New York Times Archives — Page 19 of 31 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

FAIR: NYT Slams Single-Payer

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September 22, 2009

Action Alert
NYT Slams Single-Payer
Fails to include advocates among ‘diverse’ experts

The New York Times devoted some rare space on September 20 to discussing single-payer (or Medicare-for-all) health reform. The result? A one-sided account of why such a system couldn’t work.

With a headline like “Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,” readers probably had a sense of what the Times had in mind with the piece, which was the latest in a series titled “Prescriptions: Making Sense of the Healthcare Debate.” Reporter Katharine Seelye wrote: “Extending Medicare to all has seemed like a good idea to many–except to those who call it ‘socialized medicine.’ Or crazy.”

The Times seemed to want to express single-payer opposition in more gentle tones, explaining that the idea is, from the start, politically impractical: “Beyond a liberal base in the House, there is little support for expanding Medicare.” And outside of Congress, wise minds seem to agree: “But even experts of diverse ideological views say expanding Medicare would be far more complicated and politically difficult than it might appear.”

Invasion of the bedbugs

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September 16, 2009

2

news@sfbg.com

Editor’s Note: The writer has penned this story under a pseudonym because of concerns about social stigma and backlash from his landlord, as he discusses below.

More than three weeks had passed since our hike through Yosemite, so my girlfriend and I were starting to worry that the festering egg-shaped welts appearing daily on her arms, legs, and stomach weren’t just a late reaction to mountain mosquitoes. We’d rationalized the problem away until now, but when a bump appeared on her face, we decided to get professional help.

"It doesn’t make sense," my girlfriend told her dermatologist. "It can’t be spiders or fleas because I sleep with my boyfriend and he’s not getting bit. Maybe I’m allergic to my new detergent?"

"Nope," the doctor said. "You’ve got bedbugs."

Then he took some pictures of her wounds "to document the epidemic," wrote out a prescription for an anti-itch medicine, and sent her home to deal with the diagnosis, adding that she shouldn’t freak out because bedbugs don’t transmit diseases. They just make your life miserable, causing rashes, sleeplessness, paranoia, and embarrassment — which is why they’re considered a health risk on par with roaches, scabies, and lice.

But how exactly were we supposed to deal with this? Neither of us had ever even seen a bedbug, and we’d never heard of anyone getting bit. We really didn’t even believe in them. I mean, we’d both heard the old "good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite" rhyme, but we thought it was about ticks or maybe some fantastical little boogiemen, not actual bugs that live in or near your bed. That’s because, like most San Franciscans the age of 70, my girlfriend and I had grown up in a mostly bedbug-free world. But that’s over now.

Bedbugs are back and they’re eating San Francisco alive, sticking their blood-hungry proboscises in transient gutter punks, international travelers, homeless people, doctors, lawyers, and yes … maybe even you. They’re crawling around in our walls as we speak, scuttling from basket to basket in Laundromats, and camping out on buses and trains, waiting for new victims.

But where did they come from? And why are they here now, creeping out residents of civilized American cities that include Cincinnati, New York, and, most recently, San Francisco, where the Department of Public Health has received 307 complaints this year alone — a figure that’s soon to surpass last year’s total count of 327, according to DPH special operations manager Dr. Johnson Ojo.

Well, there are plenty of theories, but the truth is that nobody knows for sure. What we do know is that bedbugs are here and they are hungry. And, by the look of things, they’re not going anywhere soon. As travelers, tenants, homeowners, and landlords, our first mode of action against the epidemic is to learn how to deal. We’ve got to know how to prevent infestations, understand our rights when they occur, and finally come to grips with what it means to live in an infested city.

Of course, to do all of this, it helps to know a thing or two about the nasty fuckers.

WHAT ARE BEDBUGS?

Bedbugs are parasitic insects that feed on the blood of sleeping humans. One of the reasons you’re probably not familiar with them, the reason you might think they’re a myth or some dead epidemic from the Dark Ages when nobody washed, is that bedbugs were virtually annihilated from the western world by about 1960.

"Exterminators back then were quite fond of an insecticide called DDT," explained Luis Agurto Jr., president of a local integrated pest management company called Pestec. The chemical was great because it killed every bug in sight. Unfortunately, the virulent toxin wreaked havoc on the environment, killing most bald eagles and a wide variety of plant and animal life, as well as causing cancer and birth defects in humans. Rachel Carson’s landmark book exposing DDT, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962), helped launch the modern environmental movement. Most uses of the chemical were later banned in the U.S. and other countries, even though it meant finding new ways to keep our bugs under control.

Less toxic sprays were developed after DDT was banned in the U.S. in 1972. They worked on roaches and other pests, but what exterminators didn’t know at that time was that the new chemicals weren’t doing much to the bedbug diaspora that was still thriving in remote parts of America and the world. And these little bastards were nothing to mess with.

"These critters had been hammered so hard that, by the 1980s, they were growing impervious to any insecticide on the market," said Michael Potter, an entomology professor at The University of Kentucky and former national technical director for Orkin. "But nobody really noticed because most of these bugs were far away."

In addition to rural parts of the United States, bedbugs could still be found in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa. But Potter rejects the theory that increased travel and immigration are entirely to blame for the global resurgence, as some scientists speculate. "It’s not like we just started flying 10 years ago," he said.

Potter concedes that population movement has a lot to do with the issue, but said that blaming travelers and immigrants ignores certain facts and doesn’t quite explain why bedbugs are coming back in such large numbers. The truth is that bedbugs never really went away. Pockets of extremely resistant survivor cells simply laid low until their offspring could flourish once again. It didn’t take long for that to happen.

"The thing about chemicals is that they only work for a given amount of time," Agurto said. "Everything develops a tolerance after a while." No matter. The commercial use of carbamates and other organophosphates, the classes of insecticides that replaced DDT, were soon restricted in the U.S. after they, too, exhibited nasty environmental side-effects.

After that, pest control managers were forced to switch to pyrethroid-based insecticides — which a bedbug could go swimming in, Potter said — and preventive measures like steam-cleaning, vacuuming, and bait. These methods targeted cockroaches and other pests, but they essentially allowed bedbugs to thrive in a chemical-free paradise. This was in the early 1990s and, according to Potter and Agurto, it’s probably no coincidence that the first major infestations in American cities came to light soon after. By the end of the century, a few years after DDT was restricted to malaria zones worldwide, bedbugs were becoming a problem in the eastern United States. By 2001, they had become a hot news topic in cities in America and around the world.

The bedbug resurgence in New York City has been covered extensively by The New York Times, starting in 2001 with an article about hotels and hostels titled "Bedbugs; Sleeping with the Enemy." Subsequent reports tracked the spread of infestations through homeless shelters, SROs, and eventually into condos, apartments, and houses. But the tiny vampires aren’t stopping there.

Bedbugs, once thought of as a byproduct of poverty, are moving up in the world. "We’re seeing them now in upscale condos and private residencies in the best neighborhoods in town," Agurto said. "Places where people never imagined they’d have to deal with this kind of thing." But that’s not where the infestations stop either, not in New York and probably not here.

