Media Archives — Page 99 of 121 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Green satellites dying

September 18, 2007

› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Government-funded satellite systems and sensor networks are supposed to be spook stuff, technologies for surveillance and social control. They’re the "electric eyes" that follow us and turn our private lives into sitcoms for bored intelligence agents, right? Wrong. They may be spooky, but satellite and sensor networks are some of the most powerful tools for studying the way humans are impacting climate change. They allow scientists to create maps showing how land use affects climate, as well as how chemical emissions are linked to rainfall, water levels, temperature fluctuations, and ozone depletion.

And now, according to a distressing report last week from the US Climate Change Science Program, the government is cutting funds to the tools that climate researchers need most. In this report, researchers write that the National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System has been severely downsized, "eliminating several key climate instruments," while rollout on four new systems for measuring atmospheric changes has been delayed or cancelled. At the same time, the government has failed to maintain observatories on the ground devoted to climate change and is scaling back on an ocean climate sensor system called the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean buoy array.

Parts of the CCSP’s report are essentially a plea for more sensor networks. We need good data from these networks to create realistic models of global climate change, the researchers say. But more important, scientists need that data to figure out the best ways for people to intervene and make the future greener. That’s why we need sensor networks sampling the air from high above the Arctic and across the ocean, proving that cutting back on carbon emissions can lower temperatures or prevent hurricanes from forming. We need good satellite maps showing exactly how urban developments are destroying local forests.

For these reasons, the report emphasizes that the biggest problem faced by the CCSP is an inability to implement policies for change. CCSP researchers are frustrated that the data they’ve compiled rarely make it into policy recommendations to the government. And only $30 million of the CCSP’s $1.7 billion dollar budget is allocated to programs that investigate the impact of environmental changes on human beings.

Just as news of this report was breaking, New York environmental group Blacksmith Institute released a list of the 10 most polluted places on Earth. Created by the group’s technical advisory board, and based entirely on how much impact the pollution has on local human populations, the list is topped by regions in the industrializing world: Sumjayit, an industrial manufacturing city in Azerbaijan; Linfen and Tianying, coal and lead mining towns in China; and Sukinda and Vapi, chemical mining and manufacturing areas in India. Also included are similar areas in Russia and Peru.

People in the regions highlighted by the Blacksmith Institute are getting cancer and lung disease, as well as passing birth defects on to their children. If we want to prevent the entire world from becoming like Sumjayit — and indeed, to prevent people in Sumjayit from suffering the worst side effects of industrialization — we need the very kinds of data that CCSP scientists worry we can no longer get. As climate sensor networks decay, and green satellites die, so too does the hope that we can build a better climate model, a sane climate model based on how changing social behaviors.

So if you think that having one less satellite in the sky is a good idea, think again. And if you think that the only thing a sensor network can do is invade privacy, think again about that too. As ever, the problem isn’t with technology; it’s with who controls it.*

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wants to put toxic emissions under surveillance.

Letters as leverage

September 18, 2007

› news@sfbg.com

It’s a thin, seemingly innocuous letter. The Social Security Administration mails it when names and Social Security numbers don’t match on an employee’s I-9 form. The intent is to make sure workers receive their benefits.

But unions and immigrants have long charged that unscrupulous employers use SSA "no match" letters to harass undocumented workers and squelch union organizing efforts. Now, after a failed immigration debate in Congress, the George W. Bush administration wants to pass a regulation that would explicitly turn the letter into an immigration enforcement tool.

Activists fear this could result in massive firings and retaliation against workers organizing with unions. Employers complain it could lead to an economic slump in industries dependent on undocumented labor. A temporary injunction granted by a San Francisco judge is the only thing holding back letters across the country; it ends Oct. 1.

Bay Area activists have been national leaders at the intersection of immigrant rights and labor movements. They are now shaping national policy on this new regulation in the courts and promise wide-scale street action and workplace walkouts if it goes into effect.

A look at past and present related Bay Area organizing may shed light on the future of the national issue.

BAY AREA ORGANIZING

US companies file hundreds of millions of W-2 forms with the SSA every year. The SSA uses them to calculate how much it owes workers at retirement. When the name and the Social Security number do not match, the SSA sends a "no match" letter to the employee to clear up the discrepancy. The letters are also sent to employers who have more than 10 employees with no match. These letters have nothing to do with immigration law, and employers are not required to take any adverse action against these employees.

But under the new Department of Homeland Security regulation, no-match letters may be seen as evidence that an employer knowingly employed an undocumented worker. The letters would include a leaflet from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement informing employers that they must fire workers who cannot resolve no matches with the SSA or reverify their work authorization within 93 days. If the companies do not, they may be subject to fines or criminal charges.

The rule was drafted more than a year ago but was not announced by Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff until Aug 10. "The magnet that brings most economic migrants into this country is work," he explained. "And if we have worksite enforcement directed at illegal employment, we strike at that magnet."

Brooke Anderson, an organizer with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, told the Guardian that this is an unlikely scenario. Workers will not leave the country; they will simply be forced into underground economies, rotate through different jobs, and become even more vulnerable.

Anderson was among a delegation of more than 30 labor, faith, and community leaders that presented a letter Aug. 30 at the regional SSA office in Richmond. The letter outlined their concerns and asked that the SSA send out no-match letters only to employees, not employers.

"DHS is using an incomplete, hodgepodge system intended to ensure our economic security to implement a regressive immigration policy that Bush failed to pass in Congress," Anderson told us. "The SSA as an agency should have a spine and say no to DHS and no to the Bush administration."

If the ICE inserts do go out with no-match letters, she predicts walkouts and massive street actions.

The regulation is also being challenged in a lawsuit filed by the Central Labor Council of Alameda County. The AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the San Francisco Central Labor Council have joined it. The plaintiffs claim that because the SSA’s database is full of errors, many citizens and legal immigrants could end up losing their jobs. They also argue that the DHS has exceeded its authority by seeking to use the SSA to enforce immigration laws.

US District Judge Maxine Chesney in San Francisco granted a nationwide temporary restraining order Aug. 31, blocking the SSA from sending letters with ICE inserts. The order is in effect until Oct. 1, when another federal judge here, Charles Breyer, will decide whether to grant another injunction.

"DHS is trying to create a huge terror, to give the illusion that they are doing something," Bill Sokol, a lawyer with Weinberg, Roger, and Rosenfeld, the firm representing the Central Labor Council of Alameda County, told us. "Workers are afraid, but we must dial down people’s fear and terror under our new gestapo."

He said the law will have little impact if employers understand it and do not abuse it. If employers overreact, however, the result could be disastrous. Sokol said employers are already firing employees immediately after receiving the letters.

HISTORY

Unions and immigrant workers across the country have charged that no-match letters have been used to stifle workers’ rights since the SSA began sending them to employers in 1994. Activists in the Bay Area have played a key role in resisting these efforts, setting national precedents upholding worker rights.

When a San Francisco Travelodge fired workers after they began organizing with a union in 1999, allegedly due to Social Security no matches, the terminated employees took it to court. The next year they won an arbitrator’s decision that the firing, based solely on no-match letters, was a violation of their union contract.

Local community pressure on the SSA also resulted in the inclusion of cautionary text in the letter. The no-match letter now states that employers "should not use this letter to take any adverse action against an employee…. Doing so could, in fact, violate state or federal law and subject you to legal consequences."

Activists at Oakland’s Labor Immigrant Organizers Network wrote a resolution in 1999 asking the AFL-CIO to renounce its support of the employer-sanctions provisions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the federal law that for the first time made it illegal for an undocumented worker to hold a job. Their agitation is credited in part for a resolution the AFL-CIO passed in 2000 calling for the repeal of sanctions and for a legalization program for undocumented workers.

The letters remained a potent tool for antiunion activity. A 2003 survey by the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that 25 percent of workers listed in no-match letters reported that their employers fired them in retaliation for complaining about inadequate worksite conditions. More than one in five workers reported that their employer fired them in retaliation for union activity.

San Francisco opposed the DHS no-match regulation when it was proposed last year. An August 2006 resolution by the Board of Supervisors said it may lead to employers "using it as a device to fire, intimidate, harass, or underpay employees." It promised that the city would defy the regulation if it received a no-match letter for a city employee.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce also came out against the regulation.

But some employers embraced the proposed regulation. Uniform manufacturer Cintas fired hundreds of employees across the country, allegedly responding to the proposed guidelines after receiving no-match letters during a union organizing drive. Organizers said the company targeted employees involved in the union and jumped the gun on new regulations.

The Woodfin Suite Hotel in Emeryville fired 21 housekeepers in December 2006, also allegedly due to no-match letters. The workers claim the Woodfin retaliated against them for organizing with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a labor-affiliated think tank, to enforce the living-wage law (see "Calling in the Feds," 6/13/07).

A yearlong campaign targeting the Woodfin has brought the issue to a national audience.

FALSE INFORMATION

Organizers say the regulations are far less strict than the news media has portrayed them, adding to an atmosphere of hysteria and fear among employers and workers. Francisco Ugarte, a lawyer with the Oakland firm of Leonard Carder, held up several San Francisco Chronicle articles at a Sept. 13 workshop for union organizers as examples of media inaccuracies.

An employer is not required to fire an employee after 90 days, as news accounts have stated. The employer has 90 days to fix discrepancies, and the worker has three days after that to fill out another I-9 form with a new Social Security number. If it appears credible, employers must accept the new I-9, Ugarte said.

The ICE insert in the SSA letter will terrify employers, he predicted, but the rule does not create any new information sharing between the SSA and other governmental agencies. The SSA is actually prohibited by law from sharing private data with any other governmental agencies.

There are also no automatic fines assessed to employers, as news accounts have implied. ICE will only levy fines if it raids employers and finds that they did not address no-match discrepancies. It is unlikely that the DHS will be able to enforce the regulations; in announcing them, Chertoff said the agency would rely largely on self-policing.

Even if this is the case, organizers fear that the DHS’s no-match regulation will provide employers with another tool to squelch immigrant workers’ rights. Comprehensive immigration reform is still needed to reconcile employers’ demands for workers, immigrants’ needs for employment, and US immigration policy.*

Witch, please

September 18, 2007

› cheryl@sfbg.com

If you can end your Toronto International Film Festival experience with a movie that climaxes in a 10-minute fistfight (roofs collapse, cinder blocks are smashed, tables become splinters, ankle bones snap like twigs, and vengeance is won … but at what price?), that qualifies as a joyous note in my book. And fortunately, it’s my book we’re talking about — specifically, my TIFF screening list, which by the end of my festival stint was completely mangled by incoherent scribblings and intricate schemes involving cinematic scheduling and basic human needs (chief among them sleep, which was often totally disregarded).

There’s a fine art to festivalgoing. I’m not sure I’ve mastered it yet. But I managed to see 26 (and a half) movies, probably missing some that I should have seen and certainly digesting a few disappointments. Another critic could spend a week in Toronto and see none of the films that I saw; my tastes run toward horror, documentaries, Hollywood and accessible indie stuff by directors I admire, and Hong Kong cinema (like the ankle buster mentioned above, the Donnie Yen–<\d>starring Flash Point). Plus, you gotta work in at least a few totally random selections — otherwise, what’s the point of being surrounded by cinema 24-7?

The big bananas in the horror bunch were Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears, the long-awaited conclusion to his witch-happy Three Mothers trilogy, and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, hyped as the legendary zombie king’s return to no-frills filmmaking. I also followed my thrill-sniffing snout to Spanish newcomer Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage and the French Frontier(s), directed by Xavier Gens (whose Hollywood debut, video game–<\d>based Hitman, is currently trailered on Death Sentence). I’m a huge fan of Argento’s gialli and flashy, trashy, blood-soaked horror epics — and while I’m aware of the argument that he hasn’t made a great film since 1985’s Phenomena, Mother of Tears offers vintage pleasures galore. You want a coherent story and subtle acting? Look elsewhere (perhaps to the ghostly, Guillermo del Toro–<\d>produced fable The Orphanage). Argento’s tale starts with a cursed urn and snowballs into mad hysteria, grabbing a gold-toothed witch, Argento ex (and Mother star Asia Argento’s real-life mother) Daria Nicolodi, a creepy monkey, and exorcist Udo Kier en route to a church-burningly ridiculous conclusion. In other words, I loved it.

I wasn’t as sold on Frontier(s), a well-made but derivative Texas Chainsaw Massacre descendent that squanders its interesting Paris riots context. And it’s my sad duty to report that Diary of the Dead is hardly essential Romero. Glowing reviews published elsewhere baffle me. Diary works an of-the-moment theme of kids subverting the mainstream media via user-controlled Internet sites — post–<\d>undead apocalypse, the only source of truth for the masses. But it becomes caught up in Making a Statement, and its narrative device — camera-wielding film student obsessively documents the undead uprising — is completely irritating. Sorry, but I’ll take the flawed-but-fun Land of the Dead any day.

