-
0

EDITORIAL When you decide to buy your vegetables at a local grocery store, not at Safeway, or when you buy your books at the neighborhood bookstore instead of Barnes and Noble, or when you buy hardware from a store down the street, not from Home Depot, you’re actually doing something profoundly radical. You’re challenging the predominant paradigm of economic theory — and you’re helping make the San Francisco economy a whole lot healthier for a whole lot of people.

That’s what a detailed new report by a group of small business leaders and advocates for a sustainable economy argues. The coalition, led by the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, makes a powerful argument — and the San Francisco supervisors ought to make it official city policy to follow the report’s proposals.

As Jeff Goodman reports in "Localize It" on page 11, in some ways the report is a critique of globalization: it argues that an economic system that encourages Bay Area consumers to buy cheap goods made by near-slave labor thousands of miles away and shipped here to be sold in giant chain stores whose workers can’t even afford health insurance and where all the buyers arrive in individual automobiles isn’t good for anyone. The economic displacement, the environmental impact, and the human cost are all unacceptable. And yet globalization (and so-called free trade) is the accepted principal of almost all national and even statewide policy.

But cities like San Francisco don’t have to go along with that. Jane Jacobs, the urban economist and planner, noted more than 30 years ago that cities are the true engines of national economies — and that the healthiest and most successful cities are the ones that have diverse, locally controlled economies and that, as much as possible, replace imports with local products. That’s what the new report calls for — and on a policy level it’s not terribly complicated.

For example, a citywide policy calling for a sustainable local economy would strongly discourage any new chain stores in the city (such as a Home Depot on Bayshore Boulevard) on the grounds that they violate all the basic principles of what the coalition calls localization. Economic development decisions would have to pass a strict test: Does this encourage locally owned businesses? Does it help replace imports? Does it keep money in the economy? Land-use decisions would have to be evaluated in part on their economic merits (but under a new sort of standard); a high-end housing development that displaced local industry wouldn’t make the cut. Purchasing decisions would have to take into account localization issues: Does the food come from the region? Is it possible to buy the goods locally?

It’s impossible in the modern economy to completely avoid globalization — and it’s not necessarily a good idea either. The new report hardly calls for economic isolation. But it does offer a very different policy vision. The supervisors should hold hearings, bring in the authors of the report, and move to create a formal policy that sets sustainable local economics as a standard for all city business. *

The coalition’s report is available at www.regionalprogress.org.

Revolutions happen like refrains in a song …

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The term independent once meant something in Philippine cinema. It was reserved for such luminaries as Rox Lee (the great animator), Raymond Red (the great short-film maker), and in recent years, Lav Diaz (the great stubborn filmmaker). These were artists who had earned their stripes and garnered accolades but refused to sell out or cater to commercial demands, preferring to maintain control over their work rather than cash in and see their names in lights.

Today independent — and its many synonyms — has become a hot buzzword in the Philippines. Young filmmakers, students, festivals, even commercial studios are beginning to use the word, defiling the purity that was once associated with it.

When parties from the commercial industry, from the mainstream or establishment, begin to infiltrate and claim the underground for themselves, what is left for the true independent filmmaker to do? Stan Brakhage put it best:

So the money vendors have begun it again. To the catacombs then, or rather plant this seed deeper in the underground beyond false nourishing of sewage waters. Let it draw nourishment from hidden uprising springs channeled by gods … forget ideology, for film unborn as it is has no language and speaks like an aborigine — monotonous rhetoric…. Abandon aesthetics…. Negate techniques, for film, like America, has not been discovered yet, and mechanization, in the deepest possible sense of the word, traps both beyond measuring even chances…. Let film be. It is something … becoming.

It is in this spirit that the New Philippine Cinema, conceived in 2004, birthed in 2005, and now beginning to mature in 2006, is being forged. While it does encompass this false new independence, most of its best and brightest moments have been strong reactions against it.

To speak of ambition in regard to Raya Martin’s A Short Film about the Indio Nacional (or the Prolonged Sorrow of Filipinos) would be to speak of the obvious — the director was a 21-year-old college senior undertaking a feature film, silent with title cards, shot on 35mm, in black-and-white, set in the 1890s Spanish-era Philippines. The movie starts with a frustratingly slow 22-minute piece, shot in color, on digital video, with sound, that’s devoid of action for the first 17 minutes (before settling into a moving tale of nationalism). Martin’s A Short Film is an intensely personal work projecting the young director’s emotional impressions of the bygone era into the beginnings of the uprising, the stirrings of Philippine nationalism. Is Martin’s film accurate in its depiction? Does it represent a work evincing deep historical research that may be used as a text for young students to study in order to know more about the era? No — and that is both its strength and its weakness.

A Short Film focuses on minor and intimate moments, creating images that would otherwise be left out of major historical films (and were left out of the films shot at the time by the colonizers). How relevant is the film in the cultural geography of the Philippines? I daresay it is a very, very important work, one that will be looked at with as much perplexity now as admiration in the future. But the reasons for its importance, for its significance, will be (a) its audacity, (b) its aesthetic, and (c) the emotional impact it will have on maybe not an entire generation of average viewers, but at the very least this generation of filmmakers. A Short Film throws down the gauntlet — and with rude authority — for the heights of sophistication and beauty the Philippine aesthetic may reach.

John Torres is as personal a filmmaker as you can possibly meet. His short films and one feature (Todo Todo Teros) — all made for not more than the cost of a few mini-DV tapes and the opportunity cost of accepting other work (he runs a small editing house) — are heartbreaking works. They combine found and organized footage with text in a way that hasn’t been seen before in Philippine cinema. I go to Torres’s films for what I can learn from them. But I learn nothing a proper academic setting would find valuable, nothing of history, politics, or economics; not even anything about contemporary Philippine cinema. I learn something much, much more valuable to me in my life: I learn about the inner working of the heart. Torres’s films, the ideas behind them, the struggle to make them, teach me something I need to learn: humility, benevolence. They illustrate the beauty found in self-effacement, in touching your pain, admitting your faults, and at the same time learning to sacrifice face in the name of trust, in the name of solidarity with humanity and sharing everything that is close to you with the world in the hope that it will understand and sympathize with you as much as you are trying your hardest to understand and sympathize with it. Ultimately, they are tone poems, films that both espouse and offer compassion.