They’ve even infiltrated the headquarters of large corporations. One of the latest infestations of this sort, at the Penguin Group in Manhattan, made headlines recently when employees of the publishing company were sent home while the building underwent treatment. The same thing happened at Fox News’ Manhattan office in March of last year, and again this month at Bill Clinton’s offices in Harlem.

Spokespersons for these three entities claim to have things under control. But the question is, does treating the building really solve anything? What about the employees? And, in the case of Penguin, what about all those books? Aren’t they infected too? It would certainly seem so. But perhaps you’re also wondering why, if the epidemic is getting so out of hand, you still haven’t encountered a problem. Well, the truth is, the bedbugs might be closer to you than you think.

INVISIBLE INVADERS

There are dozens of reasons why you might not have noticed the resurgence, but probably the biggest is that it’s embarrassing: people don’t want to discuss the issue because it’s gross. But this line of thinking works against us, and if we ever want to learn how to handle the situation, we’ve got to come to terms with the fact that bedbugs have nothing to do with social class or cleanliness.

That’s something my girlfriend hasn’t quite been able to come to grips with, which is why I’m writing under a pseudonym. She hasn’t told anyone but her mother and she can’t stand the idea of bosses, friends, and potential employers Googling her name or mine and somehow finding this story. Yet I’ve come to realize, while researching this issue, that there’s really no reason to be ashamed.

"This is really the first time in human history where people — all people — aren’t constantly on the lookout for bedbugs," Potter said. "And our first course of action is to get reacquainted." That’s not as easy as it sounds. But here are some tips.

First, you should get rid of the idea that bedbugs are microscopic. They’re not. When bedbugs are born, they look like milky-white flax seeds, but after the first feeding they grow to the size of chili flakes and develop a similar hue. Full-grown bedbugs are about the length of a Tic-Tac. They’re brown and flat and they have six legs — something like a two-dimensional, oval-shaped tick with stripes.

Second, don’t underestimate the cunning nature of bloodsucking insects. Bedbugs may not be able to communicate with one another or build intricate nests, but evolution has blessed the species with one sinister adaptive trait: near-invisibility. Bedbugs are masters of disguise. They live in tiny crevices in hard-to-find places — box springs, mattresses, baseboards, etc. — and usually only come out when people are sleeping. But nocturnal dining habits and the ability to hide aren’t the only tools in a bedbug’s arsenal.

The real reason we can sleep soundly while hordes of insects wriggle through our undergarments and suck our blood is that these particular insects are equipped with anesthetic. Simply put, bedbug bites do not hurt. What’s even worse is that, unless you happen to be allergic to the numbing agent found in bedbug saliva, there’s not going to be any evidence in the morning either.

That’s why I thought my girlfriend was either completely insane or perhaps the victim of some unknown skin disorder, even after she got back from the doctor. I just couldn’t understand how a colony of insects could repeatedly bite one person and not even touch the other as he slept inches away. My girlfriend still had her doubts as well, but for lack of any other plausible answer, we decided to look deeper into the issue. This is when things got nasty and when I learned that many people (about half the population, according to various sources) do not react to bedbug bites at all.

After reading everything we could about bedbugs, watching horrendous videos of elderly people swatting insects off their bodies, and perusing vomit-inducing pictures of telltale bedbug signs — smeared blood, fecal stains, and carcass buildups — we did a thorough search of our bedroom and found a cluster between the carpet and the baseboard behind our bed. Now the question was: what to do next? It’s what everyone asks when they encounter an infestation. And sometimes, it’s hard to answer.

DEALING WITH THEM

"Many of the people who come into our office with bedbug issues are afraid of retaliation," said Ted Gullicksen, head of the San Francisco Tenants Union. "They don’t want to tell their landlords because they don’t want to lose their apartments or get fined."

But in most cases, they’re wrong. City health codes specify that rental properties be free of "any public nuisance," a category that includes bedbugs. Because my girlfriend and I didn’t know that at the time, we worried that we’d somehow be blamed for the infestation.

When we found our nest, we did what most tenants fearing eviction and/or more bills would do. We tried to handle the problem on our own, turning to family and the Internet for advice. Folk remedies soon poured in and we tried them all. We threw out excess clothing, sprayed our bedroom with cedar oil, steam-cleaned our carpet, and then sprinkled diatomaceous earth, an organic powder that kills insects, into every nook and cranny we could find. Then we started sleeping on the couch to wait for the bugs in our bedroom to die. But after four days, the unthinkable happened: more bites.

Potter said it’s a common problem because bedbugs respond to store-bought pesticides by scattering into walls, often showing up a few days later in other rooms or units. "What’s worse," Potter added, "is that there’s nothing saying they can’t be reintroduced even after you’ve invested in professional treatment. And, depending on the size of the problem, that can cost more than $10,000." Indeed, the only method of eradication that most pest control companies, including Pestec, guarantee these days is heat treatment, which necessitates the use of expensive technology and requires multiple follow-ups to ensure success. Plus, it’s not cheap.

When my girlfriend and I realized that our problem wasn’t going to magically disappear, we looked into the cost of treatment and freaked out. We were prepared to pay a couple hundred bucks, but the quotes we got were crazy — thousands of dollars for two rooms. We’re not broke, but forking out that kind of money would hobble us. And besides, by then we were getting scared. What if our landlord found out we’d had bugs for weeks? Could our decision to go it alone be used against us? Could it be grounds for eviction?

We didn’t want to find out and, at that point, we didn’t understand how difficult bedbug eradication could be. So we decided to repeat home treatment and simply hoped for the best. The result? It seems to have worked. My girlfriend has been bite-free for over a month and we haven’t seen a bedbug since July.

But now I’m wondering if we just dug ourselves a deeper hole. I mean, up until about two weeks ago when I started doing heavy research for this article, we thought we were in the clear. That’s why we never reported the problem (which is another reason I decided to write this under a pseudonym). But now that I’m painfully aware of how resilient these fuckers are, I’m wondering if we made the right choice. Still, the thought of coming out with this now fills me with dread. Despite what the Tenant’s Union says, I just can’t imagine getting out of this without some sort of fine. And even if money isn’t an issue, I don’t want to get on my landlord’s bad side. But what now? Should we just move? And what about the tenants who follow us?

It’s probably not the most responsible choice, but this line of thinking is common among first time bedbug sufferers — something my girlfriend and I learned on Yelp.com’s local message boards. Despite all the coverage the bedbug resurgence has gotten in recent years, people on Yelp (a.k.a. everybody you know) seem to be in the dark when it comes to tenants’ rights and responsibilities, with many posters opting for temporary solutions to avoid the possibility of financial penalties.

The most revealing post to date comes from a Yelper named JU who got bedbugs in early August and decided to handle matters on his own. "I know I’m moving out in four months … I’m just trying to make it more livable until then," he wrote. Which raises the question: what about landlords? If a tenant neglects to blow the whistle on a blossoming infestation, can the property manager or building owner charge that tenant for treatment? Can JU be held responsible if his bugs move into neighboring units? Were my girlfriend and I right to think we might get evicted or fined for negligence? Maybe.