Enfolded into my documentary diet were several music-themed entries, including Heavy Metal in Baghdad and Joy Division, and the doclike narratives Control and I’m Not There. We all know things are bad in Iraq, but Heavy Metal puts them on a regular-dude level that CNN reports don’t often facilitate. Metal outfit Acrassicauda love Slayer and Metallica, and they (and their fans) just wanna rock. At the start of the film (exec-produced by Spike Jonze and codirected by Suroosh Alvi, the cofounder of Vice magazine, and Eddy Moretti), the musicians claim they aren’t a political band. Attitudes change, thanks to Scud missiles (which destroy their practice space and all of their instruments), pressure from a culture that frowns on long hair and headbanging, and a post–<\d>Saddam Hussein environment of extreme danger (machine-gun fire is just part of the street noise). Less contemporary but no less absorbing is Joy Division, Grant Gee’s reverent and artful look at Manchester’s pioneering post-punkers. Lead singer Ian Curtis is the focus of Control, a black-and-white wonder by music-video vet Anton Corbijn that focuses mostly on the troubled Curtis’s rocky personal life. Meanwhile, Todd Haynes creatively interprets the music biopic — as he’s done before with Superstar and Velvet Goldmine — with I’m Not There, a freewheeling (yet carefully calibrated) look at Bob Dylan. An array of famous folks — the stunning Cate Blanchett among them — portrays an array of Dylanesque characters. Though I could feel the movie being deliberately arty at times, it worked for me. And I’m not even a huge Dylan fan.

I’m running out of space, and I haven’t even gotten to three of my favorite TIFF films, so I’ll just lump ’em in here. Son of Rambow got mad props at Sundance, and with good reason; you’d have to be completely heartless to not love this tale of two British boys who bond over the one thing they have in common: First Blood. You know you’re gonna see No Country for Old Men anyway, because seeing the new Coen brothers movie — well, that’s a no-brainer. Lucky for you, it’s their best film in years. If Oscar don’t bite, there’s no hope for Oscar. I know the gold guy will totally ignore Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, and that’s OK. I doubt the multiplex crowd will go for its sweetly bizarre tale of celebrity impersonators (Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe specifically, but other faux familiar faces, including Abe Lincoln and Buckwheat, make appearances) — and that’s not even mentioning Werner Herzog or the skydiving nuns. Amid all the witches, zombies, and actual movie stars, it was my favorite TIFF film.*

Democrats can end the war

September 13, 2007

Photo from www.mindprod.com/politics/iraqwarpix.html

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) today published an excellent analysis of how the mainstream media and Democratic Party are falsely conveying a sense of official powerlessness to end the war in Iraq. The reality is that the Democrat-controlled Congress could defund the war effort immediately if it had the will to do so, forcing the Bush Administration to pursue a new strategy (ideally something along the lines of the McGovern plan).
Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi is more concerned with expanding her party’s power than taking a principled stand that would save thousands of lives and begin restoring this country’s image in the eyes of the Muslim world. And none of the presidential candidates (except also-rans Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel) are offering plans for Iraq that will substantially reduce the long-term U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. That’s a disgrace that is being compounded by the mainstream media and its campaign to disempower the average American and ensure that our imperial experiment continues unchecked and unquestioned.

Black-and-white beatitude

September 12, 2007

Given all the media hype and hand-wringing that’s attended the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and the upcoming posthumous appearance of Allen Ginsberg in Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan bio-fantasia I’m Not Here — in which the goaty poet, played by David Cross, pays awkward tribute to a limo-driven Dylan (Cate Blanchett) from a speeding golf cart – you’d think the rainbow spectrum of Beats had finally been winnowed down to the twin poles of James Dean-ish sexpotism and portly Zen-molestation.

Sure, there’s Grandpappy William Burroughs in there somewhere, and Neal Cassady, popping up like a scarecrow in a field of blurry mental imagery, but ask kids today who the Beats were and they’ll skip straight past the tilted berets and beaten tablas, the smoke-wreathed faculties of Naropa, and various Coney Islands of the mind, pausing only when they meet their own reflections in whatever Gap-like ad campaign features Jack and Al at the moment.

Which is precisely why photographer Christopher Felver’s handsome picture book Beat comes as a revelation. In the tradition of the Beats’ artistic intentions and pretensions, Felver’s collection of historical black-and-white photographs expands our mental perceptions, including among the pantheonic Beat coterie a plethora of artists and writers who were influenced by, accompanied, or descended stylistically from the well-packaged icons of the era. Scribbled haiku, scrawled excerpts from heartfelt letters, and other typographically authentic ephemera accentuate 187 pages of gorgeously immediate photographs of rapidly fading fellow travelers such as Gary Snyder, Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, and Tom Clark — as well as more liberally categorized Beat types such as Kathy Acker, Lou Reed, Kurt Vonnegut, and composer Lou Harrison.

Sometimes this methodology of including every personality possessed of “creative spirit and joyous antics” (as the book’s dust jacket has it) who happened to cross Felver’s lens leads to a little stretching. I have a feeling Denise Levertov, Tatum O’Neal, and Hunter S. Thompson would raise half an eyebrow at their inclusion here. But the pictures are frank and fabulous, so it’s best just to go with the flow.

San Franciscans may be forever hovering at the edge of Beat burnout, but whatever the lasting cultural merits of these pranksters, posers, protesters, tireless Orientalists, and gangly graphomaniacs (Beat’s press materials suggest that these folks all shared “themes of spirituality, environmental awareness, and political dissidence”; one is tempted to add “unbridled onanism” to the list), they sure lived fast and left great-looking corpuses.

BEAT
By Christopher Felver
Last Gasp
240 pages
$29.95

The tragic tale of Tamesha Tobie

September 12, 2007

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

At first, police believed it was a terrible, self-inflicted mishap.

It happened April 15, just after the funeral held for a San Francisco man who’d succumbed to diabetes. Mourners were gathered in the Western Addition home of Tamesha Tobie’s grandmother, Edna Tobie. Tamesha, a 14-year-old first-year high schooler in town from Stockton for the funeral, was hanging out with two teenage boys, her cousins, in a bedroom — a room where, it turns out, another family member had stashed a powerful .357 Magnum revolver. Suddenly, the house filled with the sound of the gun’s pop.

Tobie’s aunt was cooking in the kitchen. She rushed to find out what was going on. The two boys met her in the hallway and told her there was a gun; she found Tobie on the bed, not moving. Nearby lay the pistol, with five live rounds and a shell still visible in the cylinder under the hammer.

The family dialed 911, and soon the area was packed with uniforms. Paramedics arrived with the police, as did a media flack who expected reporters, a crisis response team from the health department, the local medical examiner, and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, whose district includes Edna Tobie’s Oak Street home.

"These are vivid experiences you don’t lose," Mirkarimi said. "The gut-wrenching part is that it was a young girl."

Fox, CBS, the Associated Press, and the San Francisco Chronicle all reported what the cops told them: Tamesha Tobie had accidentally shot herself with the gun.

But it turns out that wasn’t true. In fact, according to an autopsy completed by the medical examiner June 1, Tobie didn’t pull the trigger.

Her death has become another in a long list of unsolved homicides in San Francisco — and another sign that gun violence, both accidental and intentional, is raging out of control.

THE COPS DON’T KNOW

Months after the killing, the San Francisco Police Department didn’t seem aware that Tobie’s death was anything but an accident.

When we contacted the SFPD’s press office early in September, the staffers weren’t aware that her death had been ruled a homicide, nor was Lt. John Murphy, head of the homicide unit. Department spokesperson Sgt. Neville Gittens even requested that the Guardian fax him a copy of the report.

Now the SFPD acknowledges that Tobie was a homicide victim. "We believe it was done at the hands of someone else," Gittens said a week after receiving the report.

A homicide inspector assigned to the case said he learned of the medical examiner’s final report two weeks ago but explained that he’d already regarded Tobie’s death as suspicious.

Inspector Mike Johnson said he thinks one of the two cousins in the room with Tobie fired the weapon. Police have also concluded that the gun was used in an unrelated San Francisco homicide a few months prior by another young family member before being hidden in the home of Tobie’s grandmother.

Nobody has been arrested in that case either. Despite the fact that this gun has now been used to kill at least two people, Johnson conceded that not enough evidence exists to make an arrest in the first murder, even though a suspect has been identified — an exasperating fact for a city already near last year’s total of 85 murders.

If nothing else, the gun’s owner could possibly be guilty of negligence or child endangerment — but no charges are pending.

"The capacity of government not to do something about this at the pace that it is rocketing is what is absolutely alarming," said Mirkarimi, who’s pushed the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice to provide better data on violent crime in the city, "because it’s not going to abate itself…. The way that the number is traveling out of the reach of the Police Department and the district attorney — I think we’re going to need to send red flares up, SOS."

DEADLY HORSEPLAY

The Tamesha Tobie case is tricky; there were only three people in the room, and one is dead. The boy who police believe accidentally ended Tobie’s life won’t confess, Johnson said. Some relatives dispute the police’s view that one of the boys mistakenly fired the weapon and instead believe the story the pair have stuck to so far — that the gun fired on its own from the bed as they horsed around, the bullet smashing through the right rear of Tobie’s jaw.

"Obviously the one boy who did it doesn’t want to say anything to us," Johnson said. "And the other boy is somewhat traumatized, and his parents are worried about any possible criminal charges against him for associating with the first boy. So right now we’re trying to corroborate the stories and what happened through other people who were in the house…. It’s kind of a sensitive thing at this point."

But either way, Tamisha Tobie is the ultimate victim of gun violence, and while her death likely wasn’t intentional, it’s joined the city’s steadily climbing homicide rate nonetheless.

Attempts to reach Tobie’s family for comment were unsuccessful.

Statewide in 2004, 10 kids were killed after being accidentally shot either by themselves or by someone else, according to figures maintained by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More recent figures won’t be available until later this year. But according to media accounts and calls to local police jurisdictions, over the past 12 months, three children died similarly just in the Bay Area.

In June a five-year-old boy in Oakland shot himself while playing with a relative’s gun, and a 28-year-old man was arrested for child endangerment — in notably less time than it took San Francisco to complete Tobie’s autopsy.

Just days after Tobie was killed, an 18-year-old girl accidentally shot a younger male teen in the city of Richmond with a revolver he’d found in the home where his death occurred. Last November a 16-year-old boy in Contra Costa County was killed after a friend accidentally shot him in the chest while playing with a .22-caliber revolver. Several other accidents occurred during 2006 in San Francisco and the East Bay, including one involving an Alameda toddler who that spring mistakenly shot his 20-year-old cousin with a .38 that belonged to a family friend.

The gun lobby complains that news stories depicting such deaths overstate the problem of accidents among kids and foster hysteria.

But Shawn Richard of the local nonprofit Brothers Against Guns has a response. The volume of deaths, he argues, isn’t the story.

"It could be a low number. It could be a high number," Richard said. "Regardless, it’s still ridiculous to deal with lives that are being taken by a gun."

Richard founded Brothers Against Guns after two of his siblings were shot to death in San Francisco during the 1990s. He joined the Mayor’s Office, District Attorney Kamala Harris, and the Legal Community Against Violence in drafting a batch of local antigun ordinances that passed the Board of Supervisors last month. One requires local firearms dealers to send inventories of their weapons to the police chief every six months, and another requires all handgun owners to disable their weapons with trigger locks.

Richard is also working with Assemblymember Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) to ban gun shows at the Cow Palace, which is located on state property near the Sunnydale housing project, where violent crimes are a frequent occurrence.

But would all of the antigun news releases in the world have saved Tobie? Homicide inspector Johnson wonders aloud whether they would.

"If the gun’s used in a homicide," Johnson said, "and it’s hidden in the house by children, who’s going to put a gun lock on it?"

Dogs behind bars

September 12, 2007

› news@sfbg.com

Why would an underfunded, understaffed, volunteer-dependent organization dedicated to taking care of animals institute new policies that prevent volunteers from volunteering and, some say, put the animals at risk?

That’s the question some people are asking about the Alameda city animal shelter, where the director has fired several core volunteers, reduced the number of hours other volunteers can work, and at one point temporarily suspended the volunteer dog-walking program.

After some outcry, the dog walkers are back — but there’s still a lingering battle between director Diana Barrett and the volunteers, and the result is a policy that leaves shelter dogs in conditions that experts say border on inhumane.

Under Barrett’s new rules, laid out in a June volunteer handbook, dogs not yet eligible for adoption are now kept in small kennels 24 hours a day, for as long as 11 days if the dog is a stray and up to 21 days for any dog ever registered to an owner. Barrett’s policy dictates that these "on hold" dogs may no longer be visited, petted, walked, bathed, or allowed to play with toys.

Dogs eligible for adoption are locked in kennels 23 hours a day, with dog walks limited to 20 minutes, at most three times a day.

"I think those conditions border on abuse," behaviorist Bob Gutierrez, who for 10 years was coordinator of the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal’s Animal Behavior Program, told the Guardian when we described the rules to him.

At the SPCA, Gutierrez recounted, "we would encourage people to interact with the dogs as often as possible because socialization is an ongoing process, even with adult dogs."

There’s also a physical health risk. "Dogs will not foul their own space," Gutierrez explained, "and dogs that are confined that long often develop some medical issues from not emptying their bladders at regular intervals."

And the shelter doesn’t routinely vaccinate the dogs in its care.

Deb Campbell, volunteer coordinator at the San Francisco animal-control shelter, said dogs there are generally taken out five or more times a day and are also given a socialization hour in a dog park where volunteers supervise group play.

BAD BEHAVIOR

Barrett, an animal control officer with the Alameda Police Department, which manages the shelter, has been on the job since 2000.

Since the shelter has only limited paid staff — three animal control officers, including Barrett — who also have to go out on calls, much of the work of walking and caring for the animals has been done by volunteers.

But some of those volunteers have clashed with Barrett — in one case, a Barrett memo talks about "foul language" and "argumentative-confrontational stances toward staff members" — and as a result, the entire program has been changed.

Although a half-dozen core volunteers had each previously worked from three to five days a week every week, Barrett’s new rules permit only two volunteers per hour and limit each volunteer to a maximum of 20 hours per month — one half day per week. Anyone who works more than four hours a week "will be given a mandatory break of two weeks," according to the August edition of the shelter’s volunteer handbook, and if the infraction is repeated, the volunteer’s service will be terminated.