Lav Diaz’s works stand so off tangent that Evolution of a Filipino Family has had only six screenings in the Philippines. His Heremias, a labor of love and the first half of the last part of his Philippine trilogy, following Evolution and Batang West Side, was written, directed, produced, and edited by Diaz himself. The astonishing thing about his Philippine trilogy is how, while the films are radical in themselves, they’re also all so different — in time, space, and aesthetic. The five-hour West Side, about the Filipino experience abroad, is a 35mm color work shot and set in contemporary New Jersey. The 11-hour Evolution, a mix of 16mm and various forms of digital, is in black-and-white and is set just before, during, and after the martial law period in the Philippines. Mixing scenes of urban and rural life, it is astonishingly sophisticated in its use of both mise-en-scène and (intellectual) montage, a remarkable feat given its duration. The nine-hour Heremias, shot entirely on digital, is set in the present-day rural Philippines. It is the only film in the trilogy that is told linearly and focuses on a single character. This trilogy, when completed, should tower over contemporary Philippine cinema, over aspiring independent filmmakers as a paradigm of what it means to be uncompromising.

The new Philippine filmmaker does not fear experimentation but embraces it, knowing that, as Brakhage declared, film — or perhaps better put, cinema — is still something … becoming. While aboveground the death of Philippine cinema (or the industry) is proclaimed, in the deep underground lie the real artists, replenishing the soil with seeds of a new cinema. *

Alexis A. Tioseco is editor in chief at Criticine. A longer version of this piece can be found at www.criticine.com.

For Tioseco’s top five Southeast Asian features, short works, and older films seen for the first time, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Troubled ferry

-
0

For more than three months, captains, deckhands, and union sympathizers have been protesting on the Embarcadero in front of Alcatraz Cruises’ new operations at Pier 33.


But a few blocks away on Market Street, the battling companies have been wrangling inside the offices of the National Labor Relations Board. In early October, Alcatraz Cruises filed a complaint against the protesters for "visitor harassment."


"Nobody was getting hurt, but there was behavior that wasn’t necessarily appropriate," Alcatraz Cruises spokesperson Tegan Firth told the Guardian. She said protesters have used foul language around the tourists and the complaint included a compilation of video footage gathered over several weeks as evidence.

In response, Masters, Mates, and Pilots and the Inland Boatmen’s Union filed their own complaint with the board based on hiring discrimination. "We countered their charges with our own charges of discrimination," captain Ray Shipway told us. "They interviewed a lot of people, but they didn’t hire them. They hired junior crewmembers over the experienced ones."


The unions also filed suit earlier in the year and won an injunction from the Department of Labor, forcing Alcatraz Cruises to pay prevailing wages to their crews. The company has appealed that decision.


"It wasn’t clear in the original decision if it applied to this concession contract or all future contracts with the National Park Service," Firth explained.


She said the other reason was the company would like more flexibility. "The Department of Labor set down the wages and benefits, but we want to explore a wide variety of benefits and offer employee incentives."


She said some of that might include a cafeteria plan for health care, but as far as incentives were concerned, "I don’t think we have anything specific in mind, but we want to be able to be flexible."


When asked if part of that flexibility was an opportunity to offer lower wages to employees, she said, "No, it is not. It is partially clarification and partially so all our employees have the best options for total compensation."


"Terry MacRae, like the owners of Whole Foods and Wal-Mart, is virulently antiunion," said deckhand Steve Ongerth, criticizing the owner of Alcatraz Cruises. "He made sure he hired only enough crew to train their replacements. He knows what he’s doing. He hired people who weren’t in the union so there wouldn’t have to be a union."


Union members are concerned this could be the start of an unwelcome trend on San Francisco’s waterfront, which has traditionally been powered by strong unions.


Firth said the company wasn’t ruling out the possibility of seeking future service contracts with the National Park Service or taking ferries to other ports in the bay. "We’re not exploring any actively, but I wouldn’t rule it out in the future," she said.


"Hornblower [Alcatraz Cruises’ parent company] is one of the fastest-growing businesses on the bay," she said, "and it obviously didn’t get that way waiting for business to come to it."

Well, officially un-official

-
1

By Tim Redmond

UPDATE: Mark Leno has written a letter to Fog City Journal saying that his run against Carole Migden isn’t really official yet.

So I just called Leno to check it, and he says he won’t make a final final decision until mid-January. But “I’m looking at it very seriously,” he said, and added: “I’m getting a lot of encouragement from local labor leaders.”

I told him that, from everything I’m hearing, it’s seems pretty clear to me that he’s in the race. “It’s certainly looking that way,” he responded.

So there you have it. That’s about as close to an unofficial official announcement as you get.

This is not progress

-
0

TECHSPLOITATION I can’t stop thinking about the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2,000-year-old computerlike device made by some Greeks who wanted to predict the motion of the sun, moon, and stars. Fashioned out of highly-sophisticated interlocking gears, the mechanism was discovered a little over a century ago in a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera. About the size of a shoebox and operated with a hand crank, the machine can also plot the dates of eclipses.
I know all these details because a group of international researchers used cool new X-ray imaging technologies to look at the mechanism, which to the naked eye appears rather like a pile of crusty, corroded plates that have stuck together. Using X-rays, however, scientists could see how the gears fit together. Pictures are available on Nature.com and reveal a machine whose complexity rivals the internals on a Rolex. Researchers say it was probably state-of-the-art technology around 30 BC. It’s likely that Greek astronomers on Rhodes had been perfecting such gear-driven temporal charts of the heavens for decades or even centuries before inventing the Antikythera Mechanism.
As Nature editor Jo Marchant points out, what’s intriguing is not so much that the device existed 2,000 years ago but that the technology behind it ceased to exist for the next 1,000 years until the first mechanical astrolabes and clocks worked their way out of the Arab world and into the West. It’s very possible that gear-driven mechanisms were made throughout the first millennium in the Middle East, but Western scholars have yet to gain access to the ancient texts that describe them.
For people interested in the evolution of technology and so-called scientific progress, the Antikythera Mechanism doesn’t just provoke questions about history. Instead, it asks us to rethink the future. If the ancient Greeks and Romans managed to invent the precursor to information technology 2,000 years ago and then essentially forget about it, what does that say about the kinds of amazing advances we might be throwing away right now?
Tech historians have two theories about why the Greeks and Romans didn’t get into gear mechanisms full bore and invent some kind of clock or computer before the Holy Roman Empire smooshed Europe. First of all, there was no power source for their gear devices other than the hand crank. Weight-powered clocks weren’t invented until the late Middle Ages in Europe. So devices like the Antikythera Mechanism weren’t particularly practical unless you were an astronomer or a rich collector. Plus, who needed to know time down to the minute? As long as you knew the hours and seasons, you could get by just fine in classical antiquity.
More interesting to me is the theory that the widespread practice of slavery in Greece and Rome would have prevented people from trying to create machines that could perform human labor. It’s not that having slaves kept people from inventing gear mechanisms — it just kept them from imagining possible outcomes and applications. If you already have people performing all the manual and intellectual labor you don’t want to do, there’s no need to figure out what kinds of machines would be capable of doing it.
Obviously, it’s impossible to know what stopped our ancestors from connecting the dots and ushering in the information age 2,000 years ago. And it may be equally impossible to figure out what our sociological blind spots are today that prevent us from hurtling into a better world more quickly. Still, there are some missteps in progress we can see and correct before plunging into another Dark Ages. It’s clear that our dependence on oil has halted progress toward finding cleaner, more efficient energy sources. Similarly, the widespread use of cars has halted progress in public transportation.
Who knows what kinds of great discoveries are cast aside when labs lose their funding or graduate students lose hope and slink away from experiments in defeat? Tomorrow’s Antikythera Mechanism is probably sitting in some disgruntled engineer’s garage right now, rusting. Let’s hope we discover it in two years rather than 2,000.<\!s>SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who was actually invented 2,000 years ago but only discovered recently.