"The bedbug issue is complicated and it really boils down to cooperation," said Janna New, director of San Francisco Apartment Association. "If the problem is eradicated and then reoccurs due to a tenant’s negligence or refusal to abandon risky behavior, then the cost of remediation could be negotiable. And evictions could occur."

New says she hasn’t heard of anyone getting evicted for harboring bedbugs, but adds that it’s important for tenants to report infestations immediately because if they ignore the problem, their entire building could quickly become infested. "It’s like the flu," she said. "If you get sick, you talk to your doctor. You should do the same thing with your landlord. Teamwork is the only way to get rid of bedbugs."

That’s something I wish I knew a couple months ago and something Tiffinnie McEntire, a 43 year-old acupuncturist, intuited when she noticed bugs in her Cathedral Hill apartment in 2006. Rather than waste time with store-bought insecticides, she immediately called her landlord, who responded by sending an exterminator. When that didn’t work, he sent anotherm and another, until McEntire and the rest of his tenants felt safe. "It was a pain in the butt," McEntire said. "But in the end, we were all happy."

That’s how an infestation should be solved, and that’s probably how it’ll go down if you report one as soon as you notice it. Both the Tenant’s Union and the Apartment Association agree that the burden of eradication usually falls on the landlords. So if you find bugs, your best mode of action is to report the problem as soon as possible. And if you happen to be an apartment or hotel owner, you should do frequent checks and respond to reports immediately. It might cost thousands of dollars, but it could save you from a lawsuit or prolonged infestation.

THE FINAL STAGE: ACCEPTANCE

So what does it mean to live in an infested city, in an infested nation and world? Well, for one, it means that we all have some lifestyle changes to make. For Njon Weinroth, an out-of-work software salesman whose 14th floor condo has been infested for six months, that has meant staying away from friends and developing an amicable relationship with the little monsters. People without bedbugs can obviously skip this step, but Weinroth can’t afford professional treatment at the moment and feels like he has no other choice.

"I do what I can to control them, but I still kill at least two a night," he said. "When I squish ’em, my blood comes out. It’s gross and that’s really been the hardest part — overcoming the stigma." And that’s something everyone — my girlfriend and I included — need to do if we ever hope to get this problem under control. We have to accept that the only thing bedbugs care about is blood and that they will suck it from a bum as quickly as a movie star (just ask actress Mary Louise Parker from "Weeds," who recently had a bedbug scare in her home). Other than that, specialists recommend being wary of buying used clothing and furniture and avoiding clutter.

With that out of the way, we need to start talking about the problem so that first time bedbug sufferers like my girlfriend and I won’t feel so helpless and ashamed when their bodies and beds become infested and, more important, so they will report bedbug activity before it gets out of hand.

Last, we have to come to grips with how rampant this epidemic is. "I don’t want to be the one tooting the horn saying it’s doomsday and that bed bugs are falling from the sky," Agurto said. "But I can’t think of a person alive who doesn’t know someone — or at least know of someone — who has had a problem." But don’t take it from him alone. If you really want nightmares, take a look the Bedbug Registry (www.bedbugregistry.com).

Started in 2006 by a computer programmer living in San Francisco, the Bedbug Registry is an anonymous record of bedbug activity across North America. It has maps tracking the spread of infestations and a search engine that allows you to see how close the creatures are crawling toward your house, hotel, or workplace (36 reports within two miles of Guardian headquarters — yikes!).

Maciej Ceglowski got the idea for the service when he found bumps on his body and dying bugs in the coffeepot at a San Francisco motel. "I reported the problem and got a resigned shrug from the front desk," Ceglowski said. Then he researched the issue and realized that because it’s so hard to get rid of bedbugs, it would not be in a hotel owner or landlord’s interest to publicize an infestation. "I started the site because I thought it would be a good way to fight back against bedbugs."

But is that even possible? With bedbug activity steadily rising in all corners of the world, a simple solution seems doubtful. Which raises another question: how soon before we all have bedbugs?

"Well, that’s hard to answer," Potter said. "But there’s absolutely no reason to think that our problem is going to get better or go away. We’re in for a real struggle with this critter."
Great. What the hell am I supposed to do now? Under normal circumstances, I would have stopped worrying about these bloodsuckers after a week of not seeing them in my apartment. But now that I’ve done all this research, my girlfriend and I are faced with another tough decision: do we tell our landlord or do we just hope our last home treatment actually worked?
We’re still thinking about it.

Take warning

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September 15, 2009

0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

The forests are in flames, the desert is advancing, the glaciers have vanished, and in a solar-powered facility towering above the ice-free waters of the Arctic, some 800 miles north of Norway, a solitary older man (Pete Postlethwaite) roams the hallways of the Global Archive, a warehouse sheltering banks of data-storage servers, a civilization’s worth of art and invention, and a Noah’s ark of extinguished species. From this lonely outpost, he gravely explores a stomach-churning inquiry: "We could have saved ourselves. But we didn’t. It’s amazing. What state of mind were we in to face extinction and simply shrug it off?"

Good question, and one that Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid, a hybrid merging documentary material and a fictional frame tale, forcefully suggests we start addressing like we mean it — immediately. That is to say, before runaway climate change makes its debut and some or all of its widely forecasted ecological consequences begin to manifest, along with resource shortages, food and water riots, and massive societal collapse.

Delineating the complex global network of climate-change causes and effects, The Age of Stupid interweaves real-life documentary footage from the lives of six present-day subjects in New Orleans, the French Alps, Jordan, southwest England, a small Nigerian fishing village, and Mumbai, India. Interspersed is real and faux (future) archival footage depicting and predicting the environmental consequences of humanity’s bad habits. And all of it is presented as the digital artifacts of a dying-off civilization, preserved for uncertain posterity in the Global Archive. While covering similar terrain to that of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the film serves as a kind of "No, but really, folks …" in the face of frighteningly incremental gestures toward sustainability — and continued shortsighted resistance — at the levels of national, state, and local government as well as citizenry.

The film’s opening sequence begins with the big bang and hurtles via countdown clock through billions of years, flying past the earliest stages of evolution, past dinosaurs, past the industrial revolution, and past the present day, the titular Age of Stupid, so fast that we barely have time to notice ourselves on the screen before it’s 2055, the Age of Too Late. The message: in the grand scheme of things, we have about a nanosecond left to kid ourselves as we refill our metal water bottle and press the start button on our Energy Star-qualified washer-dryer or Prius — or to find a way, at the level of populace, not green-minded individual, to radically swerve from our current path. According to Armstrong and her cohorts in the Not Stupid Campaign, the film’s companion activist effort, our fate will pretty much be decided by December’s climate talks in Copenhagen. (The film, which premiered in the U.K. in March, has its 50-country "global premiere" Sept. 21-22.)

So then, do the canvas bags, travel mugs, energy-saving appliances, clotheslines, CSA memberships, cycling, recycling, composting, and other ecologically minded efforts of a smattering of well-intentioned individuals matter at all? Or matter enough — in the face of factories, factory farming, methane-emitting landfills, canyons of office towers lit up 24/7, a continent-sized constellation of plastic detritus in the Pacific, and millions of trips cross-country at an average elevation of 30,000 feet?