At least six volunteers have resigned in protest. As Mary Sutter and her 16-year-old daughter, Kaity Sutter, who were volunteers for four years, explained in a July 25 letter, a copy of which was provided to us, "We left … because we felt that policies were being put in place to control people to the detriment of the dogs."

Alameda city manager Debra Kurita has barred Barrett from speaking to the media, and Lt. Bill Scott, Barrett’s supervisor, serves as her designated spokesperson. Scott defended the changes as allowing "increased efficiency and supervision." Asked about the reduction in the volunteer hours — formerly 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., now 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. — Scott said, "We can do more now in three hours than we could before in five," but he could not explain how, nor which tasks are being accomplished more quickly.

Scott insisted that the volunteers who were most recently let go were dismissed for cumulative histories of infractions. A June 27 memo from Barrett outlined the problems, some of which seem to be a bit of a stretch.

One volunteer, Jim Gotelli, was cited for "tampering with city property" — because, according to Gotelli, he bought and attached a new hose nozzle to replace a broken one.

Gotelli was also given a written reprimand for contacting a law professor at UCLA who is an animal-law expert and asking if the Alameda shelter was complying with the Hayden Bill, a state law that sets minimum standards for care in California animal shelters. Barrett informed Gotelli that as an agent of the city, he was barred from seeking outside legal advice. Gotelli was dismissed in July after writing a letter to the city attorney seeking policy clarification.

Another charge cited by Barrett — "feeding the dogs unauthorized food and causing them gastric distress" — apparently refers to Dan Mosso, who for 18 months paid out of his own pocket for premium-quality food for the dogs, with Barrett’s consent, until she suddenly withdrew permission. Mosso was also terminated in July, for questioning shelter policy.

Scott also made dark hints to us about a "subgroup that needed to be broken up," apparently referring to a group of long-term core volunteers — Gotelli, Mosso, and Donna McCaskey — who suggested to Barrett that the shelter might not be in compliance with the law. Scott suggested that a public organizing campaign by the terminated volunteers — which includes an online petition — is a vendetta against Barrett. But each volunteer we interviewed praised Barrett for some of her work. "It’s not about us, and it’s not really about Diana Barrett — we’re worried about the dogs," Mosso said.

Okorie Okorocha, a lawyer and expert in animal law, wrote an Aug. 17 letter to the city of Alameda charging that the shelter is vioutf8g the Hayden Bill. In the letter, Okorocha stated that several Alameda residents "have first-hand knowledge that animals in your shelter are kept in cages or kennels for periods of 10 to 20 consecutive days without receiving any exercise."

Mohammed Hill, a deputy city attorney, stated in an Aug. 29 response that it’s perfectly legal to keep dogs in their kennels without exercise as long as the cages are big enough for the animals to walk around in. The cages at the shelter are 12 feet long, seven feet wide, and four feet high. But the cages are divided, so that much of the day the dogs are in a six-foot space.

Some animals — those who have been claimed by owners but not yet picked up — are kept caged all the time "for liability reasons," Hill’s letter states.

However, it adds, "The shelter has a current staff level of approximately 40 dedicated volunteers who on average walk each dog for a period of 20 minutes three times a day, six days a week." But the shelter is only open five days a week, and the volunteer statistics Hill cites are almost certainly inflated. Since the volunteers can only work from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., it’s unlikely that the dogs are getting three walks a day.

In fact, that could only happen under perfectly optimal conditions — a factory-line approach to dog walking, with no more than five dogs and two volunteers per hour, the last of which, several observers say, has not been the case. At least one visitor observed that the paperwork showed no walks for any dogs on the day she visited.

Vicky Smith, a 55-year-old schoolteacher, visited the shelter recently to offer her services as a volunteer. She said Barrett told her the shelter needed no more volunteers.

Equally troubling were the conditions that Smith observed in the cat area two weeks ago: empty water bowls, crusted-over remnants of canned food dried in the food bowls, a terrible stench from dirty litter in several cages, all against the background din of a multitude of cats yowling for attention. The one volunteer on duty seemed completely overwhelmed and, Smith said, apologized, saying, "There are hardly any volunteers anymore."

WHO’S WATCHING?

The situation at the Alameda shelter might not have reached this point had there been effective oversight. The city lacks an animal-welfare commission, and Scott told us repeatedly that nobody at the Police Department has specific expertise in animal welfare. Scott is so unfamiliar with the shelter that he was literally unable to answer a single question about its daily operations. He repeated, "That’s animal stuff, that’s beyond me," "I wouldn’t know," "That’s a question of animal law," and variations thereof a total of 11 times.

We asked Scott how, without such knowledge, he could be certain that Barrett was making the wisest possible decisions. "We work closely with the Humane Society of Alameda," he assured us.

While that statement is technically true, it is profoundly misleading. The Police Department does receive grants from the HSA, but the bulk of the funds received do not go to the shelter; instead, for instance, last year the department spent $15,000 in HSA funds to purchase two police dogs and thousands more on bulletproof vests for the dogs.

When asked about Scott’s assertion that the HSA provides the animal knowledge that the police lack, HSA president Carmen Lasar denied it fiercely, repeating several times with increasing agitation, "Our only role is helping them financially."

Discussing the nature of municipal shelters in general, Carl Friedman, director of San Francisco Animal Care and Control, told us, "Most of the successful agencies are independent, not part of any other department, and either report directly to their city administrator or have oversight from a commission that includes members of the public. Politically, the independent departments are usually free to fight for the resources and funding they need."

In response to the recent burst of publicity about the issues at the Alameda Animal Shelter, Police Chief Walter Tibbet publicly pledged to conduct "a full investigation" into those issues. After we made numerous Public Records Act requests of the city of Alameda, the investigation was upgraded and is now being conducted by Internal Affairs. The investigating officer, Sgt. Robert Frankland, is on vacation through Oct. 10 and does not expect to finish his report until early November.

"Volunteering at the shelter is the best thing I’ve ever done, one of the most satisfying things, and I love it, and I miss it," Mosso said. "But if this is my legacy, so be it: that they’ll never let me come back, but at least the dogs will get walked and get proper care."

NASA hippies

September 12, 2007

› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION As annoying as hippies can be, it’s strangely comforting to think that the one bit of junk we shot into deep space is emblazoned with a hippie symbol. I’m talking about the golden records screwed onto the shells of Voyagers I and II, two space probes that completely changed our understanding of the solar system and then shot out into deep space bearing record albums intended for alien consumption.

Last week marked the 30th anniversary of the Voyager II launch. While most people recall the Voyager probes for creating close-up photographs and atmospheric readings from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, these probes were always intended to do more than send messages back home for human consumption. In the mid-1970s, when the Voyager spacecraft were being completed, pop cosmologist Carl Sagan convinced NASA to include a message from Earth on the probes. They were to bring news of us to alien beings in the unknowable reaches of the galaxy and beyond.

In consultation with a bunch of other geeks (including Timothy Ferris, who produced the album), Sagan decided that the delivery mechanism for this message should be a golden record, packaged with a cartridge and needle, as well as abstract mathematical instructions for how fast to spin the disc and at what frequencies it would emit sound. You can listen to the entire recording at goldenrecord.org, and the experience is bittersweet, an auditory glimpse of a very different time in human history.

The tracks include greetings in dozens of languages, including ancient Sumerian, which of course nobody knows how to pronounce anymore. And Gaia help us, there is also a "whale greeting." There is a track devoted to "Earth sounds," all which sound totally cool while remaining unrecognizable as particularly Earthly. There are over a dozen music recordings from around the world, all of which are written (and mostly performed) by men. Most are from the West, with a few Russian numbers thrown in — probably for "diversity." Bach is presented alongside Chuck Berry, Navaho chants beside Beethoven. It’s a Sesame Street notion of pluralism, with an emphasis on music and greetings rather than political speeches or academic treatises on economics.

Also included on these records are directions to Earth, using nearby stars as navigation points.

The golden records imply that music, math and images are universal symbolic systems, the best kind for communicating with beings radically different from ourselves. This is an idea that was popular in the 1970s — Steven Spielberg immortalized it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which humans meeting aliens establish communication via electronic sounds. But as American historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman has pointed out, the idea that music (and the math underlying it) is a universal form of communication also comes from centuries-old encounters between Europeans and natives in the Americas. Early European explorers recount communicating with natives via music upon first meeting and reaching an understanding on that basis.

Music may be a near-universal form of communication among humans, and there is something glorious and touching about trying to share that with other creatures in space. Of course, the notion that aliens might share the idea of "hearing" with us profoundly silly. What if these are creatures who communicate via molecular manipulation, or chemical signatures? What if they live in vacuum, and therefore cannot "hear" at all?

So yeah, the golden record is species-centric. It’s also naively specific to one culture, for who can think of a golden record full of Western music as anything but the work of hippie liberal white dudes? Still, I’d rather be represented by its naive utopianism than by most of the signals shooting off this planet.

No doubt the golden record will bemuse any alien life that actually bothers to examine the goo on a piece of space junk. But a bemused alien may in fact be the one who comes closest to guessing the true meaning of the golden record, and perhaps the true meaning of human life itself. And so it seems fitting that our one letter to the universe reads something like this: Wish you were here. We have no idea what we’re doing, but we sound good!

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who thinks that perhaps the golden record is really a message to ourselves.

Hispanics go hyphy

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September 12, 2007
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Latinos rarely receive credit for all they’ve brought to the rap game. After all, it was primarily Puerto Ricans who authored those boogaloo break-dance moves in the Bronx. And what would Cali hip-hop be without the laid-back style of Chicano cholos and their "low lows"?

Currently, a contingent of local Latino rap artists is pushing hard for recognition. Its members are on the Thizz Latin label, an imprint of Mac Dre’s Thizz Entertainment group. Only a year old, Thizz Latin is the brainchild of Julio "Gold Toes" Sanchez, a Chicano MC and hip-hop impresario hell-bent on highlighting the diversity of the hyphy movement.

To the Mission District native, San Francisco is practically synonymous with diversity. "I’m a San Franciscan to the heart," Sanchez says. "I’m a melting pot within my mind and in my soul."

On this hot Mission afternoon, he rolls up in his cream-colored Cadillac to tell me the Peruvian joint where we planned to meet is closed. Instead, he takes me to a Chinese restaurant where the Asian immigrant owners greet him by first name. To some, Sanchez could be imposing, with his brawny build, shaved head, and fiery demeanor. To the restaurant’s proprietors, he’s just a neighborhood kid.

Sanchez is using his community-bridging skills and street hustle to build a wide audience for his label’s pan-Latin roster of rappers, including Mr. Kee, Tito B, Freddy Chingaz, and Louie Loc, who are of Cuban, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan descent, respectively. "We can go to Hunters Point and have it rocking. We can go to the Mission and have it rocking. We can go to Union Street, and we can have it crackin’ off the hook. We could go to Chinatown, and they’re gonna love us."

One of Thizz Latin’s premier artists, Chicano MC Jimmy Roses, opened the "Super Hyphy 18" concert recently in Santa Rosa. Minutes into his set, he made the remarkably mixed crowd of more than a thousand move with his feel-good anthem "Who Rock the Party," an ebullient track that received some airplay on local radio and galvanized what Sanchez calls the Latin hyphy movement.

Movement building, however, has been impeded by the peculiar racial politics of local commercial radio. Although Thizz Latin artists have garnered a few spins, radio play in the Bay largely eludes them, despite the fact that several of the imprint’s releases have sold more than 20,000 units. The explanation given by DJs and programmers? They’re not black enough for hip-hop and R&B stations, and they’re not Latin enough for the Hispanic format. In Sanchez’s words, "We’re everywhere but the motherfucking radio!"

The situation mirrors the marginal, neither-here-nor-there position of US Latinos, who comprise the nation’s largest minority yet rarely receive recognition in the mainstream media. The music industry in particular can’t seem to wrap its brain around the biculturalism of urban Latino youth, many of whom grew up listening to traditional Latin sounds yet are utterly immersed in hip-hop.

Thizz Latin beatmaker Ivan "Baby Boss" Martinez, a rising star at 18, is a perfect example of this. The Mexican American college freshman explains, "Whenever we’re with our families, we’re bumpin’ banda. We’re playing mariachi in the car. But when I’m with my clique, it’s just hip-hop and reggaetón."

Martinez’s dexterity in mixing multiple genres impressed "ShoBoy" Edgar, a popular DJ on fledgling KWZ, 100.7 FM ("La Kalle"). The reggaetón-heavy station, which specifically targets urban Latino youths, hired Martinez to produce a few commercials but seldom plays Thizz Latin tracks — ostensibly because they’re in English.

Even more galling to Sanchez is the lack of local hip-hop and R&B radio support, considering that both KMEL, 106.1 FM, and KYLD, 94.9 FM (Wild), regularly sponsor events such as Carnaval in the Mexican American community and even farm their DJs out for private quinceañera parties. Still, they refuse to put Latin rap on regular rotation. At press time, KMEL and KYLD representatives had not responded to requests for comment.

Interestingly, Thizz Latin MCs get more love in other regions, including central California and the Southwest, where they play to crowds as large as 5,000. The hip-hop hotbed of Houston is especially amenable to Latin rap — so much so that local players have begun to migrate there. Vallejo rapper Baby Bash moved to H-Town years ago and subsequently struck gold in record sales. San Jose’s Upstairs Records, home of SoCal Chicano-rap phenom Lil Rob, recently set up shop there.