Get Your (Conflict) Rocks Off

-
0

By Sarah Phelan
Diamonds, so the saying goes, are a girl’s best friend, especially during the holiday season, which is when 25 percent of the sales of these gems reportedly take place.
But does it make sense to give your sweetie a diamond as a symbol of your love, when so many of these brilliant sparklers have caused death and destruction for so many African souls?
“Conflict diamonds” are sparklers that are mined in war zones and sold to finance African paramilitary groups. But while that practice is said to be lessening, unethical child labor practices and unacceptable environmental degradation continues unabated in Africa, which is where 49 percent of the world’s diamonds originate. These harsh realities became clear to San Francisco resident Beth Gerstein when she was shopping for an engagement ring. The discovery led her to found Brilliant Earth, which specializes in independently mined diamonds of what she calls “ethical origin,” most of them hailing from Canada, which has some of the toughest labor standards in the world.
“Diamonds are supposed to be a symbol of love and commitment, but the industry has fueled a lot of civil wars, and many workers continue to live in abject poverty and work in dangerous and environmentally degrading conditions,” says Gerstein, noting that the movie Blood Diamond, which premiers Dec. 8, “has created a lot of defensive reaction within the diamond industry.”
“People should be proud to wear diamonds. An ethically-mined, conflict-free diamond will carry a “slight premium, but it’s still competitively priced,” says Gerstein, noting that if the whole notion of wearing diamonds turns you off, you can donate your previously worn diamonds to the Diamonds for Africa Fund, which Brilliant Earth cofounded with the Indigenous Land Rights Fund. Proceeds benefit the San Bushmen in Botswana, improve health conditions and education in villages in the Congo, and help children in Sierra Leone, who’ve been affected by conflict diamonds.

Get Your (Conflict) Rocks Off

-
0

By Sarah Phelan
Diamonds, so the saying goes, are a girl’s best friend, especially during the holiday season, which is when 25 percent of the sales of these gems reportedly take place.
But does it make sense to give your sweetie a diamond as a symbol of your love, when so many of these brilliant sparklers have caused death and destruction for so many African souls?

“Conflict diamonds” are sparklers that are mined in war zones and sold to finance African paramilitary groups. But while that practice is said to be lessening, unethical child labor practices and unacceptable environmental degradation continues unabated in Africa, which is where 49 percent of the world’s diamonds originate. These harsh realities became clear to San Francisco resident Beth Gerstein when she was shopping for an engagement ring. This discovery led her to found Brilliant Earth, which specializes in independently mined diamonds of what she calls “ethical origin,” most of them from Canada, which has some of the toughest labor standards in the world.
“Diamonds are supposed to be a symbol of love and commitment, but the industry has fueled a lot of civil wars, and many workers continue to live in abject poverty and work in dangerous and environmentally degrading conditions,” says Gerstein, noting that the movie Blood Diamond, which premiers Dec. 8, “has created a lot of defensive reaction within the diamond industry.”
“People should be proud to wear diamonds. An ethically-mined, conflict-free diamond will carry a slight premium, but it’s still competitively priced,” says Gerstein, who notes that if the whole notion of wearing diamonds turns you off, you can also donate your previously worn diamonds or family heirlooms to the Diamonds for Africa Fund, which Brilliant Earth cofounded with the Indigenous Land Rights Fund. Proceeds benefit the San Bushmen in Botswana, improve health conditions and education in villages in the Congo, and help children in Sierra Leone, who’ve been affected by conflict diamonds.