Colin Beavan, the subject of Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s No Impact Man, is banking on yes, being of the "be the change you wish to see in the world" school of thought (admittedly in good company, with Mahatma Gandhi). Taking its name from Beavan’s book project and blog, No Impact Man shadows the NYC-based writer; his wife, Michelle Conlin, a senior writer at BusinessWeek admitting to "an intense relationship with retail" and a high-fructose corn syrup addiction; and their toddler daughter, Isabella, during a year in which they try to achieve a net-neutral environmental impact.

This entails giving up, in successive stages, with varying degrees of exactitude, packaged food (hard on a family whose caloric mainstay is take-out), nonlocal food (hard on a woman who drinks multiple quadruple-shot espressos a day; impossible, as it turns out), paper products (magazine subscriptions, TP), fossil-fuel-dependent transit (airplanes, elevators, and even the subway), electricity (i.e., the refrigerator), and, to a large extent, trash. The idea is to learn empirically — and demonstrate — which behaviors might be permanently ditched and which are virtually hardwired.

There are, predictably, certain criticisms –- from irritated environmentalists, from semianonymous blog commenters, from the New York Times Home and Garden section. There is the matter of giving up public transportation rather than championing it, and the issue (raised by a community gardener who takes Beavan under his wing) of Conlin’s laboring for a high-circulation publication that trumpets capitalist virtues antithetical to the project of tapering off consumption and waste. And Beavan sometimes comes across, particularly in the book, as well-meaning but stubbornly myopic in his focus on self-improvement.

Then again, the guy and his family gave up toilet paper, electric light, motor vehicles, spontaneous slices of pizza, and many deeply ingrained habits of wastefulness for a year while most of the rest of the country got up each morning and brushed their teeth with the water running. What impact the No Impact project might have on, for instance, the mounds of trash-filled Heftys that line Manhattan’s sidewalks each week remains to be seen. But as the Age of Stupid winds down, it’s probably a waste of time to fault anyone’s attempts to forestall the Age of Too Late.

NO IMPACT MAN opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

THE AGE OF STUPID plays Mon/21, 8 p.m., SF Center. Visit www.ageofstupid.net for additional Bay Area screenings.

Newsom can’t rewrite history, but he can sell his soul

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September 15, 2009

4

By Steven T. Jones
379-cover.web.jpg
On the day that former President Bill Clinton endorsed Gavin Newsom’s campaign for governor, it’s hard to believe the local blog post that Newsom is about to call it quits, and sources I consulted dispute key tenets of the anonymously sourced article. Yet there’s still plenty of reason to believe that Newsom’s quest is doomed.

While Newsom’s sleazy affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk was already bound to hurt his candidacy, it is how he handled it afterward that really makes Newsom look untrustworthy and immoral. I attended the 2007 press conference where Newsom blithely admitted “everything you may have heard or read is true” regarding the affair, only to recently tell the New York Times Magazine and Fast Company just the opposite, that there was “a story that has yet to come out” in which Newsom looks good.

This is seriously delusional stuff, the product of a deeply megalomaniacal mind, as if he actually sees himself as a victim for banging his top aide’s wife. It’s reminiscent of his wife Jennifer Siebel’s disturbing quote in the Chronicle that was followed by her crazy extended comment to SFist blaming Ruby for the affair and excusing Newsom’s behavior on the grounds that she supposedly showed up drunk at his door, an odd “date rape as defense” strategy.

I and other journalists have long hounded Newsom to address issues raised by the affair, and he’s always refused to discuss it. Yet now, as he worries about the impact of this affair on his ambitions, suddenly there’s an “untold story.” Newsom is already held in very low esteem even by his former supporters, but if he and his top political henchman, Garry South, continue to try to rewrite this sordid history by dragging the Tourks through the mud again, our mayor might find himself a top candidate for San Francisco’s All-Time Hall of Shame.

Gavin, if you still have a soul, now’s probably a good time to search it and decide if you really want to trade it in for your longshot pursuit of power.

Events listings

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September 8, 2009

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Events listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 9

Beatles Day Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF; (415) 831-1200. 11am-8pm, free. Celebrate the release of the newly remastered Beatles CDs with Beatles DJ sets, fab four trivia and giveaways, a Beatles cover band, and a Beatles look-like contest.

THURSDAY 10

Red Vic Benefit Mercury Café, 201 Octavia, SF; (415) 252-7855. 7pm, $10-30 sliding scale. Help out your favorite local rep house while having a good time at this benefit featuring live music by Tango No.9 and Toshio Hirano, silent auction with art and film-related items, and a raffle.

Supergirls Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission, SF; (415) CAR-TOON. 7pm, free. Hear Mike Madrid, author of The Supergirls, discuss the cultural history of the superheroine, like how their search for identity, battle for equality, and juggling the dual roles of career and motherhood mirrors real life. Wine tasting hosted by Small Vines Wines.

FRIDAY 11

Neighborhood Free Days California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, SF; (415) 379-8000. 9:30am-5pm, Friday – Sunday; free for select zip codes. Visit www.calacademy.org to find out which weekend your SF zip code will gain you free admission to the museum. This weekend’s lucky residents are from Sunset, Parkside, Stonestown, Lakeshore, and St. Francis Woods.

Party for the People SubMission, 2183 Mission, SF; (415) 431-4210. 8:30pm, $5-20 sliding scale. Enjoy live Latin music, DJs, raffles, fresh Mexican juices, and veggie tacos at this event where all proceeds will benefit PODER, a Mission/Excelsior District community organization where local youth lead environmental justice projects.

SATURDAY 12

Babylon Salon Cantina, 580 Sutter, SF; (415) 398-0195. 8pm, free. This literary night features performances by well known authors Pamela Uschuk and Daniel Alarcon and emerging writers Anthony Gonzales, K.G. Schneider, and Michela Martini.

IXFF Kick-off Party El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325. 9pm, $7. Celebrate Good Vibrations’ Fourth Annual Independent Erotic Film Festival with a special screening of Courtney Trouble’s new film, Speakeasy, music with DJ Justin Credible, prizes, and more.

Power to the Peaceful Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.powertothepeaceful.org. 9am-5pm; free, donations accepted. This music, arts, action, and yoga festival featuring performances by Michael Franti and Spearhead, Alanis Morissette, Sellassie, and more is dedicated to issues of social justice, non-violence, cultural co-existence, and environmental sustainability.

BAY AREA

Crossword Puzzle Tournament Alameda High School Cafeteria, 2250 Central, Alameda; www.bayareacrosswords.org. 10:30am, $30. Challenge yourself with some crossword competition at the second annual Bay Area Crossword Puzzle Tournament, featuring three unpublished New York Times puzzles donated by the legendary Will Shortz.

SUNDAY 13

BAY AREA

Dash for a Cure Oakland Aviation Museum, 8252 Earhart Rd., Bldg 621, Oakland International Airport, Oak.; (510) 638-7100. 2pm, free. Experience, through video clips, photos and PowerPoint, the thrilling account of CarolAnn Garratt ‘s World Record breaking flight around the world to raise money and awareness for ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

MONDAY 14

Fixing U.S. Healthcare Commonwealth Club, 2nd floor, 595 Market, SF; (415) 597-6700. Noon, $15. Hear T.R. Reid, correspondent for the Washington Post, commentator for NPR, and author of The Healing of America, weigh in on whether or not the U.S. can really fix healthcare and how we can learn from health-care models across the globe.