Even Sanchez, a die-hard San Franciscan, feels the pull southward. He lived in Houston for a time and built strong connections there with top Chicano talent Chingo Bling and South Park Mexican, who both appear on Thizz Latin releases. So does Baby Bash, who recently paired up with Sanchez on "Thick ”N Juicy," a seductive track on Sanchez’s solo debut, Gold Toes Presents: The Gold Rush, set for a Sept. 18 release.

Something of a slow jam, "Thick ‘N Juicy" differs from Thizz Latin’s more hardcore hyphy output. The imprint’s vaguely thuggish brand of rap is offered as another excuse by radio programmers for why it doesn’t get played. But that argument doesn’t hold water considering both KMEL and La Kalle play classic gangsta rap by the likes of Snoop Dogg and 2Pac.

There are obviously racialized assumptions being made about what a real Latino is and what true hip-hop is. This rigid logic pushes Latino rappers into a broadcast border zone as migrant wanderers looking for a place to settle on the radio dial. Hopefully, they’ll find a home once Latinos gain a stronger foothold in the media.

www.myspace.com/blacknbrown

Looks that kill

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September 11, 2007
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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER When does music news boil down to a form of disaster reporting? Behold the universal slagging that accompanied the tepid Sept. 9 Video Music Awards performance by a sluggish, underwear-clad Britney Spears, postpreggers bulgy and freshly toasted from a supposed turn at Burning Man (yet another sign of the event’s apocalyptic death throes, scuttling my long-dreamed-of plans for a Playa Hater’s Camp at Black Rock?). OK, Brit is a mess — the nonstop media slam dance is starting to nauseate me, despite Spears’s unconvincing pleas to give her more.

But maybe in a microfragmented, nano-niched pop universe, we’re all just looking for a few things to agree on, like: Rihanna embodies class (is it the Posh Spice asymmetrical bob?), Justin Timberlake looks good next to his Mickey Mouse Club ex and his Sept. 12 Shark Tank opener Good Charlotte, and Spears needs a handler she can trust so we can cease critically burning her. There is such a thing as too much freedom — as several Mötley Crüe-dites have proved of late. San Jose native Nikki Sixx’s collection of ’80s journal entries The Heroin Diaries — out Sept. 18 — shows that it’s never too late to exploit one’s excesses, while Bret Michaels from Poison’s VH1 series Rock of Love takes The Bachelor‘s formula to a skanksome low, as his prospective mates — coldly self-promoting, sharky rock chicks all — manage to outshine the shameless star with their backbiting, bitchery, and oh so many looks that kill.

Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Witness, a galaxy away, the communal, mammalian planet Animal Collective. Much has been made in the past five years or so of the collectivist spirit infusing art groups like Hamburger Eyes, Royal Art Lodge, and Space 1026. Music collectives have been overshadowed, although San Francisco’s Thread Productions collective seems to be finding its rhythm via Tartufi, Silian Rail, Low Red Land, Birds and Batteries, and Sky Pilots, and a few art ensembles like Forcefield persist via recordings.

Through it all, though, Animal Collective have continued to fly their fellow-feeling flag high, despite multiple solo outings, loudly thumping the drum for the notion of continual artistic exploration and Strawberry Jam (Domino), their latest, almost poppily upbeat album. All the members possess the freedom to leave anytime they want to — and to combust messily all over blogosphere gossip sites if they care to — but they choose to stay and play with their happily bent song structures.

Panda Bear, né Noah Lennox, has seen his share of success with this year’s solo Person Pitch (Paw Tracks) and has had to struggle with the tug of his Lisbon, Portugal, home, where he’s lived for more than three years with his wife and daughter, and touring with the loose collection of onetime Baltimore schoolmates now scattered between New York City and Washington, D.C. Stuck in traffic with Avey Tare (David Portner), Geologist (Brian Weitz), and Deakin (Josh Dibb) outside Toronto, where they have a show, the 29-year-old Lennox says earnestly, "I hope people show up. I get nervous about performing — it takes over from the worry about whether people are going to be there."

Strawberry Jam‘s title came to him during a dreamy airline encounter. "On the little tray of food was a packet of strawberry jam. I opened it up and looked at that stuff," he explains. "It was futuristic looking, gooey, but it also looked sharp in a way. I thought it would be cool if it we could get the music to sound like that."

The final recording, produced by longtime Sun City Girls producer Scott Colbourn, who also oversaw Feels (FatCat, 2005), drones and shimmers with fewer overdubs than they’ve used in the past, surging with the band’s trademark bell-shaking, ethereal gloss ("#1"), an almost Madchester bounce ("Peacebone"), and infectious, nearly melodic manifestos ("Winter Wonderland"). "I guess we wanted to do something different than anything we’d done before and hopefully different from anything we’d ever heard before," Lennox says. "That’s what we get psyched about overall."

Having only to dread the retread, Lennox even embraces that three-letter word — jam — in reference to the band. "Maybe there’s a bit of a crossover," he says sweetly. "That’s cool. There’s a lot of Grateful Dead fans in our band."

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

Mon/17, 8 p.m., $25

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

WHAT GOES AROUND

AD HAWK

Coalition of Aging Rockers just keeps on noisily aging: Charalambides’s Tom Carter and other acolytes pay tribute to the fab space rock fossils of Hawkwind. Wed/12, 6 p.m. $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

MASERATI

The Kindercore survivors play alongside Thread Records collectivists Silian Rail and Sky Pilots. Wed/12, 9 p.m., $8. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. www.12galaxies.com

YO MAJESTY

Sunshine State crunk-punkers promise to pick up where ESG left off. Wed/12, 9 p.m., free with RSVP at going.com. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

BONFIRE MADIGAN

Ex–<\d>SF riot grrrl cellist Madigan Shive joins the local Best Wishes. Thurs/13, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

TOMUTONTUU AND VODKA SOAP

Finland band generates eerie cryptonoise alongside Skaters spin-off project. Fri/14, 9 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

VHS OR BETA

The Southern dance rockers bring their comets. Fri/14, 9 p.m., $15. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

SPECTRUM

Spaceman 3 alum Sonic Boom helms one of the finest free street-fair experimento lineups ever at the Polk Street Fair. With Triclops!, TITS, Los Llamarada, and Lou Lou and the Guitarfish. Sat/15, noon–7 p.m., free. Polk and Post, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

HANDSOME FURS

Wolf Parader Dan Boeckner breaks out his silky Sub Pop side project. Mon/17, 8 p.m., $10–$12. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

HIGH ON FIRE

Death be not proud, the Oakland metallists claim, waving a fierce new Relapse disc, Death Is This Communion. Tues/18, 7 p.m., free. Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF.

Awesome Polk St. block partay

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September 11, 2007
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Spectrum’s Sonic Boom pulls out a new album and the group’s first US trip in more than four years.

No kiddin’, kids – this Gulch getdown on Saturday, Sept. 15, from noon to 7 p.m., puts all the white-wine-grub-boooorrrrring-music street fairs to shame and sets a new standard for free, outdoor, gutter-level entertainment programming in SF. Over near the Hemlock Tavern, at Post and Bush, the club and KUSF will host an open-air show with headliner Space Man 3 alum Sonic Boom’s Spectrum (5:30 p.m.), noise-rock locals Triclops! (4 p.m.), all-lady experimental-noise extravaganza TITS (2:45 p.m.), and Latino cacophony-makers Los Llamarada (1:45 p.m.), and Lou Lou and the Guitarfish (12:30 p.m.).

Saturday swelters with David Harness.

Futher up the street at Bush and California, Hemlock’s Polk Street neighbor and Grammy-nominated producer Chris Lum’s Moulton Media hosts electronic and techno acts at an outdoor dance-party called “The Block Party Mixtape” – expect visual art and live painting presented by Space Gallery as well as DJs Mauricio V & Jessie Martinez, David Harness, 92.7’s Trevor Simpson, Amenti Music’s Olivier Desmet vs. Yerba Buena Discos, Landshark, Tweekin’ Records’ and Green Gorilla Lounge’s Anthony Mansfield, the 40 Thieves, DJ Andre Lucero, Dirtybird Records’ Claude Van Stroke & Worthy.

You can thank the Lower Polk St. Merchants Association. A beer garden will be open all day along with booths, and Hemlock opens at 1 p.m. with KUSF DJs spinning throughout. And don’t forget, it’s freeeeeee…

Britney may come back – just not yet

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September 10, 2007
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By Molly Freedenberg

(Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I love bubblegum pop. If you have a problem with that, bite me.)

I am in serious denial. I can’t believe that the wobbling, nervous (or stoned?), first-time-in-a-talent-show performer at last night’s VMAs was Britney – my Britney. I remember the days when even those who hated her music had to admit that she was a fantastic (and quite attractive) performer. And even through all the media mess she’s become tangled with in the last few years, and her fantastically horrible reality TV show, what’s kept me going – and rooting for her — is remembering just how mesmerizing she can be on stage. And so I’ve been eagerly anticipating her performance at the VMAs, hoping she’d blow the skeptics away with her trademark snap and sparkle. But no.

AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill
Who are you and what have you done with my Britney?

She looked out of practice and out of shape (and I don’t mean her slightly plumper body, which would be sexy if she didn’t look like she’d borrowed it for the night and therefore didn’t know how to wear it,) as though she couldn’t keep up with her choreography and definitely couldn’t handle those heels – and that both of those things were distracting her from pretending to sing. It was so painful to watch, not only because of the vicarious embarrassment factor, but because I really like Britney and wanted her to do well. I only wish she’d taken into account whatever her limitations are (Quaalude addiction? Too much time defending her mothering skills and not enough in the dance studio?

“Photo by Kurt&Bart.
I miss this Britney.

The amount of alcohol required to forget she ever married KFed?) and shaped a performance that highlighted her existing strengths, rather than trying – and failing – to embody her former self. Still, I’m not inspired to take shots about how she’s a wash-up at 25 (shame on you, Sarah Silverman). Instead, I’d like to give her a hug, introduce her to my former therapist in Westlake Village, and watch my “Toxic” DVD until my girl makes a real comeback.

Britney vs. Petraeus

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September 9, 2007
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Ah, a cozy Sunday night spent toggling between Britney Spears’s expectedly disappointing performance on MTV’s Video Music Awards and early word of Gen. David Petraeus’s expectedly disappointing – to those hoping for a rapid draw down of forces overseas, at least — “report on Iraq” that our dear “Austria, Australia, what’s the dif?” President will pretty much base all of his future expectedly disappointing decisions on.

Both of these media hotspots are shaping up in the mind as almost miraculously opaque; the twin poles of current American culture — celebrity and violent hubris — apexed in such highly anticipated but awkwardly non-eventful performances that the status quo can only feel impelled to continue (dribble, dribble): Ms. Spears giving us tottering, soulless blah-horridness that will provide more WTF grist for her rumor mill$ …

Praying for coverage. Screen grab from mtv.com

….and General Petraeus giving us simply a slight blah torque on Bush’s “stay the course.” (Petraeus’s recommendations before Congress tomorrow, reportedly, will be to withdraw one surge battalion by December and four more by next August – a minutely faster timetable than Bush’s “experts” had been predicting.) Of couse, Britney’s decisions haven’t killed thousands — or have they?

Feast: 4 guides to hot wines

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September 6, 2007
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Good lord, the grape. Living in a world-class wine region (or rather, living so close to several) literally drenches one in delightful tannins and myriad notes of blackberry, chocolate, tobacco, apple, and plum. But while we’ve definitely forgone our youthful tastes for brown-bagged Mad Dog breakfasts in favor of a late-night glass or two of Lavis Langrein at Bar Bambino (www.barbambino.com) or a dinnertime flight of fantastically obscure German whites at Cav (www.cavwinebar.com), we admit that when it comes to which fashionable corks to pop for fall, we haven’t quite graduated from “oh, whatever” to outright oenophiles. Sure, we dip into the media stream enough to know what’s hip in the bars and clubs these days (rose and sparkling wines are so over; Lambrusco is on its way back), but honestly, if you asked us the difference between syrah and shiraz, we’d probably answer, “Doesn’t one of them have a yellow kangaroo on the label?” So we took it upon our taste buds to go straight to the source, and ask a few of our latest favorite wine bars and stores for the juice on what’s big. Chin-chin!

QUE SYRAH

This funky little wine bar in West Portal specializes only in delightful small production wines, but proprietor Stephanie McCardell tells us that in the overall big picture her clientele’s tastes are trending toward syrahs, white Rhônes, Roussanes, and viogniers. (White Rhônes and viogniers are especially attractive to those among us suffering from Chardonnay fatigue.) A current hot seller right now is the Vin Nostro Syrah, grown in Red Hills, Lake County, which McCardell describes as smoky, with dark fruit notes and that slight bacon aspect inherent to most syrahs. Que Syrah also carries wines from all over the world and is currently featuring two from Croatia — Bibich Reserva, a Dalmatian red with a subtle fruit and red pepper quality, whose main grape is a relative of Zinfandel, and a Croatian Malvasia, a dry, crisp white with peachy and other stone fruit characteristics.

230 W. Portal, SF. (415) 731-7000, www.quesyrahsf.com

OTTIMISTA ENOTECA

Ottimista Enoteca is a gorgeous Italian wine bar and restaurant in the Marina with an outdoor patio to die for and a menu to match. (Hello, fontina-stuffed risotto balls. Hello, nutmeg-sugared ricotta doughnuts.) Ottimista’s Melissa Gisler tells us that requests from her clientele for Sicilian wines have been off the charts lately, and a recent rise in import volume has allowed Ottimista to offer a much wider breadth of options from the region. (Two hot Sicilian labels: Nero d’Avola and Cantine Berbera.) Due to the volcanic nature of Sicily’s soil, these wines tend to have a tang of acid and notes of minerality, but also come bearing a powerful fruity flavor, with a very clean quality. The trend toward Sicilians has been noticeable, Gisler says, because Ottimista usually focuses on Northern Italian wines — like those produced in the Piedmont region, or from areas near the Austrian and Slovenian border — where the days are hot and the nights are cold.