Seven-story sneak attack

-
0

› news@sfbg.com
Marina residents who thought they scored a victory against the developer of an oversize hotel have been surprised to discover that Planning Department officials, working with a permit expediter, had quietly moved the project forward anyway.
At issue is the plan by an out-of-state developer to demolish the Lombard Plaza Motel and build a larger hotel on the spot. More than three years ago a Florida developer obtained a conditional use permit to construct a new seven-story tourist hotel of nearly 50,000 square feet on a lot containing about 13,600 square feet at 2026 Lombard. The new structure would dwarf the motel, which is approximately 8,000 square feet.
Concerned residents, with the help of San Francisco land-use attorney Steven Williams, appealed the conditional use permit to the Board of Supervisors. After a lengthy public hearing, the board passed a motion in September 2003 basically saying that the hotel as planned was too big and therefore that the developer would have to make the building smaller.
After the board issued its ruling, the developer waited two years and nine months before submitting a revised proposal to the Planning Department. By that time, Williams and the residents had all but forgotten about the matter. The board, after all, gave the developer three years from September 2003 to obtain its permits; there was no chance, given the amount of time the developer had permitted to elapse, that it could submit new plans and obtain all of the necessary regulatory approvals by Sept. 30, 2006. Or at least that’s what Williams and his clients believed.
No one alerted the residents when the developer submitted its new plan in June. The developer hired a high-powered permit expediter, Jaiden Consulting, and almost immediately thereafter, the Planning Department issued a site permit. Neither Jaiden Consulting nor the developer returned the Guardian’s calls for comment.
Williams told the Guardian it normally takes weeks or months for a permit to be issued. In this case, the developer submitted its new proposal the Friday before the Labor Day weekend, and the Planning Department issued the permit the following Tuesday.
Deviating further from procedure, the Department of Building Inspection issued the permit even though the Structural Advisory Committee had not yet conducted a peer review of the project. The board’s 2003 motion explicitly made the issuing of permits conditional upon such a review. Williams brought this fact to the Planning Department’s attention, and on Sept. 21 zoning commissioner Lawrence Badiner directed the Department of Building Inspection to suspend the demolition permits pending a structural review.
The suspension finally gave Williams and the residents the opportunity to review the developer’s new plan; they quickly discovered that it did not conform to the conditions they believe the board mandated in its 2003 motion. They say that the hotel as conceived is still much too large and would encroach upon their privacy, light, and airspace. But the Planning Department didn’t see it that way.
The matter has been hanging in limbo even though District 1 supervisor Jake McGoldrick, who sponsored the board’s 2003 motion, sent department officials a letter in which he agreed with the residents’ position and clarified the board’s intent in passing the motion.
The Planning Department responded that McGoldrick is only one supervisor and that his understanding of the motion’s language does not necessarily reflect that of the other board members. For that reason, McGoldrick talked to the other supervisors who were active when the motion was passed; with one exception, they all agreed with his interpretation. McGoldrick communicated that fact to Badiner.
It’s still unclear how the Planning Department will resolve the conflict, but — no matter how it settles the dispute — the story should serve as a cautionary tale for all city residents. Even if you’ve followed the dictates of city process and obtained what you believe is a fair outcome, beware: some officials seem willing to ignore the rules to favor companies backed by well-connected lobbyists. SFBG