*

Obama needs to stop being nice

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September 4, 2009

0

By Tim Redmond

The New York Times has a great piece by Jean Edward Smith on why Obama needs to stop trying for a bipartisan health plan and a compromise that the moderates and conservatives can agree on:

This fixation on securing bipartisan support for health care reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead.

This was not true of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Congresses that enacted the New Deal. With the exception of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 (which gave the president authority to close the nation’s banks and which passed the House of Representatives unanimously), the principal legislative innovations of the 1930s were enacted over the vigorous opposition of a deeply entrenched minority. Majority rule, as Roosevelt saw it, did not require his opponents’ permission.

When Roosevelt asked Congress to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide cheap electric power for the impoverished South, he did not consult with utility giants like Commonwealth and Southern. When he asked for the creation of a Securities and Exchange Commission to curb the excesses of Wall Street, he did not request the cooperation of those about to be regulated. When Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act divesting investment houses of their commercial banking functions, the Democrats did not need the approval of J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers.

From the start, the wrong people (that is, the insurance industry reps.) have been at the table. Now the president is going to Congress to make his case — but he ought to have enough support to get a strong bill passed anyway.

And maybe he can start his speech with this report from the National Nurses Movement, which notes:

Researchers from the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee analyzed data reported by the insurers to the California Department of Managed Care. From 2002 through June 30, 2009, the six insurers rejected 45.7 million claims — 22 percent of all claims.

The main point here:

Left hanging in the air is a bigger question. If the private insurers are not paying for care, why do we have private insurers?

Inflatable darling

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August 12, 2009

0

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

We were watching Mythbusters and they were using inflatable dolls instead of crash test dummies. That didn’t work very well, but it did make me wonder, does anyone ever use those for actual sex?

Love,

Blow Me Down

Dear Blow:

Who knows? Any attempt to answer this scientifically would be hampered by the inevitable sample problem: would even the most dedicated enthusiast actually admit to putting the thing to its supposed intended use? If they told you, wouldn’t they have to kill you?

If I had to guess, I’d say yes. Men have been known to stick it into condoms full of warm oatmeal, into watermelons, and allegedly into a piece of liver intended for the family dinner. How could at least some tiny fraction of male mankind not be expected to stick it into what passes for a genital orifice in a vinyl novelty device? Of course some do. But mostly not, I’d assume, and mostly not often, or even twice.

Once upon a time I had a boyfriend who lived in a foul two-bedroom with a roommate of disreputable habits (it was Roommate who was principally responsible for the apartment’s foulness, or so I chose to believe at the time). Before Roommate’s birthday one year, Boyfriend and another equally disreputable friend went off to a Tenderloin sex shop and bought a … fuckhead. That’s what we called it, and that’s what it was, a softish mannequin head, like a Barbie’s Hair Salon head but horribly porny, with a round, gaping maw and frizzly blond curls that shed distressingly when you attempted to grasp the thing like a, well, a head. It was ghastly and we could not imagine anybody ever using such a creation for its intended purpose — nobody even wanted to touch the thing — so they put it in the oven, which was never used for its intended purpose, and left it there to gaze blankly, gape-mouthed, through the glass-paneled door.

No, that story did not have a point. I just wanted to tell it.

Of course, decades after the invention of the rarely-fucked Inflatable Love Doll (and by the way, they make sheep, too, but I can’t remember now if it’s actually sold as a "Love Ewe" or if my friends and I made that up), the Real Doll debuted to enormous media hullabaloo and respectable sales. Fairly or not, and nicely or not, I ascribed those respectable sales to the concurrent dot-com bubble and the sudden wealth it showered upon a lot of guys with good coding skills and not so much experience talking to girls. The Real Doll, in case you were sleeping, is a fairly realistic (only slightly less realistic than Jenna Jamison, for instance), life-sized, customizable silicone sex partner. According to their site, you can buy some models on super-special this month for less than $6,000: "order a female flat-back torso, get the head kit free." In fact, the company is, as they say, "going out for business":

In These Difficult Economic Times, Abyss Creations Is Doing Our Part To Help.

SHIPPING IS NOW FREE ON ALL NEW ACCESSORY ORDERS!

And for the month of July there is a $500 Discount Off all new Doll orders.

We also want you to know that all of our products are made in the U.S.A. As well as all materials and parts. We are doing our part to keep our country working.

They are doing their part. Are you doing yours?

The Real Doll appears to have had its moment in the sun (a good idea, actually, since silicone warms to body temperature very readily). If The New York Times, of all things, is to be believed, the coming thing in fake sex partners is not a semirealistic girl-shaped thing, or the expected, immanent online, plug-in cybermate. It’s a … pillow.

The Times article [www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-2DLove-t.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all] is about Japanese "2-D lovers," a subset of obsessive anime fandom who carry on what at least feels to them like real relationships with representations of anime characters, often, ickily, prepubescent girls. The article never says what, exactly, people like the profiled "Nisan" ("big brother") do with a stuffed pillowcase printed with the image of a 10-year-old in a bikini, besides carrying it around and ordering it a bowl of soup and calling it their girlfriend.

Japan is, of course, kind of a special case. According to the Times article, "more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan do not have friends of the opposite sex." I’m hanging onto the hope that the fact that the same cannot be said of North Americans will provide us at least partial immunity to the spread of a similar craze here. But I think we can trust a certain subset of geek-hipsters to at least claim to have adopted it.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

SF protest against illegal Honduran regime

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August 11, 2009

14

By Steven T. Jones

People are understandably still outraged by the coup d’etat in Honduras, which will be the subject of a 5 p.m. rally today outside that country’s consulate in San Francisco, located at 870 Market Street near Powell.

“Tuesday will culminate a week-long march against the illegal coup in Honduras by hundreds of Hondurans nonviolently calling for the immediate and unconditional restitution of elected president Mel Zelaya,” announced organizers that include the ANSWER Coalition, School of the Americas Watch, Barrio Unido, and many others.

The group is certainly correct that US-trained members of the Honduran military have kept the illegal regime in power and silenced critics for almost two months, and even the Associated Press and New York Times have written about the class conflict at the heart of the coup.

FAIR: Did GE Stifle Keith Olbermann?

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August 7, 2009

1

The gentleman’s agreement between Fox and MSNBC illustrates the corrosive effect on media of corporate ownership

(FAIR is a media reform group called Fairness & Accuracy in Media)

In the wake of an August 1 expose in the New York Times, an agreement reportedly reached by executives at the parent companies of Fox News Channel and MSNBC to rein in the networks’ two stars’ criticism of each other seems to have fallen apart. The behind-the-scenes deal-making, though, still illustrates the corrosive effect on media of corporate ownership.