1838 Union, SF. (415) 674-8400, www.ottimistaenoteca.com

BIONDIVINO

Carrie Smith of Biondivino, a sleek Russian Hill wine boutique that offers a mind boggling array of labels (yet provides enough comforting atmosphere and information to guide you through it all), has also noticed an upswing of interest in wines from Sicily, especially those from Etna. But another “strange surge” of interest, she says, is in the return to classics from the Tuscany and Umbria regions. A big winner among Biondivino winetasters this year has been the intensely fruity and now near impossible-to-find Valdicava Brunelo di Montalcino (brunello is closely related to sangiovese, another hot grape this year). Smith’s favorite white at the moment is Piedmontese Timorasso — lush and rich, creamy without being oaky or buttery, with a golden acidity. “It’s a good brain slap that makes you think, and want some more,” she says. Her favorite red is Vigneti Massa, from a Croatian varietal. With the power of a brunelo and the structure and elegance of a borello, she says, this wine is dark and rich, with nice-ending tannins.

1450 Green, SF. (415) 673-2320, www.biondivino.com

SWIRL ON CASTRO

“Tiny production California wines as well as pinot noirs and Argentine Malbecs are going to be all the rage this fall,” according to Jerry Cooper, one of the owners of this spiffy wine shop. According to him, the tiny productions most in demand are coming from Santa Barbara and Mendocino Counties. Increasingly popular are organic and biodynamic wines, whose producers employ a holistic, “metaphysics meets Farmer’s Almanac” approach to growing and harvesting. The reason for this popularity? “The qualities of these wines are of an artisan nature, with more flavor. They taste more of the regions they hail from.” Cooper also notes that while Bordeauxs have waned in popularity, Burgundies have maintained their place on the trend roster, especially in anticipation of the arrival of the 2005 vintage. Also hot: South African wines from the Cape. But mostly he sees wine becoming a more localized affair, including the way in which it’s encountered and purchased. “The wine bar has become the new neighborhood institution,” he says.

572 Castro, SF. (415) 864-2262, www.swirloncastro.com

Project Censored: The Byrne ultimatum

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September 5, 2007
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amanda@sfbg.com

Sometimes the story behind a story is just as juicy as the story itself. One of Project Censored’s picks for the 2008 list – “Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict” started out as a project funded by the Nation Institute, and was supposed to splash the cover of the Nation magazine prior to the November 2006 election. Instead, it took some interesting peregrinations – involving some charges of partisan political influence — before it was finally printed in the North Bay Bohemian on January 24, 2007.

Petaluma-based freelance journalist Peter Byrne was originally paid $4,500 by the Nation Institute to research connections between lucrative defense contracts granted to Perini and URS companies, in which Richard C. Blum held stock, and the Senate Appropriations Military Construction subcommittee (MILCON) that funds the contracts– and which includes Blum’s wife, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, as a ranking member.

Blum’s companies were involved with more than $1.5 billion in defense contracts between 2001 and 2005. Michael R. Klein, Blum’s business partner and Feinstein’s legal advisor, had been informing the senator about specific federal projects in which Perini had an interest, specifically to avoid conflict of interest issues, but Byrne reported Feinstein was not told about potential URS contracts. So, in the case of Perini, Feinstein would be informed and recuse herself from pertinent decisions, but with URS, she’d remain in the dark, and because the detailed project proposals don’t include the names of the companies bidding, the senator wouldn’t know it was URS.

“In theory, Feinstein would not know the identity of any of the companies that stood to contractually benefit from her approval of specific items in the military budget – until Klein told her,” Byrne wrote.

According to Klein, a Senate Select Committee on Ethics ruled, in a confidential decision, that this was all above board.

But Byrne contends, “That these confidential rulings are contradictory is obvious and calls for explanation.”

Furthermore, Byrne’s research concluded that the senator could potentially look at the lists from Klein, compare them to the nameless funding requests and contracts coming before MILCON, and draw substantial conclusions on her own about where the money would end up.

“Klein declined to produce copies of the Perini project lists that he transmitted to Feinstein. And neither he nor Feinstein would furnish copies of the ethics committee rulings, nor examples of the senator recusing herself from acting on legislation that affected Perini or URS. But the Congressional Record shows that as chairperson and ranking member of MILCON, Feinstein was often involved in supervising the legislative details of military construction projects that directly affected Blum’s defense-contracting firms,” Byrne wrote.

A month after Byrne turned the story in to Bob Moser, who was the Nation‘s editor on the story, the piece was killed. In an email to Byrne, Moser wrote, “The main reason is that with Blum’s sale of

Perini and URS stock last year, this became an issue of what Feinstein did rather than an ongoing conflict. Because of that, and also because Feinstein is not facing a strong challenge for re-election, the feeling here, finally, was that the story would not likely have the kind of impact we want from investigative stories.”

Later in the email, Moser writes the story lacks a “smoking gun,” apparently because Byrne lays the case for a perceived conflict of interest and relies on the testimony of non-partisan ethics and government experts for support.

Still, Byrne told us, “I was shocked. The story was really solid, completely fact-checkable, and even though it was complex I think I boiled it down pretty well.”

The Nation‘s publicity director, Ben Wyskida, told us it’s rare for the magazine not to publish a story in which the Institute has invested significant time and money, but in this case the editors decided to pass. “Ultimately they just didn’t feel like he delivered the story that we’d hoped.”

“At the same time, we do think it’s an important story,” he added.

Undaunted, Byrne took it to Salon.com, which initially agreed to buy it, but then killed it as well. When asked why, news editor Mark Schone told us, “We don’t discuss those kinds of editorial decisions. We have a long history of publishing investigative pieces.”

Byrne thinks it was political. “In my opinion it’s because both the Nation and Salon have an editorial allegiance to the Democratic Party.” It was, he said, too sensitive a time to publish a story critical of a Democrat when the party was positioning to take control of the legislative branch.

The Nation vehemently denied the decision to kill had anything to do with that. “It’s absolutely false that we had any political biases that caused us not to run the piece. It was the reporting and the timeliness,” said Wyskida.

Salon would not comment on Byrne’s political theory.

When pushed for specifics on what the story lacked, Wyskida said, “Generally, we felt like it was possible there were pieces of the story we could not verify or stand behind.”

Byrne went on to pitch the story to Slate, the New Republic, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, and – thinking that conservative publications might bite – American Spectator and Weekly Standard. “Most of the editors praised the reporting, but turned down the story,” Byrne writes in an update for Project Censored’s publication. “So I sold the tale to the North Bay Bohemian, which, along with its sister papers in San Jose and Santa Cruz, ran it on the cover – complete with follow-ups. After it appeared, the editors and I received a series of invective-filled emails from war-contractor Klein (who is also an attorney) but, since he could show no errors of fact in the story, he did not get the retraction he apparently wanted.”

Klein, a key figure in the series of stories, is chairman and founding donor of the Washington, DC-based Sunlight Foundation, an organization that promotes more government transparency and grants investigative work undertaken with those goals. The Blum Family Foundation has also given seed money to Sunlight.

The foundation’s Web Site has posted a rebuttal to Byrne’s story, written by senior fellow and veteran investigative journalist, Bill Allison. It includes a spirited exchange between Byrne and Allison on some of the finer points of Byrne’s reporting, and links to the original Congressional hearings that Byrne cites for some of his evidence of Feinstein’s questionable ethics.

Shortly before Byrne’s story was printed in the North Bay Bohemian, Feinstein quit MILCON. Byrne reported this resignation in a March 21, 2007 story, in which he speculates thinks it was because of his questioning her ethics.

Feinstein’s office denies any connection. Press officer Scott Gerber said that at the start of a new Congressional session, “She took the opportunity to become chair of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee. It’s a better subcommittee for California.” Her office also attempts to blow holes in Byrne’s story with a detailed rebuttal similar to Allison’s – not issued as a press release but provided upon request (and available here in pdf form.)

Despite the rebuttals, which contend that facts have been distorted, Byrne says no evidence exists that merit any retractions.

“Stories get killed all the time for various reasons but what I found interesting is that they paid me almost $5,000,” said Byrne, who expressed admiration for both the Nation and Salon. “The editor worked really hard with me but it was leading up to the elections. I’m not actually accusing them of anything nefarious. They basically told me they weren’t going to print it for political reasons.”

Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored, which rated the Byrne story as #23 out of the top 25 stories the mainstream media missed last year, said it played a part in prompting him to conduct a survey of 10 popular “left”-leaning publications. The survey looked at whether or not liberal news outlets touched stories that weren’t reported by the mainstream media and the results were included as a chapter in Project Censored 2008.

EDITORS NOTE: The above story reports that the piece on Dianne Feinstein’s conflicts of interest was slated to
run on the cover of The Nation. Ben Wyskida of the Nation contacted us after publication say that “we just don’t make promises like that; our covers never get decided until all the edits are in.”

Censored!

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September 5, 2007
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>>Project Censored’s 15 missed-story runners up

>>Big local stories that never made mainstream headlines

>>The story behind a censored story that was killed by The Nation

amanda@sfbg.com

There are a handful of freedoms that have almost always been a part of American democracy. Even when they didn’t exactly apply to everyone or weren’t always protected by the people in charge, a few simple but significant rights have been patently clear in the Constitution: You can’t be nabbed by the cops and tossed behind bars without a reason. If you are imprisoned, you can’t be incarcerated indefinitely; you have the right to a speedy trial with a judge and jury. When that court date rolls around, you’ll be able to see the evidence against you.

The president can’t suspend elections, spy without warrants, or dispatch federal troops to trump local cops or quell protests. Nor can the commander in chief commence a witch hunt, deem individuals "enemy combatants," or shunt them into special tribunals outside the purview of our 218-year-old judicial system.

Until now. This year’s Project Censored presents a chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for the most part, the major news media weren’t paying attention.

"This year it seemed like civil rights just rose to the top," said Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored, the annual media survey conducted by Sonoma State University researchers and students who spend the year patrolling obscure publications, national and international Web sites, and mainstream news outlets to compile the 25 most significant stories that were inadequately reported or essentially ignored.

While the project usually turns up a range of underreported issues, this year’s stories all fall somewhat neatly into two categories — the increase of privatization and the decrease of human rights. Some of the stories qualify as both.

"I think they indicate a very real concern about where our democracy is heading," writer and veteran judge Michael Parenti said.

For 31 years Project Censored has been compiling a list of the major stories that the nation’s news media have ignored, misreported, or poorly covered.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines censorship as "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts," which Phillips said is also a fine description of what happens under a dictatorship. When it comes to democracy, the black marker is a bit more nuanced. "We need to broaden our understanding of censorship," he said. After 11 years at the helm of Project Censored, Phillips thinks the most bowdlerizing force is the fourth estate itself: "The corporate media is complicit. There’s no excuse for the major media giants to be missing major news stories like this."

As the stories cited in this year’s Project Censored selections point out, the federal government continues to provide major news networks with stock footage, which is dutifully broadcast as news. The George W. Bush administration has spent more federal money than any other presidency on public relations. Without a doubt, Parenti said, the government invests in shaping our beliefs. "Every day they’re checking out what we think," he said. "The erosion of civil liberties is not happening in one fell swoop but in increments. Very consciously, this administration has been heading toward a general autocracy."

Carl Jensen, who founded Project Censored in 1976 after witnessing the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 in spite of mounting evidence of the Watergate scandal, agreed that this year’s censored stories amount to an accumulated threat to democracy. "I’m waiting for one of our great liberal writers to put together the big picture of what’s going on here," he said.

1. GOOD-BYE, HABEAS CORPUS

The Military Commissions Act, passed in September 2006 as a last gasp of the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Bush that Oct. 17, made significant changes to the nation’s judicial system.

The law allows the president to designate any person an "alien unlawful enemy combatant," shunting that individual into an alternative court system in which the writ of habeas corpus no longer applies, the right to a speedy trial is gone, and justice is meted out by a military tribunal that can admit evidence obtained through coercion and presented without the accused in the courtroom, all under the guise of preserving national security.

Habeas corpus, a constitutional right cribbed from the Magna Carta, protects against arbitrary imprisonment. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called it the greatest defense against "the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny."

The Military Commissions Act has been seen mostly as a method for dealing with Guantánamo Bay detainees, and most journalists have reported that it doesn’t have any impact on Americans. On Oct. 19, 2006, editors at the New York Times wrote, in quite definitive language, "this law does not apply to American citizens."

Investigative journalist Robert Parry disagrees. The right of habeas corpus no longer exists for any of us, he wrote in the online journal Consortium. Deep down in the lower sections of the act, the language shifts from the very specific "alien unlawful enemy combatant" to the vague "any person subject to this chapter."

"Why does it contain language referring to ‘any person’ and then adding in an adjacent context a reference to people acting ‘in breach of allegiance or duty to the United States’?" Parry wrote. "Who has ‘an allegiance or duty to the United States’ if not an American citizen?"

Reached by phone, Parry told the Guardian that "this loose phraseology could be interpreted very narrowly or very broadly." He said he’s consulted with lawyers who are experienced in drafting federal security legislation, and they agreed that the "any person" terminology is troubling. "It could be fixed very simply, but the Bush administration put through this very vaguely worded law, and now there are a lot of differences of opinion on how it could be interpreted," Parry said.