The morning after

-
0

› gwschulz@sfbg.com
The plight of newspapers is a popular news story these days, from a late-August cover package in the Economist (“Who Killed the Newspaper?”) to National Public Radio’s On the Media last week (“Best of Times, Worst of Times”).
It’s usually told as the story of an industry on its deathbed, bleeding from self-inflicted wounds and those delivered by Wall Street, Main Street, Craigslist, and the blogger’s laptop. Ad revenues have nose-dived in recent years. Circulation is down nationwide. Journalism scandals and shortcomings have damaged the whole profession’s credibility.
And staff newspaper blogs alone won’t be enough to bring a new generation of tech-savvy Americans back to hard-copy publications that even smell stodgy and old.
Yet the bottom line is still the bottom line. The truth of the matter is that many publicly traded newspaper companies have healthy profit margins ranging between 15 and 20 percent. But the tendency of the doom and gloom business press to sensationalize bad news may actually make things easier for William “Lean” Dean Singleton, the cost-cutting king of Denver-based MediaNews Group, which recently announced a round of staff reductions at its Bay Area newspapers. The cuts came amid claims of a massive dip in ad income just a few months after Singleton promised that his company’s buyout of local newspapers wouldn’t diminish the quality or quantity of journalism here.
“Given continued declines in revenue, we need to reduce expenses significantly, and thus have no alternative but to implement a reduction in [the] work force,” George Riggs, who was recently appointed to lead the company’s Northern California operations, told employees in a memo Oct. 20. Several such memos have now been posted on the Internet.
If this is how quickly the news biz can turn ugly, it’s a wonder MediaNews was attracted to print journalism in the first place. Who knows what newspapers around here will look like in another few months? How much fat can they trim before they start hitting bone?
They aren’t just cutting staff. The Bay Area’s newspaper establishment is now outsourcing work to circumvent those pesky labor unions. The press operators’ union at the San Francisco Chronicle — which was the sole union holdout against management’s demand for expanded control and decreased benefits — could disappear in three years as a result of a new printing contract with a Canadian company. MediaNews recently announced plans to outsource ad production positions to India.
Consolidation already has amounted to fewer reporters covering individual stories that are distributed to several publications, including at least one story about the latest layoffs. That means fewer editorial perspectives on key public policies (and possibly fewer editorial positions) for readers in a market that’s notorious for its high intellectual demand and robust political participation.
Only an ongoing federal Justice Department investigation and a civil lawsuit threaten to slow down big changes going on at the Bay Area dailies. A federal judge ruled just before deadline in real estate mogul Clint Reilly’s antitrust claim against the Hearst Corp., publisher of the Chronicle, and MediaNews that for now, at least, the two could not combine circulation and advertising operations to save money.
The companies had secured a court order sealing key records unearthed during discovery, including depositions and exhibits, citing the right to protect confidential trade secrets. It’s an ironic move for a group of papers that have regularly sued government agencies for public records and made a great show of their First Amendment pieties.
Federal Judge Susan Illston on Nov. 28 blocked the two companies from merging some advertising and distribution operations, a consolidation she said was probably illegal under antitrust laws. And she sounded her concern that Hearst isn’t the “passive equity investor” it had represented itself in court to be. She also revealed the contents of letters written in March and April by company executives: “Hearst and MediaNews will enter into agreements to offer national advertising and internet advertising sales for their Bay Area newspapers on a joint basis, and to consolidate the Bay Area distribution networks of such newspapers, all on mutually satisfactory terms and conditions, and in each case subject to any limitation required to ensure compliance with applicable law.” (For more extensive information on the ruling and related coverage, see www.sfbg.com.)
For those who regard newspapers as more of a public trust than an engine for deep profits, the future is starting to look a bit unsettling.
When Singleton expanded his control over the Bay Area threefold last summer, he temporarily quelled some discontent by assuring skeptics that there were no planned changes in staffing and salaries as a result of the transactions.
“We’re looking forward to doing a lot of good things here in Northern California,” Singleton told San Jose Mercury News staffers, according to the paper’s story on the buyout.
But employees at the papers still had every reason to be nervous about Singleton’s $1 billion takeover of the Contra Costa Times, the Mercury News, and other papers from the Sacramento-based McClatchy Co.
MediaNews already owned the Oakland Tribune, the San Mateo County Times, and the Marin Independent Journal among others in California before it carved excess properties out of McClatchy, which had grown too large following its purchase of the Knight Ridder chain earlier this year.
The purchases allowed Singleton to seize almost complete control of 14 metropolitan and suburban media markets. The only remaining daily print competitor in the Bay Area was the Chronicle and its parent company, the Hearst Corp., which subsequently purchased $300 million in MediaNews stock, a deal the feds are still investigating. When the transaction with Hearst was finalized, top executives at MediaNews were collectively awarded about $2 million in bonuses.
Some profiles of Singleton have depicted him as a good old-fashioned newspaper journalist, but knowing his cost-cutting reputation, only a fool would assume there were no plans to consolidate major operating functions to save money regardless of any promises made. Singleton has always been more about business than news.
Clustered ownership and shared management were prominent features of the company that MediaNews presented to investors at a Deutsche Bank “Global High Yield” conference in October. An April letter that reappeared in federal court last week during a hearing in Reilly’s suit confirmed that MediaNews and Hearst hoped to shed costs by possibly combining circulation and advertising operations.
Layoffs are also a big part of Singleton’s MO. Respected but tough Contra Costa Times editor Chris Lopez was let go in October because he’d become “redundant,” according to a memo company executive John Armstrong sent to employees.
“That came as a shock to a lot of people in the newsroom,” one source at the paper told the Guardian. Known for handing cash rewards out of his wallet to reporters who nailed concise stories for the front page, Lopez had attempted to play down Singleton’s reputation when the purchases were announced. Lopez had been at the paper for more than six years and had helped earn Singleton a Pulitzer Prize during a six-year stint at the company’s flagship Denver Post, received for its coverage of the Columbine shootings.
“In better times, we might have found a way to ignore an extra position or two or even three,” Armstrong wrote in the memo.
Lopez insisted to the Guardian in a phone interview that he had proposed his own termination to ease anticipated cuts elsewhere.
“My layoff from the paper was not unexpected,” Lopez said. “It caught the staff off guard, but I saw it coming. I made the recommendation. I was trying to save some jobs in the newsroom.”
The loss of an experienced editor may have saved some jobs … for now. But maybe not for long. Reporters have been asked to summarize their beats for managers to determine how they can cover single subjects for a number of papers. The idea seems to be maximizing staff output rather than ensuring broad coverage of the communities.
A story about Lopez’s departure written by a Times reporter also appeared on the Merc’s Web site. MediaNews is also looking into multimedia deals with local TV stations and arming reporters with cameras for podcasts, one source told us.
Armstrong told the Guardian in a phone interview that opinion columnists, for instance, could still cover the same stories. “But we had found some situations where reporters were sent to the same events like Oakland [Raiders] away games.” He said offering buyouts to staffers has been “successful,” but it wasn’t enough to stem declining revenue, triggering the need for “involuntary” layoffs.
All of this may make sense from a strictly economic perspective. After all, doing more with less is a widely accepted imperative for profit-driven corporations. But there is a public price that will be paid for this reality: Bay Area citizens will get less original reporting and fewer perspectives on the news.
A former senior staffer at a major Bay Area daily wrote an open missive outlining recent major stories covered by fewer reporters: “Three months after MediaNews Group added two major Knight Ridder dailies to its far-flung Northern California newspaper group, news coverage is well on its way to being homogenized in this formerly competitive market.”
The observation is borne out by a Guardian survey of three major MediaNews papers. Out of 10 top recent cultural and political stories in the Bay Area, nine were covered by the same reporter, who wrote the same article for all three papers. (For details, visit www.sfbg.com.)
Under the recent layoff announcement, the Merc could lose up to 101 employees, half from its newsroom, while more than 100 business-side positions will be reportedly moved to a new, nonunionized San Ramon office of the California Newspapers Partnership (CNP), a consortium of companies including Gannet Co. and Stephens Group that helped MediaNews fund its recent purchases. The centralized San Ramon space could continue to fill up with employees from the business side of the papers who have been forced to reapply for their jobs under the CNP corporate moniker. They would presumably fall out from under union protection.
The company’s Peninsula and East Bay papers saw cuts across their operations from Walnut Creek to San Mateo. Armstrong told the Times the layoffs were “broad but not deep.” East Bay Express writer Robert Gammon, a former Tribune reporter and union organizer, revealed in early November that MediaNews planned to leave behind the Tribune’s historic downtown tower and move many of its staffers to the San Ramon office. News-side functions could be moved to a cheaper spot across from the Oakland Coliseum.
“The question is how do we continue to put out a paper people want to read if we continue to cut further?” Luther Jackson, executive officer for the San Jose Newspaper Guild, which represents almost 500 workers at the Merc, asked the Guardian. “I have a concern that when newspapers face increased competition for advertising, why are we cutting service? Does it work for readers? Does it work for advertisers?”
The Bay Area isn’t alone. In the complex transactions that took place over the summer, Hearst bought the St. Paul Pioneer Press from McClatchy and shifted it to MediaNews in exchange for stock in the company. At the Pi Press, as it’s known in Minnesota, 40 positions were cut in November. A MediaNews paper in Los Angeles, the Daily News, recently axed its publisher and 20 other workers.