The alleged deal concerned MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly. Olbermann seemed to deny any arrangement limiting his speech, and criticized Fox and O’Reilly right after the Times story was published (8/3/09). O’Reilly, in turn, resumed his criticism of GE on his August 5 show. But many questions remain about the nature of the deal.

What went wrong

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July 28, 2009

0

EDITORIAL David Dayen, a political blogger at Calitics, had the best line on the California budget crisis.

"Whoever cares the least about the outcome wins," he wrote July 20. "If you don’t care whether children get health care, whether the elderly, blind and disabled die in their homes, whether prisoners rot in modified Public Storage units, whether students get educated … you have a very good chance of getting a budget that reflects that."

In the end, the Republicans largely carried the day because they had all the power: they could block any budget deal, they refused to raise any taxes, and they don’t really care if the state goes bankrupt. In fact, Gov. Schwarzenegger was happy to draw the crisis out as long as necessary — it helped his poll rating.

San Francisco should have had a very different situation and a very different outcome. The progressives control the Board of Supervisors and the mayor is in a tight spot — he’s running for governor and wants to show that he can manage San Francisco better than anyone in Sacramento is managing the state. It’s part of his campaign theme. A prolonged budget standoff was not in his interest.

And while the city budget is far, far better than the state budget, and the progressives managed to get a few concessions, the bottom line remains: this is a no-new-taxes budget, balanced largely with cuts and regressive new fees. In fact, for all the mayor’s talk of working with the board on possible tax measures, it now appears likely that there will be no revenue proposals whatsoever on the November ballot.

And the mayor is going to make another deep round of cuts soon, when the figures on what San Francisco will lose in state funding (almost certainly more than $150 million) become available.

It took last-minute efforts by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, supported by Sup. David Campos, to win back funding for the Public Defender’s Office and at least a shot at funding the public finance system for the next local elections.

The supervisors, frankly, should have pushed harder. The message to Newsom should have been: no budget without new revenue. And as the board approaches the next fiscal year — projections already call for a $300 million deficit — that absolutely has to be the bottom line. Critical services have been cut too deeply already.

The process needs to be better too. Allowing two supervisors — the budget committee chair and the board president — to negotiate a closed-door deal with the mayor without briefing their colleagues or letting the other stakeholders know what was going on was a big mistake that can’t be repeated.

The New York Times ran a front-page story July 21 describing in bleak terms how California has abandoned its safety net and given up the ambitious dreams that for so long defined the state. "At no point in modern history," reporter Jennifer Steinhauer wrote, "has the state dealt with its fiscal issues by retreating so deeply in its services, beginning this spring with a round of multibillion-dollar budget cuts and continuing with, in total, some $30 billion in cuts over two fiscal years to schools, colleges, health care, welfare, corrections, recreation and more.

That can’t be the model for San Francisco to follow. *

Obama plugs single-payer…sort of

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July 23, 2009

0

By Steven T. Jones

Only a single-payer system eliminates health insurance companies, which are portrayed as predatory pirates in this cartoon by Consumer Watchdog, with music by the Austin Lounge Lizards.

As President Barack Obama held a prime time news conference yesterday to boost his health care reform efforts, he tried to recast the imperative as saving the system for the average American rather than focusing on the 45 million Americans without insurance. But in the process of defending his plan, he also subtly reinforced the need for the single-payer system, as discussed in our cover story this week.

When asked about the approximately 2 percent of Americans that will be left uncovered by the Democrats’ plan, Obama said, “I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is unless you have what’s called a single-payer system in which everyone’s automatically covered, you’re probably not going to reach every single individual.”

As Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times online story yesterday, Obama didn’t explain why he doesn’t then support single-payer, but Baker wrote, “In the past, he has said such a system might be preferable if the country were inventing a new health care structure from scratch but he does not want to completely upend the current system, which does work for many or most Americans.”

Unfortunately, that final statement is bullshit. Polls show most Americans don’t like the current system (56 percent want “major health care reform” this year, 62 percent want more government control over health care, etc.), although right-wing and insurance industry propaganda have made them scared of the change that is needed to realize the president’s goals of holding down costs, emphasizing preventive care, and ensuring universal access to quality and affordable care.

Upending the current system is precisely what needs to happen.

Destroying the California dream

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July 22, 2009

2

By Steven T. Jones

A front page story in today’s New York Times correctly notes that California’s political leaders have abandoned the “California Dream” that made this such a great state: a social safety net that prevented the economic system’s losers from falling too far, a high-quality and affordable education system to give people the skills and knowledge needed to succeed, reliable and efficient infrastructure, and an appreciation for diversity.

“The California dream is, for now, delayed, as demonstrated by the budget state lawmakers and the governor agreed upon late Monday,” Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer wrote. “At no point in modern history has the state dealt with its fiscal issues by retreating so deeply in its services, beginning this spring with a round of multibillion-dollar budget cuts and continuing with, in total, some $30 billion in cuts over two fiscal years to schools, colleges, health care, welfare, corrections, recreation and more.”

Anti-government conservatives including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and just about every Republican in the Legislature (and many of the Democrats) have succeeded in destroying California as we know it with their mindless “no new taxes” mantra (which even our own Mayor Gavin Newsom pays fealty to as he runs for governor). They need to be recognized for what they are — a hostile threat to civil society, to the basic bargain among people on which government is based — and I’m happy to see the Times help with this analysis.

Things have already gone too far. It’s time to ease our way out of this abyss, and for San Francisco’s leaders to point the way. Some already are. Assessor Phil Ting is pushing for reform of Prop. 13 so commercial property taxes can be based on what the land is actually worth, Sen. Mark Leno is leading the single-payer health reform fight, and Assemblymember Tom Ammiano is trying to legalize and tax marijuana, which would bring in about $1.4 billion in annual revenue and save billions more in decreased enforcement costs.

That’s a pretty good start, but it’s just the beginning of a long slog back from oblivion.

All sex, no plot: The new porn?

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July 9, 2009

0

By Juliette Tang

Yesterday saw an interesting piece in the New York Times on the slow disappearance of plot-based porn flicks in favor of films comprised solely of sex scenes, without any narrative structure, that can easily be broken up and presented online. According to the Times, the DVD sales and rental industry was $3.62 billion in 2006 (a number estimated by Paul Fishbein, president of the AVN Media Network) but has fallen as much as 50% since then. Rather than solely filming feature length, plot-based movies, like Pirates XXX, which was released in 2005, studios are focusing more attention on filming vignettes instead — series of sex scenes that occasionally share a theme, like “Girls ‘n Glasses”.

While some are alarmed at the changes afoot in the industry, it’s a fact that studios are focusing less and less attention on making feature DVDs and that interest is only going to decrease from here. In this NYT video, Steven Hirsch, chief executive of Vivid Entertainment, states that while it wasn’t that many years ago that all of Vivid’s income was dependent on DVD sales, now, less than half of their income is generated from DVDs, largely due to the nature of the internet. Vivid now offers an online membership that users can subscribe to, that allows them to view video clips and photos simply by logging in.