Though US Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) moved quickly to remedy the situation with the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, that legislation has yet to pass Congress, which some suspect is because too many Democrats don’t want to seem soft on terrorism. Until tested by time, exactly how much the language of the Military Commissions Act may be manipulated will remain to be seen.

Sources: "Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right," Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams Web site, www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm, Feb. 12, 2007; "Still No Habeas Rights for You," Robert Parry, Consortium (online journal of investigative reporting), consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html, Feb. 3, 2007; "Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?" Robert Parry, Consortium, consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html, Oct. 19, 2006

2. MARTIAL LAW: COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU

The Military Commissions Act was part of a one-two punch to civil liberties. While the first blow to habeas corpus received some attention, there was almost no media coverage of a private Oval Office ceremony held the same day the military act was signed at which Bush signed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, a $532 billion catchall bill for defense spending.

Tucked away in the deeper recesses of that act, section 1076 allows the president to declare a public emergency and dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police if he determines them unfit for maintaining order. This is essentially a revival of the Insurrection Act, which was repealed by Congress in 1878, when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in response to Northern troops overstaying their welcome in the reconstructed South. That act wiped out a potentially tyrannical amount of power by reinforcing the idea that the federal government should patrol the nation’s borders and let the states take care of their own territories.

The Warner act defines a public emergency as a "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any state or possession of the United States" and extends its provisions to any place where "the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order." On top of that, federal troops can be dispatched to "suppress, in a state, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy."

So everything from a West Nile virus outbreak to a political protest could fall into the president’s personal definition of mayhem. That’s right — put your picket signs away.

The Warner act passed with 90 percent of the votes in the House and cleared the Senate unanimously. Months after its passage, Leahy was the only elected official to have publicly expressed concern about section 1076, warning his peers Sept. 19, 2006, that "we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders." In February, Leahy introduced Senate Bill 513 to repeal section 1076. It’s currently in the Armed Services Committee.

Sources: "Two Acts of Tyranny on the Same Day!" Daneen G. Peterson, Stop the North America Union Web site, www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/articles/Fear.html, Jan. 20, 2007; "Bush Moves toward Martial Law," Frank Morales, Uruknet.info (Web site that publishes "information from occupied Iraq"), www.uruknet.info/?p=27769, Oct. 26, 2006

3. AFRICOM

President Jimmy Carter was the first to draw a clear line between America’s foreign policy and its concurrent "vital interest" in oil. During his 1980 State of the Union address, he said, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

Under what became the Carter Doctrine, an outpost of the Pentagon, called the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, was established to ensure the uninterrupted flow of that slick "vital interest."

The United States is now constructing a similar permanent base in Africa, an area traditionally patrolled by more remote commands in Europe and the Pacific. No details have been released about exactly what AFRICOM’s operations and responsibilities will be or where troops will be located, though government spokespeople have vaguely stated that the mission is to establish order and keep peace for volatile governments — that just happen to be in oil-rich areas.

Though the official objective may be peace, some say the real desire is crude. "A new cold war is under way in Africa, and AFRICOM will be at the dark heart of it," Bryan Hunt wrote on the Moon of Alabama blog, which covers politics, economics, and philosophy. Most US oil imports come from African countries — in particular, Nigeria. According to the 2007 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations, "disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to US oil-security strategy."

Though details of the AFRICOM strategy remain secret, Hunt has surveyed past governmental statements and reports by other independent journalists to draw parallels between AFRICOM and CENTCOM, making the case that the United States sees Africa as another "vital interest."

Source: "Understanding AFRICOM," parts 1–3, b real, Moon of Alabama, www.moonofalabama.org/2007/02/understanding_a_1.html, Feb. 21, 2007

4. SECRET TRADE AGREEMENTS

As disappointing as the World Trade Organization has been, it has provided something of an open forum in which smaller countries can work together to demand concessions from larger, developed nations when brokering multilateral agreements.

At least in theory. The 2006 negotiations crumbled when the United States, the European Union, and Australia refused to heed India’s and Brazil’s demands for fair farm tariffs.

In the wake of that disaster, bilateral agreements have become the tactic of choice. These one-on-one negotiations, designed by the US and the EU, are cut like backroom deals, with the larger country bullying the smaller into agreements that couldn’t be reached through the WTO.

Bush administration officials, always quick with a charming moniker, are calling these free-trade agreements "competitive liberalization," and the EU considers them essential to negotiating future multilateral agreements.

But critics see them as fast tracks to increased foreign control of local resources in poor communities. "The overall effect of these changes in the rules is to progressively undermine economic governance, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable multinational firms, robbing developing countries of the tools they need to develop their economies and gain a favorable foothold in global markets," states a report by Oxfam International, the antipoverty activist group.

Sources: "Free Trade Enslaving Poor Countries" Sanjay Suri, Inter Press Service (global news service), ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=37008, March 20, 2007; "Signing Away the Future" Emily Jones, Oxfam Web site, www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp101_regional_trade_agreements_0703, March 2007

5. SHANGHAIED SLAVES CONSTRUCT US EMBASSY IN IRAQ

Part of the permanent infrastructure the United States is erecting in Iraq includes the world’s largest embassy, built on Green Zone acreage equal to that of Vatican City. The $592 million job was awarded in 2005 to First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. Though much of the project’s management is staffed by Americans, most of the workers are from small or developing countries like the Philippines, India, and Pakistan and, according to David Phinney of CorpWatch — a Bay Area organization that investigates and exposes corporate environmental crimes, fraud, corruption, and violations of human rights — are recruited under false pretenses. At the airport, their boarding passes read Dubai. Their passports are stamped Dubai. But when they get off the plane, they’re in Baghdad.

Once on site, they’re often beaten and paid as little as $10 to $30 a day, CorpWatch concludes. Injured workers are dosed with heavy-duty painkillers and sent back on the job. Lodging is crowded, and food is substandard. One ex-foreman, who’s worked on five other US embassies around the world, said, "I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."

These workers have often been banned by their home countries from working in Baghdad because of unsafe conditions and flagging support for the war, but once they’re on Iraqi soil, protections are few. First, Kuwaiti managers take their passports, which is a violation of US labor laws. "If you don’t have a passport or an embassy to go to, what do you do to get out of a bad situation?" asked Rory Mayberry, a former medic for one of First Kuwaiti’s subcontractors, who blew the whistle on the squalid living conditions, medical malpractice, and general abuse he witnessed at the site.

The Pentagon has been investigating the slavelike conditions but has not released the names of any vioutf8g contractors or announced penalties. In the meantime, billions of dollars in contracts continue to be awarded to First Kuwaiti and other companies at which little accountability exists. As Phinney reported, "No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site."

Source: "A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy," David Phinney, CorpWatch Web site, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173, Oct. 17, 2006

6. FALCON’S TALONS

Operation FALCON, or Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally, is, in many ways, the manifestation of martial law forewarned by Frank Morales (see story 2). In an unprecedented partnership, more than 960 federal, state, and local police agencies teamed up in 2005 and 2006 to conduct the largest dragnet raids in US history. Armed with fistfuls of arrest warrants, they ran three separate raids around the country that netted 30,110 criminal arrests.

The Justice Department claimed the agents were targeting the "worst of the worst" criminals, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, "Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime."

However, as writer Mike Whitney points out on Uruknet.info, none of the suspects has been charged with anything related to terrorism. Additionally, while 30,110 individuals were arrested, only 586 firearms were found. That doesn’t sound very violent either.

Though the US Marshals Service has been quick to tally the offenses, Whitney says the numbers just don’t add up. For example, FALCON in 2006 captured 462 violent sex-crime suspects, 1,094 registered sex offenders, and 9,037 fugitives.

What about the other 7,481 people? "Who are they, and have they been charged with a crime?" Whitney asked.

The Marshals Service remains silent about these arrests. Whitney suggests those detainees may have been illegal immigrants and may be bound for border prisons currently being constructed by Halliburton (see last year’s Project Censored).

As an added bonus of complicity, the Justice Department supplied local news outlets with stock footage of the raids, which some TV stations ran accompanied by stories sourced from the Department of Justice’s news releases without any critical coverage of who exactly was swept up in the dragnets and where they are now.

Sources: "Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State," Mike Whitney, Uruknet.info, uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1, Feb. 26, 2007; "Operation Falcon," SourceWatch (project of the Center for Media and Democracy), www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON, Nov. 18, 2006

7. BLACKWATER

The outsourcing of war has served two purposes for the Bush administration, which has given powerful corporations and private companies lucrative contracts supplying goods and services to American military operations overseas and quietly achieved an escalation of troops beyond what the public has been told or understands. Without actually deploying more military forces, the federal government instead contracts with private security firms like Blackwater to provide heavily armed details for US diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where the nation is currently engaged in conflicts.

Blackwater is one of the more successful and well connected of the private companies profiting from the business of war. Started in 1996 by an ex–Navy Seal named Erik Prince, the North Carolina company employs 20,000 hired guns, training them on the world’s largest private military base.

"It’s become nothing short of the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration’s so-called global war on terror," author Jeremy Scahill said on the Jan. 26 broadcast of the TV and radio news program Democracy Now! Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was published this year by Nation Books.

Source: "Our Mercenaries in Iraq," Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232, Jan. 26, 2007

8. KIA: THE NEOLIBERAL INVASION OF INDIA

A March 2006 pact under which the United States agreed to supply nuclear fuel to India for the production of electric power also included a less-publicized corollary — the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture. While it’s purportedly a deal to assist Indian farmers and liberalize trade (see story 4), critics say the initiative is destroying India’s local agrarian economy by encouraging the use of genetically modified seeds, which in turn is creating a new market for pesticides and driving up the overall cost of producing crops.

The deal provides a captive customer base for genetically modified seed maker Monsanto and a market for cheap goods to supply Wal-Mart, whose plans for 500 stores in the country could wipe out the livelihoods of 14 million small vendors.

Monsanto’s hybrid Bt cotton has already edged out local strains, and India is currently suffering an infestation of mealy bugs, which have proven immune to the pesticides the chemical companies have made available. Additionally, the sowing of crops has shifted from the traditional to the trade friendly. Farmers accustomed to cultivating mustard, a sacred local crop, are now producing soy, a plant foreign to India.

Though many farmers are seeing the folly of these deals, it’s often too late. Suicide has become a popular final act of opposition to what’s occurring in their country.

Vandana Shiva, who for 10 years has been studying the effects of bad trade deals on India, has published a report titled Seeds of Suicide, which recounts the deaths of more than 28,000 farmers who killed themselves in despair over the debts brought on them by binding agreements ultimately favoring corporations.

Hope comes in the form of a growing cadre of farmers hip to the flawed deals. They’ve organized into local sanghams, 72 of which now exist as small community networks that save and share seeds, skills, and assistance during the good times of harvest and the hard times of crop failure.

Sources: "Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India," Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229, Dec. 13, 2006; "Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India take on Monsanto," Arun Shrivastava, Global Research (Web site of Montreal’s Center for Global Research), www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427, Oct. 9, 2006

9. THE PRIVATIZATION OF AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE

In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ushered through legislation for the greatest public works project in human history — the interstate highway system, 41,000 miles of roads funded almost entirely by the federal government.

Fifty years later many of those roads are in need of repair or replacement, but the federal government has not exactly risen to the challenge. Instead, more than 20 states have set up financial deals leasing the roads to private companies in exchange for repairs. These public-private partnerships are being lauded by politicians as the only credible financial solution to providing the public with improved services.

But opponents of all political stripes are criticizing the deals as theft of public property. They point out that the bulk of benefits is actually going to the private side of the equation — in many cases, to foreign companies with considerable experience building private roads in developing countries. In the United States these companies are entering into long-term leases of infrastructure like roads and bridges, for a low amount. They work out tax breaks to finance the repairs, raise tolls to cover the costs, and start realizing profits for their shareholders in as little as 10 years.

As Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway reported in Mother Jones, "the Federal Highway Administration estimates that it will cost $50 billion a year above current levels of federal, state, and local highway funding to rehab existing bridges and roads over the next 16 years. Where to get that money, without raising taxes? Privatization promises a quick fix — and a way to outsource difficult decisions, like raising tolls, to entities that don’t have to worry about getting reelected."

The Indiana Toll Road, the Chicago Skyway, Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and many other stretches of the nation’s public pavement have succumbed to these private deals.

Cheerleaders for privatization are deeply embedded in the Bush administration (see story 7), where they’ve been secretly fostering plans for a North American Free Trade Agreement superhighway, a 10-lane route set to run through the heart of the country and connect the Mexican and Canadian borders. It’s specifically designed to plug into the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, taking advantage of cheap labor by avoiding the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose members are traditionally tasked with unloading cargo, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose members transport that cargo that around the country.

Sources: "The Highwaymen" Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway, Mother Jones, www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html, Feb. 2007; "Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway," Jerome R. Corsi, Human Events, www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15497, June 12, 2006

10. VULTURE FUNDS: DEVOURING THE DESPERATE

Named for a bird that picks offal from a carcass, this financial scheme couldn’t be more aptly described. Well-endowed companies swoop in and purchase the debt owed by a third world country, then turn around and sue the country for the full amount — plus interest. In most courts, they win. Recently, Donegal International spent $3 million for $40 million worth of debt Zambia owed Romania, then sued for $55 million. In February an English court ruled that Zambia had to pay $15 million.

Often these countries are on the brink of having their debt relieved by the lenders in exchange for putting the owed money toward necessary goods and services for their citizens. But the vultures effectively initiate another round of deprivation for the impoverished countries by demanding full payment, and a loophole makes it legal.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast broke the story for the BBC’s Newsnight, saying that "the vultures have already sucked up about $1 billion in aid meant for the poorest nations, according to the World Bank in Washington."