MediaNews enraged union workers at the Merc when it offered them a contract during September negotiations that was unlike anything they’d seen at the paper before. The company has since toned down some of its harsher demands but asserted that if a tentative agreement were accepted by Nov. 30, the Merc might see fewer layoffs, Jackson told the Guardian.
The proposal would grant management the right to modify insurance coverage without telling the union, freeze the paper’s pension plan and replace it with a 401(k), and change the types of work that could be assigned to nonunion employees. It would also allow the paper to hire new workers at “market-rate” salaries, which means their pay increases could be capped at lower rates.
The company may choose to simply not replace costly veterans who are retiring or accepting buyouts, meaning cub reporters could find themselves with fewer seasoned mentors around to help teach them government and private sector watchdogging.
The guild foresees losing nearly 200 members if the full number of layoffs and worker transfers are carried out. And many guild members fear it may also mean the beginning of the end of newspapers as we know them.
Corporations have the right to see to their bottom lines. But communities and individuals also have a right to the fruits that independent, competitive journalism bestows. And that’s the right being asserted now in civil court by Clint Reilly.
While federal and state investigators have largely been idling, Reilly sued Hearst, MediaNews, and its other business partners last summer. He asked Judge Illston to temporarily halt the transactions until the trial begins in his antitrust claim against the companies. She denied Reilly’s initial request for a preliminary injunction, in part because the Hearst investment had not been officially inked, even though the trial isn’t expected to start until this spring.
In her opinion, however, she suggested parts of the deal were troubling and has not ruled out forcing MediaNews to give up some of its newly acquired assets. Earlier this month Reilly’s attorney, Joe Alioto, again asked the judge for an injunction. The renewed appeal was inspired in part by the recently announced job cuts.
The plaintiffs are arguing Hearst and MediaNews previously withheld a letter from the court that the two companies had signed agreeing to discuss the possibility of combining some circulation and advertising functions to save money. In his request Alioto told the judge the companies were “rapidly consolidating, commingling, and irrevocably altering their San Francisco Bay Area newspapers so as to frustrate this Court’s ability to provide an effective remedy for their antitrust violations.”
During a tense hearing last week on the matter, Alioto asked that top Hearst and MediaNews executives be ordered to testify immediately. He suggested Hearst’s board of directors would never have agreed to invest $300 million in MediaNews if it couldn’t also merge distribution and ad sales with its competitor.
“I don’t think there is any doubt that they intend to end up with newspapers that are very different than they are today,” Alioto said. He wants any such discussions stopped by the court, adding, “We believe they intend to wipe out the possibility of any of these papers to remain freestanding. These papers will not be the same within a very short amount of time.”
Hearst attorney Daniel Wall angrily fired back that no one was trying to deceive the court with a price-fixing agreement and that the companies were merely discussing the possibility of “pro-competition collaboration,” which Wall described as a business partnership lawfully permitted by the Justice Department. He disclosed that the Chronicle was bleeding millions of dollars annually, partially because of lost revenue to the Web, and exclaimed that drastic cost reductions were necessary to keep the paper alive.
“These are tough times for newspapers, and they need to take cost out of the system,” Wall told the judge. “They need to find new revenue streams.”
Hearst has already faced something akin to all of this before. Reilly sued it in 2000 when the company bought the Chron and attempted to nix competition by shutting down its long-held San Francisco Examiner. Reilly didn’t block the deal, but the Justice Department forced Hearst to keep open the reliably conservative Examiner, today owned by another Denver-based company.
This week Illston ruled that Hearst and MediaNews must temporarily stop any agreements to combine advertising sales and distribution networks until Dec. 6, when she’ll decide whether to extend her prohibition on merging business operations.
Reilly has emerged over the last decade as a serious pain for corporate media executives and unshakable critic of concentrated newspaper ownership in the Bay Area. His most recent lawsuit charges that the Hearst and MediaNews partnership would dilute fair competition and limit alternatives for both readers and advertisers.
“They started the blood flow with the firings,” Alioto told reporters after the hearing. “We think when they’re done with this they’re going to have entirely different newspapers.”
Recent job losses don’t stop at just MediaNews. The Chronicle is getting in on the action too.
Divisive contract negotiations between the Chronicle and the Web Pressman and Prepress Workers Union Local 4 over the last two years ended recently when the union “reluctantly approved” an agreement, union treasurer Paul Kolter told us. The union was the last holdout at the paper to accept drastically reduced workers’ rights.
By successfully pushing its will on the unions, Hearst has virtually ensured that the press operators won’t pose much of a threat to the company anymore, because around the same time it signed a $1 billion outsourcing deal with the Canadian printing company Transcontinental.
The union’s new contract is up in about three years, and there are no assurances Local 4 will have any workers in the new plant Transcontinental has promised to build. That could mean the end of its relationship with the Chronicle and about 225 workers from the paper that it represents.
The previous contract ended in the summer of 2005, and under the paper’s new publisher, Frank “Darth” Vega, management called for drastic cuts in salaries and benefits. The two groups spent several intervening months battling over the proposed changes.
In July, Vega prepared the paper for a strike, issuing a memo that outlined exactly how to keep the paper operating throughout a work stoppage, and hired a notorious security firm that specializes in handling labor disputes.
The union points out that while the Chronicle complains of massive financial bloodletting, its parent company, Hearst, has somehow scraped together enough money for a brand-new $500 million office building in midtown Manhattan, the construction of which was completed over the summer. The company also sold the sprawling 82,000-acre ranch that surrounds Hearst Castle to the state early last year for nearly $100 million. It was once home to the notoriously belligerent and imperialistic newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
Union members say there are wide ramifications to what’s happening here. In July the World Association of Newspapers published a report describing how more news services globally, including the New York Times, were outsourcing major tasks, even news reporting, to save money.
“There are a lot of labor unions that have an interest in what is happening with us,” Local 4 organizer and press operator Bruce Carlton told members at a meeting in late October. “If this flies, it will be a blueprint on how to break unions. We will be sent back into the ’30s.”
The mood is dark for many employees working under MediaNews and Hearst. The scrappy feel and hard-driving reportage of the CoCo Times under Lopez and Knight Ridder are believed by some to be at risk following the purchases. “No one thinks we’re going to be a better newspaper because of this,” one source at the paper told us.
In another memo MediaNews executive Armstrong wrote to Bay Area staffers last week, he stated that the company, in fact, predicted its “advertising revenue challenges.”
“We have no additional job reductions planned due to economic conditions, but we cannot guarantee that additional reductions might not be necessary in the future,” he wrote. “Our job level is dependent on our revenue performance.”
The memo also shows that the company plans to sell an office in Danville and two parking lots in downtown Oakland.
News accounts depicted third-quarter earnings for MediaNews based on Securities and Exchange Commission filings as a windfall profit caused by its purchases of the Times and the Merc. But the company’s ad revenue and circulation are actually down a few percentage points, and it made $16 million from the July sale of an office building in Long Beach, which offsets a simple analysis of its financial standing.
It’s still a company that topped $1 billion in revenue last year, a figure that has increased steadily since 2002, but Singleton has never feared doing business with loads of debt on the books, which he’s always used to fuel new purchases. For the Bay Area papers, MediaNews took on a $350 million bank loan in August.
MediaNews has still managed to take recent dire economic forecasts to a fever pitch despite its confidently large debt burden, enabling the company to implement a business model that’s hardly new for Singleton. He knows how to make money. Interestingly, for an industry that’s supposedly on the ropes, several billionaires (who didn’t become wealthy by investing poorly) have in the last few weeks publicly expressed interest in purchasing some of the nation’s largest dailies.
The Boston Globe noted earlier this month that rock industry tycoon David Geffen and grocery chain investor Ron Burkle were considering a bid for the Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times. That paper recently endured a major shakeup when a top editor was fired for refusing to execute job cuts demanded by the company. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch has considered a run for the Globe, and more buyout rumors have floated around the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant. Such deals could signal a fundamental shift in how newspapers are regarded with respect to their newsgathering responsibilities.
“Geffen has reportedly told associates that he’d be happy with returns comparable to the 3 or 4 percent he might get from municipal bonds,” the Globe wrote. Others have discussed turning individual newspapers into nonprofits.
But Singleton probably isn’t going anywhere, and a lot of people are going to have to learn how to get along with him around here, Texas drawl and all, unless the feds shut down his party.
Knight Ridder was a respected newspaper chain before investors grew restless and demanded greater short-term profit margins. It was sold earlier this year to McClatchy (begrudgingly for some top execs and Pulitzer-wielding journalists who openly fought with Knight Ridder’s financial backers prior to the sale). Knight Ridder posted a profit margin of nearly 20 percent in 2004.
Employees of the chain wrote a chilling open letter shortly before it was sold: “Knight Ridder is not merely a public company. It is a public trust. It must balance corporate profitability with civic purpose. We oppose those who would cripple the purpose by coercing more profit. We abhor those for whom good business is insufficient and excellent journalism is irrelevant.” SFBG