Written on the body: Raging Stallion’s Ink Storm offers a different definition of “porn script”

I sent an email to Ben Leon, a director at Raging Stallion Studios, a major gay porn studio located in San Francisco, and asked for his perspective on these changing trends. The NYT article doesn’t discuss gay porn, which has historically been much less attached to the plot-paradigm than straight porn. [You couldn’t fit much more on those old Super8 one-reelers! -Ed.]

He made an interesting point linking the new web model of porn with the uptick of interest in fetish material, which the NYT article didn’t really touch on either. Said Leon, “I also think that porn is changing as the culture changes. A new trend in porn is a heavy swing toward fetish material. This trend is not that different than the wider trend toward making internet content. The new fetish stuff and the internet sites are marketed to a very specific audience. This specialization is both a widening of the market but also a contraction in certain ways. Like mass media-as it becomes more pervasive it also becomes much more targeted. People are now able to find the information (or porn) they want filtered through whatever bias or glass they choose.”

We walk with a zombie

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July 8, 2009

0

PHENOM In our heads, in our heads: zombies, zombies, zombies.

Don’t blame me for taking a bite out of your brain and inserting an annoying tune in its place — once again, not long after the last onslaught of undead trends, our culture is totally zombie mad.

The phrase "zombie bank" is multiplying at a disturbing rate within economic circles. In music, the group Zombi — hailing from the zombie capitol Pittsburgh — is reviving the analogue electronics of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead while the British act Zomby brings dubstep to postapocalyptic dance floors. A comedy of manners possessed by ultraviolent urges, Seth Grahame-Smith’s "unmentionable" Jane Austen update Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Quirk Books, 320 pages, $12.95) has set up camp on the trade paperback New York Times best sellers list, with S.G. Browne’s Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament — currently being movie-ized by Diablo Cody — on its trail. On a smaller scale, Yusaka Hanakuma’s manga Tokyo Zombie (Last Gasp, 164 pages, $9.95) has caught a zombie plane over to the United States.

Most of all, posthumous Michael Jackson mania is bringing the corpse choreography of the 1983 video for "Thriller" to life, as the media and masses fluctuate between the worst facets of grave-robbing and best facets of revival and death celebration. A Friday, July 3 party in Seattle that aimed to top the 3,370-participant world record for largest "zombie walk" included a mass dance performance to the song.

When journalist Lev Grossman first noted the shift in bloodlust from vampirism to zombiedom in a Time trend piece this April, he ticked off some of these activities but steered clear of visual art. Zombies are around in galleries and museums, too. In Los Angeles last month, Peres Projects presented Bruce LaBruce’s "Untitled Hardcore Zombie Project" in which stills from a forthcoming movie by the director of last year’s Otto; or, Up with Dead People were blown up, framed, and hung on the space’s blood-spattered white cube walls. Here in San Francisco, Michael Rosenthal Gallery is hosting a variety of zombified works by another Canadian artist, Jillian Mcdonald.

Active revisions of cinema are central to Mcdonald, whose past projects find her staring down, mimicking and making out with male screen icons such as Billy Bob Thornton. "Monstrosities" makes room for vampires, but hunger for flesh is dominant over thirst for blood. The five-minute video Zombie Apocalypse brings the zombie back to the beach, its eerily effective primary haunting ground in Jacques Tourneur’s classic 1943 Val Lewton production I Walked with a Zombie — which, incidentally, is being remade, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre now explicitly cited as its source material. In 2006’s Horror Make-up, Mcdonald plays with the image of a woman putting on makeup in public by using her compact to turn herself into a zombie while raiding the New York subway. "Monstrosities" also includes zombie wall portraits that aren’t exactly static. Through lenticular photography, Mcdonald taps into the zombie within an acquaintance, a creature that often appears more animated than its "living" counterpart.

"Monstrosities" and much of Mcdonald’s current work mines horror as a source of catharsis. The tactic is most overt in 2007’s The Scream, where her screams scare off a variety of slasher killers and monstrous adversaries. Art world attempts at tapping into filmic horror can be dreadful in the sterile and blah sense (see Cindy Sherman’s 1997’s Office Killer — or better, don’t see it). But when Mcdonald bites zombies, she gives them love bites, borne out of and energized by genuine appreciation. (Johnny Ray Huston)

JILLIAN MCDONALD: MONSTROSITIES

Through July 22

Michael Rosenthal Gallery

365 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-1010

www.jillianmcdonald.net

www.rostenthalgallery.com

———-

Brain appetit: Fine reading and viewing for the discriminating zombie lover

Twilight (haven’t read it) and True Blood (haven’t seen it) are grabbing all the headlines, including a fawning New York Times story entitled "A Trend with Teeth." But fuck this newfangled passion for vampires. (Apologies to Let the Right One In: you are awesome, despite the massive English subtitle fail on your DVD.) Go back to the graveyard, sexy supernatural critters. There’s a far more terrifying and fiendishly disgusting army of coffin-rockers afoot these days. And though they’ll happily drink your blood, they’ll also help themselves to the rest of your delicious mortal flesh.

Granted, zombie movies are almost as old as cinema itself. Glenn Kay’s recent Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide (Chicago Review Press, 352 pages, $25.95), which features a forward by Stuart Gordon, director of 1985’s Re-Animator, is a pretty good jumping-off point for the uninitiated — and a steal for anyone who’s shy about paying $280 on eBay for Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci (FAB Press). Generously illustrated chapters — with a full-color photo section in the book’s center — cover the genre’s history, starting with 1932’s White Zombie (fun fact: star Bela Lugosi earned $500-ish dollars for playing the sinister plantation owner improbably named "Murder.") There are spotlights on the turbulent 1960s (the era that spawned 1968’s immortal Night of the Living Dead), the insane 1970s (with an index of "the weirdest/funniest/most disturbing things" seen in zombie films, including my own personal fave: the underwater shark vs. zombie battle in 1979’s Zombie), Italy’s reign of terror in the 1980s (the decade that also brought us, lest we forget, "Thriller"), and the rise of video game zombies in the 1990s. Sprinkled throughout are interviews with horror luminaries like makeup master Tom Savini.

Zombie Movies‘ biggest chapter is devoted to the new millennium, with shout-outs to Asian entries like Versus (2000), cult hits like 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, and mainstream moneymakers — 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake brought in $59 million. Less successful (in my book, if not apparent George Romero fanatic Kay’s) was 2007’s Diary of the Dead, the least-enjoyable entry in Romero’s esteemed zombie series. Blame it on an annoying cast, and an even more annoying reliance on the hot-for-five-minutes "self-filming" technique. Aside from producing a Crazies remake (nooo!), Romero’s next project is titled simply … of the Dead, release date unknown, zombie subject matter an absolute certainty.

Still, ammo enough for walking-dead fans sick of all this fang-banging comes in two forms: the hilarious trailer for Zombieland (due in October), featuring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg as slayers of the undead, and the eagerly-anticipated arrival of Dead Snow. Currently available as an On-Demand selection for Comcast customers (in crappy dubbed form), this Norwegian import — a comedy with plenty of satisfying gore — opens July 17 at the Roxie (in presumably superior, subtitled form). Nazi zombies, y’all. Get some! (Cheryl Eddy)

———-

Zombie playlist: Music to eat flesh by

For whatever reason, America is possessed by a another wave of fascination with the living dead. Is increased anxiety about a devastated economy manifesting as comic book fantasy? Or do we just think zombies are kinda neat? Either way, like so many (or few) survivors barricaded inside an abandoned country home, we’re captivated by the brainless hordes. In the mood for some mood music? Here’s a brief celebration of zombiedom in the world of rock. It ain’t authoritative — no self-respecting zombie respects authority.