With the exception of the BBC and Democracy Now!, no major news source has touched the story, though it’s incensed several members of Britain’s Parliament as well as the new prime minister, Gordon Brown. US Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Donald Payne (D-N.J.) lobbied Bush to take action as well, but political will may be elsewhere. Debt Advisory International, an investment consulting firm that’s been involved in several vulture funds that have generated millions in profits, is run by Paul Singer — the largest fundraiser for the Republican Party in the state of New York. He’s donated $1.7 million to Bush’s campaigns.

Source: "Vulture Fund Threat to Third World," Newsnight, www.gregpalast.com/vulture-fund-threat-to-third-world, Feb. 14, 2007

>>More: The story of U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein’s conflict of interest

Project Censored: The runners up

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September 5, 2007
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11. THE SCAM OF "RECONSTRUCTION" IN AFGHANISTAN

Sources: "Afghanistan, Inc.: A CorpWatch Investigative Report," CorpWatch, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13518, Oct. 6, 2006; "Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan" Ann Jones, Tomdispatch.com, www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=116512, Aug. 27, 2006

12. ANOTHER UN MASSACRE IN HAITI

Source: "UN in Haiti Accused of Second Massacre," HaitiAction.net, www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_21_7/1_21_7.html, Jan. 21, 2007

13. BUSH PUSHES IMMIGRANT ROUNDUPS FOR POLITICAL ENDS

Sources: "Migrants: Globalization’s Junk Mail?" Laura Carlsen, Foreign Policy in Focus, www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4022, Feb. 23, 2007; "Workers, Not Guests," David Bacon, Nation, www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20070219&s=bacon, Feb. 6, 2007

14. IMPUNITY FOR US WAR CRIMINALS

Source: "A Senate Mystery Keeps Torture Alive — and Its Practitioners Free," Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly, public.cq.com/public/20061122_homeland.html, Nov. 22, 2006

15. CHEMICALS DAMAGING DNA

Source: "Some Chemicals are More Harmful Than Anyone Ever Suspected," Peter Montague, Rachel’s Democracy and Health News, no. 876, www.precaution.org/lib/06/ht061012.htm#Some_Chemicals_Are_More_Harmful_Than_Anyone_Ever_Suspected, Oct. 12, 2006

16. NO HARD EVIDENCE CONNECTING OSAMA BIN LADEN TO SEPT. 11

Source: "FBI Says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11," Paul V. Sheridan and Ed Haas, Ithaca Journal, June 29, 2006

17. FACTORIES EXCEED WATER POLLUTION LIMIT

Sources: "Green Fuel’s Dirty Secret," Sasha Lilley, CorpWatch, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13646, June 1, 2006; "Factories, Cities across USA Exceed Water Pollution Limits," Sunny Lewis, Environment News Service, www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2006/2006-03-24-05.asp, March 24, 2006

18. MEXICO’S STOLEN ELECTION

Sources: "Mexico’s Partial Vote Recount Confirms Massive and Systematic Election Fraud," Al Giordano, Narco News Bulletin, www.narconews.com/Issue42/article2010.html, Aug. 14, 2006; "Welcome to the Nightmare: Al Qaeda de Mexico?" John Ross, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org/ross09132006.html, Aug. 13, 2006; "Evidence of Election Fraud Grows in México," Chuck Collins and Joshua Holland, AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org/story/39763, Aug. 2, 2006

19. BOLIVIA REJECTS IMF AND FTA

Source: "Is the US Free Trade Model Losing Steam?" American Friends Service Committee, Trade Matters, www.afsc.org/trade-matters/trade-agreements/LosingSteam.htm, May 3, 2006

20. ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS ARE NOW TERRORISTS

Source: "Response to Andrew Kohn: The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is Invidiously Detrimental to the Animal Rights Movement (and Unconstitutional as Well)," David Hoch and Odette Wilkens, Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, www.vjel.org/editorials/2007S/Hoch.Wilkens.Editorial.htm, March 9, 2007

21. US SEEKS WTO IMPUNITY FOR ILLEGAL AGRIBUSINESS SUBSIDIES

Source: "US Seeks "Get-Out Clause" for Illegal Farm Payments," Oxfam, www.oxfam.org/en/news/pressreleases2006/pr060629_wto_geneva, June 29, 2006

22. NORTH INVADES MEXICO

Source: "Border Invaders: The Perfect Swarm Heads South," Mike Davis, TomDispatch.com, www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=122537, Sept. 19, 2006

23. DIANNE FEINSTEIN’S CONFLICT OF INTEREST IN IRAQ

Source: "Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict," Peter Byrne, North Bay Bohemian, www.bohemian.com/metro/01.24.07/dianne-feinstein-0704.html, Jan. 24, 2007

24. MEDIA EXAGGERATES THREAT FROM IRAN’S PRESIDENT

Source: " ‘Wiped Off the Map’ — the Rumor of the Century," Arash Norouzi, Global Research, www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20070120&articleId=4527, Jan. 20, 2007

25. NATIVE ENERGY FUTURES

Source: "Native Energy Futures," Brian Awehali, LiP, www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featawehali_nativefutures.htm, June 5, 2006

Censored in San Francisco

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September 5, 2007
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Project Censored can’t cover everything — most of the stories the group looks at are national and international in scope. But there are huge local stories in every community that the mainstream media black out, ignore, or underplay. We’ve talked to political activists and media experts around the Bay and come up with a (short) list of Bay Area censored stories. We list them in no particular order.

THE MONOPOLIZATION OF LOCAL DAILY NEWSPAPERS

The deal that gave Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group control of almost every daily newspaper in the Bay Area made the business pages — but the impact on news coverage and the damage caused by the homogenization of local news to communities and the political debate were almost entirely ignored.

COMMUNITY CHOICE AGGREGATION AND PG&E’S ATTACK ON PUBLIC POWER

The importance of Community Choice Aggregation as an alternative to Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s private-power monopoly was badly under-covered — as was PG&E’s looming attack on CCA and public power.

GAVIN NEWSOM’S REAL RECORD

The daily papers love to talk about polls that show the mayor’s popularity (and they love to talk about his personal life), but nobody’s looking at his failure to fulfill many of his original promises.

SHUTTERED PUBLIC HOUSING

Until Mayor Newsom suddenly noticed the problems in local public housing last week, the major news media had overlooked the fact that hundreds of public housing units are shuttered while thousands of people wait for affordable housing.

THE ATTACK OF THE HIGH-RISES

The mainstream media reported with glee on the proposals for giant new towers at the Transbay Terminal, but failed to mention that at least 10 more giant towers are already in the works.

MORE HIGHWAYS, LESS TRANSIT

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to talk green, but the news media haven’t compared his cuts to public transit with his plans to build more highways.

Antiauthoritarian cities

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September 4, 2007
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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Archaeologists have discovered that one of the oldest urban areas in the world was built in a way that completely defies conventional wisdom about how cities grow. Last week, a group of researchers working in Syria published a paper in Science about a 6,000-year-old city called Brak, a once-thriving urban center in northern Mesopotamia (now northern Syria, near its border with Iraq). It has long been believed that cities begin as dense centers that grow outward into suburbs. Brak, however, began as a dispersed group of settlements that formed a rough ring shape and gradually grew inward to form an urban center that boasted a massive temple and a thriving import-export trade in tools and pottery.

Built sometime between 4200 and 3900 BCE, Brak eventually grew to 130 hectares, making it one of the largest known cities of its era, surpassed in size only by Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. Long buried under a tell — a hill of accumulated debris and layers of urban development — Brak’s early history has only recently been revealed. Archaeologists are racking their brains to figure out why the place doesn’t follow known patterns of city growth.

Harvard anthropologist Jason Ur, one of the researchers investigating Brak, writes that Brak’s history might mean that urban development can be an emergent property of many immigrant groups coming together in the same region. Early cities might have spontaneously arisen via the development of a handful of neighboring villages. This flies in the face of older theories, which hold that cities develop when a ruling elite or a set of dominant institutions creates a dense, hierarchical city center whose culture and populations spread outward from it.

Brak reflects a "bottom-up" model of city evolution, in which a central political power is built slowly out of diverse cultural interests. According to Ur and his colleagues, Brak’s layout "suggests both dependence on but some autonomy from the political power on the central mound…. This pattern suggests a greater role for noncentralized processes in the initial growth of Brak and lesser importance for centralized authority."

Short of hopping into a time machine, we’ll never know for certain if Brak’s layout reflects its citizens’ attitudes toward centralized authority or not. What we do know, however, is that not all cities develop in the same way. More important, we now have social scientific theories to explain why that might be — theories that can help us understand urban development in the contemporary world as well. Cities today could be evolving from decentralized areas, out of geographically dispersed groups that do not view themselves as subject to one dominant set of institutions.

Brak might be an example of how cities would grow if neighborhoods had more social and political autonomy. What if, for example, we considered a city to be a federation of neighborhoods rather than a downtown with satellite suburbs? Would that be the foundation for an antiauthoritarian citiscape?

To answer, let’s contemplate a possible modern-day version of Brak: Silicon Valley, a region of dispersed urban centers that have formed a loose economic federation via the computer industry and proximity to freeways. Residents of Silicon Valley may not consider the area to be one city, but it’s very possible that people excavating the toxic remains of Silicon Valley 6,000 years from now will interpret the area as a single urban unit.

Like Silicon Valley dwellers, residents of Brak may have thought of themselves as living in a series of linked villages, united by nothing more than a system of commerce and a set of roads. Does this mean that authority in Brak was truly decentralized? Maybe the urban development of Brak belies a deeper truth, which is that centralized authority does not always reveal itself via tall buildings at a city’s core. An entire region may bow to the authority of an economic system that stratifies it into rich and poor, and yet never have a common culture. Decentralized urban spaces are not necessarily antiauthoritarian ones.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wonders if Google has a time-displaced satellite office in Brak.

Word on la calle

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September 4, 2007
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Times are tough in the music biz. Not only are CD sales slumping, but radio stations are losing ad revenue to online ventures. One of the only genres or formats holding it down commercially is Latin music — a fact that falls well below the radar of your average gringo.

This shouldn’t be so surprising, considering that Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States and represent the fastest-growing segment of the population. Another factor fueling Latin music’s stateside success is the rise of reggaetón, the energetic blend of hip-hop, Jamaican dancehall, and Puerto Rican sounds that tops the Latin charts and even garners airplay on mainstream hip-hop and R&B stations. The so-called Latin boom that reggaetón triggered — far surpassing that of the late ’90s — inspired media behemoth Clear Channel to convert dozens of stations from English to Spanish in 2005 and roll out a new reggaetón-heavy format known as Hurban.

Although Hurban doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue — it’s an awkward combination of Hispanic and urban — radio execs are hoping it will be easy on the ears of US Latinos ages 35 and younger, who represent somewhere around $350 billion in purchasing power.

In the Bay Area, the Hurban phenomenon is represented by San Rafael radio station KWZ, 100.7 FM ("La Kalle"), owned by Hispanic media titan Univisión. Although the name suggests urban edginess, the station’s director of programming, Bismark Espinoza, explains, "It’s basically a top 40 station…. It’s a Spanish CHR [contemporary hit radio station], if you will." Earlier this summer, the station dumped its tagline "Reggaetón y más" as the gasolina-fueled genre hit a sales plateau. Pop artists such as Shakira, Maná, and teen sensation RBD get more airtime now. Reggaetón still dominates the playlist, however, and DJs lace their bilingual banter with Puerto Rican street slang like perreo, which can mean dirty dancing or doggy-style sex — either way, the Federal Communications Commission wouldn’t have a clue.

Bilingualism is the most innovative aspect of Hurban radio. In attempting to reach the ostensibly bicultural second- and third-generation young adults of Generation Ñ, Hurban stations hire on-air personalities who can code switch between Spanish and English with the fluidity of a United Nations translator — or a Spanglish-spitting street hustler. "If our audience talks like that, we just try to relate to them as much as we can," Espinoza says. "It’s just natural — the way they talk on the street, the way they talk to their families, the way they talk to their friends."

La Kalle has the language down. The music is another question. In June the station ranked number 24 in the region, with four other Latin stations ahead of it. In order to compete, the station’s programmers continually experiment with the format, trying to stay on top of the remarkably varied musical tastes of young Latinos. Espinoza contends that the latest craze is a hybrid of reggaetón and Dominican bachata balladry. Sometimes referred to as "crunkchata," the tropical style is favored by artists such as Aventura, Rakim y Ken-Y, and Toby Love, who top La Kalle’s request lists.

Tropical music? This is California, carnales. Given that the vast majority of Latinos in the Bay Area are of Mexican descent, where’s the Chicano rap? Where’s the Mexican banda? No doubt, Chicanos in San Francisco like their island music. They’ve been dancing to salsa con sabor since the days of Cesar’s Latin Palace in the Mission District. But the hottest thing right now among Mexican Americans is regional music from their homeland: ranchera, grupero, Tejano, norteño, and banda. All four of the top-ranked Bay Area Spanish-radio stations play some variation on a Mexican theme. For listeners between 18 and 34, the second most popular spot on the dial is KRZZ, 93.3 FM ("La Raza"), a regional Mexican station in San Francisco.

At its core, regional music is steeped in the cultural traditions of rural Mexico, in folkloric forms that have been around for more than a century. But Chicanos are coming up with their own cutting-edge hybrids of rap and Latin music. Los Angeles duo Akwid melds banda with breakbeats, and Jae-P pairs G-funk with norteño. These artists earn some airplay on Hurban stations but get very little love on Bay Area urban radio, despite the fact that they each sell hundreds of thousands of records.