TUESDAY

-
0

Nov. 21

Music

Pernice Brothers

Recently I was watching Iron Chef, and one of the contestants whipped up some luscious delight of lightly fried honeycomb with cream and fruit; it looked like the best dessert ever. That night I dreamed about it. Oh, how I slept like a baby! The next day I bought the latest by the Pernice Brothers, Live a Little (Ashmont), and over the course of its 12 songs I realized I was listening to the aural equivalent of that same heavenly concoction. The yearning Americana of their early releases can still be tasted, but Joe Pernice and his crew of lovelorn stargazers have added bursting power pop to the recipe. (Todd Lavoie)

With Elvis Perkins
9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$12
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
www.pernicebrothers.com

Event

Haiti’s Solidarity Conference

Learn about Haiti from SF Labor Council member David Welsh, who visited the Solidarity Conference in Port-au-Prince last August and witnessed UN troops firing into houses, at the Gray Panther November general meeting. (Deborah Giattina)

12:30-3 p.m.
Unitarian Universalist Church
1187 Franklin at Geary, SF
(415) 552-8000
http://graypantherssf.igc.org

The devil in the metadata

-
0

The Rules Committee of the Board of Supervisors is considering whether or not the city should allow its departments to release electronic documents that include metadata. Although the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force has already hashed over the minutiae of this issue and ruled that metadata can and should be released, the mystery enshrouding what it is, and the lack of any specific policy or known precedent in other cities or states with public records laws has pushed the discussion upstream to where a formal legislation has become a possibility.
Freedom of information purists are saying all the parts and pieces of a document are part of the public domain, while the City Attorney’s Office is claiming another layer of protection may be required.
Metadata entered the realm of public discussion in San Francisco after citizens started making requests of electronic documents with a specific plea for metadata. Activists Allen Grossman and Kimo Crossman wanted copies of, ironically enough, the city’s Sunshine Ordinance, in its original Microsoft Word format. Grossman and Crossman wanted to use the advantages of technology to follow the evolving amendments the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force members were considering for the city’s public records law. These “tracked changes” are a common function in Word, and are, technically, metadata.
When Clerk of the Board Gloria Young received these specific requests for Word documents, not knowing what this “metadata” was or what to do about it, she turned to the office of City Attorney Dennis Herrera for advice.
Deputy City Attorney Paul Zarefsky initially gave oral advice to Young, and when pressed by the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, issued a five-page memo in response, arguing that release of documents with metadata could pave a path for hackers into the city’s computer system, render documents dangerously vulnerable to cut-and-paste manipulation, and invite another unwelcome burden of reviewing and redacting for city officials. Young followed his advice and proffered the requested documents as PDFs.
A PDF, or “portable document format,” is essentially a photograph of the real thing, and contains none of the metadata that exists a couple clicks of the mouse away in a Word document. Evolving changes can’t be tracked, and PDFs don’t have the same searchability that Word docs have. So PDFs of the Sunshine Ordinance that Young provided didn’t have the functions that Crossman and Grossman were looking for, and were utterly useless for their purposes.
“It’s 92 pages,” Grossman said of the PDF Sunshine Ordinance. “I can’t search it electronically if I want to find something. This document I received is of no use to me.”

Meta-what?
Before delving too deep into the intricacies of current city politics, let’s pause for a moment to note that you don’t need to be a Luddite to have no idea what metadata is. It sounds like some diminutive or ethereal version of the real thing. In a sense, it is.
Simply put, metadata is data about data, and grows with weed-like tenacity in the electronic flora of the twenty-first century. Common examples include the track an email took from an outbox to an inbox, details about the owner of a computer program, or the laptop on which a Word document has been typed.
Metadata becomes cause for concern when there is something to hide. Not readily visible, metadata requires a little sleuthing to reveal, but in the past it’s been used to uncover deeper truths about a situation. For example, attorney Jim Calloway relates on his Law Practice Tips blog a divorce case where custody of the child was called into question because of the content of emails sent from the mother to the father. The mother denied she’d sent the emails, though the father vehemently insisted she had. A court forensics investigation found metadata showing that, in reality, the father had written the emails and sent them to himself.
“Metadata speaks the truth,” Calloway writes. “My position has always been that a tool is a tool. Whether a tool is used for good or evil is the responsibility of the one who uses the tool.”
Lawyers have historically advised that metadata be fiercely protected. Jembaa Cole, in the Shidler Journal for Law, Commerce and Technology wrote, “There have been several instances in which seemingly innocuous metadata has wreaked professional and political havoc.”
Cole goes on to cite a gaffe from Tony Blair’s administration – a document about weapons of mass destruction was available on the government’s web site, which claimed the information was original and current. Metadata showed that, not only had the information been plagiarized from a student thesis, it was more than ten years old.
Cole urges lawyers to take an aggressive tack against revealing metadata, by educating offices about its existence, making a practice of “scrubbing” it from documents, and providing “clean” documents in PDF or paper form.
The city attorney’s office has taken a similar stance. Spokesperson Matt Dorsey told us metadata has been a part of the continuing education of the city attorney’s office. However, all past case law of which they are aware focuses on metadata in the context of discovery and “the conclusion of most state bars is that they have the obligation, under attorney-client privilege, to review metadata prior to discovery,” he said. “The issue of metadata is a relatively new one in legal circuits. It isn’t a brand new issue to us, but it is in the context of Sunshine,” said Dorsey, who maintains that metadata could still fall within the standard redaction policies of the public records act.
Terry Franke, who runs the open-government group Californian Aware, argues that “the city attorney needs to complete this sentence: ‘Allowing the public to see metadata in Word documents would be a detriment because…’ What?”
“From the beginning of this discussion the city attorney has never provided a plausible, practical, understandable explanation of what is the kind and degree of harm in allowing metadata to be examined that justifies stripping it out,” Francke said.