La Kalle’s Espinoza insists that urban music with Afro-Caribbean roots is much hotter right now than "urban regional" sounds like Akwid’s. One notable exception to Mexican American obscurity is Chicano rapper Down, whose chart scorcher "Lean Like a Cholo" is currently in heavy rotation on La Kalle. Similar to urban-regional artists, Down wears his brown pride on his throwback jersey sleeve, but he does it by invoking Southern California barrios, not rural Mexican pueblos. His homeland is Nuevo LA, a city with the second-largest concentration of Mexicans in the world.

Given the size of the Mexican American population, you have to wonder how many Chicano artists are out there searching for a record deal or some airplay. "Some people blame the radio stations, some people blame the record companies," Espinoza wearily attests. "I don’t know. I listen to my kids — I play whatever is hot." But Mexican and Chicano music is hot right now. It just can’t seem to find a home on youth-oriented "urban rhythmic" radio formats like La Kalle, much less English-only Bay Area stations such as KMEL, 106.1 FM, and KYLD, 94.9 FM, whose audiences also lean heavily Hispanic.

Although Mexicans and Chicanos are currently relegated to the broadcast barrios of Spanish radio, it will be interesting to see how those borders open up once media companies realize the American mainstream is more brown and proud than ever.

Stormy leather

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September 4, 2007
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Cruising for a Bruising By Jason Shamai

FILM William Friedkin, like it or not, has contributed so much to mainstream queer cinema that it’s remarkable his name primarily calls up images of projectile vomiting and Gene Hackman running a lot. The Boys in the Band (1970) and the more high-profile Cruising (1980) are bookends to a decade of comparatively unencumbered gay sex that is legendary to gay men of my generation (I was alive for a gloriously unencumbered two months of it), yet there was almost no mainstream representation of gay men in pop culture between the two films that didn’t involve guest spots on Match Game or The Hollywood Squares.

Last year’s excellent Friedkin offering, Bug, spent its first 15 minutes or so, gratuitously but innocuously, within a lesbian community. And let’s not forget Father Dyer’s gayer-than-gay proclamation in The Exorcist (1973) that “My idea of heaven is a solid white nightclub with me as a headliner for all eternity, and they love me.” Friedkin’s representations of queer people are hardly consistent in their degrees of sophistication, but the venom he’s inspired in so many activists is certainly excessive and arguably not worth the energy. If he can be accused of exploitation, what he’s exploiting is of no mere passing fascination to him. For some reason the man, whether or not he’s welcome, has clearly thrown in his lot with the queers.

Cruising — let’s just get it out of the way — is a pretty terrible movie in most of the major categories: dialogue, acting, and plot all add up to a big fat blecch, and the restored version playing at the Castro Theatre beginning Sept. 7 in anticipation of the DVD release does nothing to remedy the narrative inertia. The murder mystery it purports to be — regarding an undercover cop’s pursuit of a serial killer in the West Village’s leather-clad S-M scene — is a murky and parenthetical excuse for a series of Boschian tableaux of boot licking, fist fucking, and ass ramming. But beyond a frustrating mess of implications about the scene’s negative influence on Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), Friedkin isn’t guilty of much beyond overexuberance.

The initial vitriolic reaction to Cruising, it seems, had more to do with its depiction, embellished a touch, of a significant chunk of the gay world with its legs up in the air. The flatteringly concentrated sexual activity in the bar scenes may be less of an issue nowadays because of the growing number of politically engaged queer people, unconcerned with assimilation and happy to sign off on anything that makes jittery straight people uncomfortable. But does this say enough about the movie’s sexual proclivities? There isn’t much talk about Cruising as a pageant of eroticized violence or as a film eager in its bloodiness for the titillated approval of its viewers. Were Friedkin’s murder scenes — overt visual associations of anal and violent penetration, blood sprayed across the screen in a porn booth — intended as an extension of his conception of S-M play? Would it be wrong for him to do so, or for the audience to be duly turned on?

I’ve always taken for granted that Cruising‘s two major scenes of police harassment were your garden-variety (though highly effective) critiques of injustice, a risk-minimizing way of approaching an unfamiliar culture. But now I’m wondering if these scenes were intended as an indictment of the police at all (was the unnecessarily long, squirm-inducing raid on an all-black bar in The French Connection intended as an indictment?) or if they were simply elaborate fetish scenarios, artistic expansions of the imagery and dynamics already well integrated into the S-M scene? Mr. Friedkin, are you trying to get us off? ——————- ——————-

Stormy Leather by Matt Sussman

When Cruising (1980) finally arrived in Bay Area theaters Feb. 15, 1980, San Francisco’s gay community had long been up in arms. The 1978 murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone were still fresh in many people’s minds. Gay bashing was still a regular occurrence. Word had spread through the gay press about efforts to disrupt the movie’s filming in New York, and the verdict was clear: Hollywood was profiting from gay murder.

In a December 1979 Oakland Tribune article, Konstantin Berlandt, a member of the group Stop the Movie Cruising and perhaps the film’s most vociferous adversary in local gay rags, called Cruising “a genocidal attack on gay people.” Two months later, the STMC helped organize a demonstration at the Transamerica Pyramid, protesting one of Transamerica’s subsidiaries — the film’s distributor, United Artists. On opening day hundreds of protesters picketed the St. Francis Theatre.

“I don’t remember what I thought of the whole thing other than it was kind of stupid and annoying,” recalls Marc Huestis, one of the cofounders of the city’s Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now the SF International LGBT Film Festival). “As long as I’ve been here, there has always been the battle between the respectable gays and the fringe gays,” Huestis continues. “The respectable gays — many of whom I will say probably went to the leather bars to cruise after their protests — were all into showing a positive face.”

The issue of positive representation — and whether or not Cruising‘s problematic yoking of gay sadomasochism and serial murder warranted merely protest or outright censorship — was at the core of much of the debate. One reader wrote to San Francisco’s Sentinel, “It is ironic that we who have long been victims of prejudice and censorship should attempt to use these weapons of oppression against the movie.” In a February 1980 cover story, “The Men of Cruising,” in Mandate (the gay “international magazine of entertainment and Eros”), Rod Morgan, one of the gay extras in the film’s bar scenes, commented, “If the protesters want progay propaganda, let them get the money together and make their own movie.”

“The stakes of gay representation were very different at the time,” reflects Michael Lumpkin, artistic director of LGBT media nonprofit Frameline. “They were much higher because it was, like, ‘Hollywood hasn’t given us anything, and then they give us this?’ ” However, critic Scottie Ferguson, writing in the Advocate in April 1980, found a thrilling frisson in Cruising‘s portrayal of gay men and asked readers, “What Hollywood film has made the sexual electricity of the gay male seem so vibrant and visceral and unnerving?”

By 1995, when the Roxie Film Center revived Cruising, Ferguson’s observations had been somewhat vindicated. Mainstream LGBT film was taking off, and thanks to the risky work of directors like Gregg Araki and Tom Kalin, new queer cinema had confronted audiences with visceral and unnerving representations of violence-prone gay men.

In contrast to the largely positive reevaluations in the local press, David Ehrenstein implied in the Bay Area Reporter that the Roxie’s revival was tantamount to screening the notorious anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew (1940). Representatives from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation showed up to hand out protest literature. “It was hilarious,” former Roxie programmer Elliot Lavine recalls. “There was a line around the block, and 90 percent of those waiting were in the leather crowd, and these GLAAD folks are trying to persuade them not to see the movie.”

Cruising has, to some extent, been defanged by the passage of time, its campier moments and macho signifiers embraced by a younger generation of queers. Clearly, though, the film still touches nerves: flame wars are being ignited as fast as they are being put out on Craigslist.com. And even for this gay fan of slasher movies, the film’s murder scenes are incomparably unsettling.

After a recent local media screening of the restored movie’s DVD release — at which director William Friedkin was present — DJ Bus Station John, whose clubs Tubesteak Connection and the Rod evoke the milieu of gay nightlife at the time Cruising was made, commented in an e-mail that “Friedkin’s present claim that contemporary audiences are more ‘sophisticated’ and therefore more receptive to Cruising, if not more friendly [to the film], doesn’t mitigate the damage done to our community at the time [of its release].”

CRUISING

Sept. 7–13, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

For Johnny Ray Huston’s interview with Cruising director William Friedkin, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Censoring the Censored Project: Will the NY Times, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and the mainstream media censor this year’s Project Censored story?

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September 4, 2007
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By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so the 31st annual Project Censored story will run once again as the lead story in the Guardian and in many alternative papers around the country.

The highly regarded Project, researched and disseminated by Peter Phillips and Project Censored at Sonoma State University, makes its case about censored and under-reported stories in a most dramatic way:
the mainstream press, including the nearby Press Democrat/NY Times and the NY Times itself, censors the story.

Not only that, but the Post Democrat and the NYTimes refuse to say why they haven’t ever run a story on the project in 30 years. They even refused to answer my blog questions to the papers after we published last year’s Censored story.

So this year, let us all pull together on this critical mission: spotting who is censoring the Project Censored story? Let me note the impertinent questions for the record:
Will the nearby Press Democrat run this important local and national story? Will its parent New York Times do so?
If not, will they answer my questions when I renew my blogs on the issue? Will other mainstream media censor the story? Who will run it? Let us know at the Guardian.

This is serious stuff. I led my blog of Nov. 20th/2006 with this statement: “On Sept. 10, 2003, while the New York Times and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat affiliated papers were running Judith Miller stories making the case for the Iraq War and then seeking to justify it, the Guardian published the annual Project Censored list of censored stories.”

Later, after detailing the number one story on the neocon politics that marched us into war, I wrote, “the neocon story and the other censored stories laying out the dark side of the Bush administration and its drumbeat to war got little or no play–or else were presented piecemeal without any attempt to put the information in context.
The number two story was ‘Homeland security threatens civil liberties.’ Number three: ‘U.S. illegally removes pages from Iraq U.N. report.’ Number four: ‘Rumsfeld’s plan to provoke terrorists.’ Number seven: ‘Treaty busting by the United States.’ Number eight: ‘U.S. and British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects.’ Number nine: ‘In Afghanistan poverty, women’s rights, and civil disruption worse than ever.'”

Then I concluded my blog on last year’s censorship of Project Censored by writing, “This year, as Iraq slid into civil war, U.S. war dead rose toward 3,000, and the U.S. public was well ahead of the media in turning against the war, the New York Times should have finally recognized its annual mistake and published the Project Censored story. It didn’t, and never has” ( and neither has the Press Democrat nor hardly any other mainstream media that helped march us into war.)

This year, the theme of the Censored stories is more relevant and timely than ever: the increase of privatization and the decrease of human rights in the U.S. Let us see what happens. B3

Editor’s Notes

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August 29, 2007
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› tredmond@sfbg.com

You’d think that this was a Republican town, with the way the local news media have been bashing not only the left but also some of the better, more effective, and more functional progressive institutions in San Francisco. I wouldn’t waste my time with this stuff, but there are real issues here.

I woke up Aug. 21 to a San Francisco Chronicle headline proclaiming "Anti-gentrification Forces Stymie Housing Development." The piece, by Robert Selna, opened with the sad, sad tale of a poor auto shop owner who wants to "build eight apartments and condominiums on an empty lot next to his Mission District auto shop and rent some of the apartments to his mechanics."

Well, it turns out that the evil Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition is fighting that plan, Selna reported, "insisting that [the] project not go forward until the city evaluates how new development on the city’s east side will affect industrial land, jobs, and housing."

The message: a little entrepreneur is getting hosed by a big, bad "not in my backyard" group that wants to stop new housing. The implication (and this is just the latest example of this stunning lie): the left in San Francisco is against building housing.

Well, for starters, MAC is playing only a modest sideline role in fighting the 736 Valencia project, a five-story structure that is designated legally for condos and includes no affordable housing. The real opposition is a group called Valencia Neighbors for Community Development. The issue, Valencia neighborhood activist Julie Ledbetter said, is that as many as nine new market-rate housing projects are in the pipeline for a short stretch of Valencia, and they shouldn’t be approved one by one without any regard for the cumulative impact.

MAC activist Eric Quezada told me that the organization has indeed taken the position that the city shouldn’t go forward with any more market-rate housing projects until it’s completed a legally mandated environmental study of the cumulative impacts of high-end condos on displacement, blue-collar jobs, and overall land use.

But that doesn’t mean MAC is against housing.

In fact — and this is the killer here — MAC emerged in the dot-com era almost entirely out of the nonprofit housing community. Some of its earliest and most prominent members were (gasp) housing developers. Just for the record, nonprofits have built something like 25,000 low- and moderate-income housing units in this city in the past 25 years. That is housing the city needs, housing that meets the city’s own clearly stated goals. And the progressives, people like the MAC members, are essentially the only ones who have built any affordable housing in the city at all.

Selna told me that he didn’t write the headline and "isn’t taking sides in this." I realize it’s not all his fault that he’s stumbled into a political hornet’s nest — but he has.

Then in the Aug. 22 SF Weekly, Matt Smith wrote that the left is turning this city into nothing but a tourist trap by promoting "a price-goosing apartment shortage of 30,000 to 70,000 units." That’s what, 140 giant new towers, or 7,000 10-unit buildings … that will go where? And what if (as is likely) rents still don’t come down? (Smith had no comment when I called him.)

And now C.W. Nevius of the Chronicle wants to shut down the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council Recycling Center so that homeless people won’t have any money … and will what — panhandle more aggressively? Break into cars? Makes perfect sense to me.

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