To the task force
When Grossman and Crossman were denied the documents as they’d requested them, they filed complaints with the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. In their cases, first heard on Sep. 26, they argued there should be no concern that the text of Word documents could be manipulated – anybody with a gluestick and a pair of scissors could do that to any piece of paper. That had been a consideration when the Sunshine Ordinance was drafted, and why the city always retains the undisputable original.
Thomas Newton, of the California Newspapers and Publishers Alliance, who was involved in drafting the state’s public records law, agreed with them. “If you follow his logic, you can’t release a copy of any public record because, oh my God, someone might change it,” Newton told us.
Crossman and Grossman also pointed out that to convert documents from Word to PDF invites even more work to a task that should be as burden-free as possible. It’s a regular practice for the clerk of the board to maintain documents as PDFs because that preserves signatures and seals of ratified legislation, but to make it a policy of all departments could invite a landslide of work, printing out documents and converting them to PDFs – not to mention undermining the notion of conserving paper.
Also, translation software and the “screen reader” feature that a blind person might employ to “read” an electronic document, don’t work with PDFs.
First amendment lawyers also offered written opinions on the issue. “Some of the city’s arguments have no support in the law whatsoever,” wrote Francke. “The fundamental problem for the city is that it has no authority to legislate a new general exception of exemption from the CPRA (California Public Records Act), and that’s what’s being advanced here.”
“The city’s scofflaw position represents the status quo ante, the old law that used to allow an agency to provide a copy of computer data ‘in a form determined by the agency.’ The city’s position has been directly and completely repudiated by the legislature. If the city disagrees with the law, it should come to Sacramento and get a bill,” wrote Thomas Newton, general counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA).
As for the hacker scare, Zac Multrux, an independent technology consultant was invited to the Sep. 26 hearing by task force member Bruce Wolfe to speak about the dangers of metadata. He suggested a number of technological tools that are available for purchase or are free online, that will “scrub” metadata from documents. He said that while it’s true that someone with ill intent could mess with metadata, “I think someone would need a whole lot more than the name of a computer” to hack into the city’s system. “Personally, I don’t see it as a significant security risk,” he said.
It was also pointed out at the hearing that a variety of city, state, and federal departments already make Word and Excel documents available. Wolfe did a quick online search and found more than 96,000 Word documents on the State of California web site. “They’re not afraid to make Word documents public online,” he said.
Over the course of two hearings the task force found no basis for Zarefsky’s claims in either the city’s law or the California Public Records Act – both of which explicitly state a document should be released in whatever format is requested, as long as the document is regularly stored in that format or does not require any additional work to provide.
The task force found Young in violation of the ordinance and she was told to make the documents available in Word format. No restrictions or rulings were made for future requests, but task force member Sue Cauthen said, “I think this whole case is a test case for how the city provides documents electronically.”

What’s next?
As requested, Young had the Sunshine Ordinance, in Word format, pulled from the city’s files and posted on a separate server outside of the city’s system to be viewed. Crossman, noting the added labor and resources for that provision, wondered if that would happen to all public records requested in Word format, so he cooked up another request to test his theory.
He asked for all the pending and accepted legislation for the month of September from the Board of Supervisors, in Word format.
While the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force had found that withholding documents because of metadata was against the law, redaction of privileged information is still legally necessary, and Young continued to follow the city attorney’s advice that a PDF with no metadata was still the safest, easiest way to comply. She told us, “I don’t take their advice lightly.”
Zarefsky’s opinion said departments “may” provide PDFs instead of Word documents and that “metadata may include a wide variety of information that the City has a right — and, in some cases a legal duty — to redact. Young’s office does have pending legislation in Word format, she says it does not fall within the expertise of her staff to review and redact the metadata in those documents because they didn’t author them. “Since we don’t create the documents, how could we ever know whether the metadata should be released? We don’t know what it is,” she told us. “We couldn’t even hire expertise that would know.”
“I can’t imagine there’s so much toxic stuff in Board of Supervisors records they can’t let out,” Grossman told us. “This is a whole mystery to me.”
“It’s just data,” says Crossman. “City employees created it on our dime. Unless it falls under redaction discretion, entire documents should be provided.”
Young took the issue to the legislators who do draft the legislation, asking the November 2 meeting of the Rules Committee for further policy consideration. Miriam Morley spoke on behalf of the city attorney’s office, and said there was a sound legal basis for providing documents as PDFs, but that this was an evolving area of the law that the city attorney’s office wasn’t aware of until about 9 months ago. They could find no other cities currently grappling with the issue, but she said, “Our conclusion is that a court would likely hold a right to withhold a document in Word.”
The committee decided to research the issue further before making a ruling. Committee chair Ross Mirkarimi said he had been integral to the drafting of the Sunshine ordinance, and to rush a decision could be detrimental.
“It seems to me in the spirit of the Sunshine law this is something we should really look at,” Tom Ammiano said. It’s currently at the call of the Chair of Rules and no date has been set for the Rules Committee to hear it again.
A policy in San Francisco could set a real precedent for public records law, but according to many first amendment lawyers, for the Board to do so would be a violation of state law. “I know of no other city, county, or subdivision of state government or state agency that’s disregarding the clear intention of the law as some elements of San Francisco city and county government are planning to do,” Newton told us.
“It’s a debate that can’t really occur outside of a proposal to change the state law,” he said. “The Board of Supervisors can’t pick and choose which law to comply with,” and he said the state’s constitution and public records act trumps the city, which is reading the law too narrowly. “They’re required to give a broad interpretation of this access law. If they don’t like it they should come to Sacramento and get a bill,” he said.
“I think a lot of city departments, and policy and advisory bodies can save themselves a lot of headaches by declaring as policy that they will provide documents in their original formats,” task force member Richard Knee said. “With metadata.”

“NAN-CY! NAN-CY!”

-
0

No on 85/Yes on F Election Party
by Ailsa Chang

The scene at Medjool Bar tonight is upbeat, confident and loud. This election party hosted by the San Francisco Labor Council and Medjool’s owner, Gus Murad, is the party for everyone who didn’t have a party: No on 85, Yes on F, supporters for Bob Twomey for School Board, State Assembly Candidate Fiona Ma.

1...666768...70Page 67 of 70

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