MISFITS

"Braineaters"

(from Walk Among Us, Slash, 1982)

Yes, Walk Among Us also features "Night of the Living Dead" and "Astro Zombies," but neither of those tracks captures the profound ennui of existence as a walking corpse. Democratically sung from a zombie’s perspective, "Braineaters" laments a repetitive diet of brains. (Why can’t a zombie have some tasty guts instead?) The Misfits actually made a primitive music video for "Braineaters" that shows the band engaged in what has to be the most disgusting food fight ever filmed. If you’ve ever wanted to see a young Glenn Danzig covered in what appear to be cow brains, have I got a YouTube link for you!

ANNIHILATION TIME

"Fast Forward to the Gore"

(from II, Six Weeks, 2005)

One of the standout tracks from II, "Fast Forward to the Gore" makes excellent use of singer Jimmy Rose’s frantic vocal delivery. Rose’s raw lyrics, belted out over the hardcore guitar assault of Graham Clise and Jamie Sanitate, celebrate the subtle artistry at play when zombie meets chainsaw. In the event of an actual zombie apocalypse, this song should serve as nostalgic reminder of simpler times, when zombies were merely a source of entertainment that didn’t leave the TV screen.

THE ZOMBIES

Entire discography

Self-explanatory.

DEATH

"Zombie Ritual"

(from Scream Bloody Gore, Combat, 1987)

The second track on the seminal Scream Bloody Gore, "Zombie Ritual" helped establish the nascent death metal scene’s predictable love affair with the titular braindead hellspawn. Chuck Schuldiner’s lyrics — as awesomely repulsive as anything the genre has to offer — deal with some sort of zombie creation ceremony, though the only discernable part is the Dylanesque chorus ("Zombie ritual!" screamed four times in succession). While Death’s later albums saw Schuldiner grow by leaps and bounds as a songwriter, "Zombie Ritual" remained a live staple up until the band’s final days. (Tony Papanikolas)

Editor’s Notes

-

July 7, 2009

0

Tredmond@sfbg.com

There was plenty in the long New York Times Magazine cover story profile of Gavin Newsom to induce the Technicolor yawn. But the sentence I found most offensive was buried after the jump, down at the bottom of a page of type: "While generally considered a liberal by people outside of San Francisco, Newsom has not shied from confronting the left with tough love."

Say, what?

Whenever you read something in the Almighty Times that uses terms like "generally considered," you need to stop and think. Considered by whom? And what the hell does the Times mean by "liberal?"

You can define that word any way you want — Wikipedia has a long history, and outlines the difference between the classical liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo (much of which we would now call libertarianism) and the social liberalism of the postwar era. I think any honest definition, though, rests in significant part on the notion that unregulated free markets are not always the best way to allocate resources, that government has a role in helping the needy, and, perhaps most important, that one of the primary functions of government is to reallocate income and resources to increase equality — that is, to tax the rich to feed the poor.

Liberalism got a bad name in the 1960s, particularly when it was used to apply to politicians like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, who had the right ideas about using exceptionally high taxes on the very rich (the marginal rate in that era was more than 70 percent) to fund programs like the Great Society, but were utterly wrong about the Vietnam War and the use of U.S. military force abroad. And in the 1970s and 1980s, liberal politicians like Phil and John Burton in San Francisco became way too close to the real estate developers.

But words have to mean something, or the whole gig is over. And, as far as I’m concerned, a mayor who refuses to raise taxes to cover a huge budget deficit, and instead cuts wholesale from programs that help the poor, is not by any definition a "liberal."

He’s not terribly good at "tough love," either.

The Times uses his implementation of Care Not Cash as an example — the program, the magazine says, "essentially ended direct payments to homeless people and put the money into service agencies instead." Not exactly true — Newsom ended direct payments to homeless people, but the "care" part of the package was never really there. And it’s all gone in this latest budget. That’s not tough love — it’s just tough.

The idea that Mayor Newsom of San Francisco is a good liberal who is still willing to challenge the left every now and then is just mythology. Newsom (generally, to use the Times’ favorite word here) has no relations whatsoever with the left. That fact might help him in the campaign — Californians as a whole are not as progressive as San Franciscans. But let’s at least be honest about it.

And of course, the lavish story is another sign that the Newsom campaign is rolling ahead very nicely. "The fact that a national newspaper of the stature of the Times decides that Gavin Newsom is the story in the governor’s race is certainly a plus," Eric Jaye, Newsom’s chief political advisor, told me. I’d say that’s a bit of an understatement. *

NYT Mag takes on Cali and The Gav

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July 1, 2009

1

By Steven T. Jones

It’s fitting that the just-posted New York Times Magazine profile on how colorfully fucked-up California is right now leads with our own Mayor Gavin Newsom, both with his words and image.

The most telling paragraph is the second one, describing Newsom’s initial confusion over an emergency call button on his desk: “Newsom says he has not had occasion to press the button since, although the mayor admits he is tempted to whenever meetings drag on or when reporters ask him annoying questions or when he becomes bored, something that happens easily.”

There are mountains of things to say about all this – from discussing Newsom’s carefully crafted media image to pushing back on the latest East Coast “wow, isn’t California weird” profile – but for now, just give this long piece a read and feel free to discuss. I was already working on another Newsom post for later in the day, and this is just one of many interesting items that have popped up in the last strange week.

Father Miguel’s homily

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June 30, 2009

0

P>news@sfbg.com

Editor’s Note: Nick Buxton covered the June 24-26 United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development for the Guardian.

Shuffling into the room, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, informally known as Father Miguel, is every bit the avuncular priest — squinting through his glasses, saying we all need to take Jesus’ message of love more seriously.

At 76, the U.S.-born naturualized Nicuarguan citizen doesn’t look like a major threat to the established economic order. But as the elected president of the United Nations General Assembly, d’Escoto has touched a raw nerve among the world’s most powerful nations.

Since late May, European Union and U.S. negotiators have accused him of putting the entire U.N.’s credibility at stake. In the May 24 New York Times article "At U.N., a Sandinista’s Plan for Recovery," reporter Neil MacFarquhar accused Father Miguel of "serious delusions of grandeur." At the end of June, the criticisms reached a loud crescendo as the whole United Nations met for a summit on the global economic crisis.

Last September, d’Escoto was unanimously elected to the one-year presidency. Typically seen as a low-profile convener, d’Escoto, a former foreign minister for Nicaragua under the left-wing Sandinista government, soon showed his colors when he openly condemned U.S. "acts of aggression" in Iraq. When the financial meltdown occurred in October 2008, d’Escoto convened a high-level commission chaired by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and started to organize a U.N. conference on the global economic crisis.

He also started to deliver presentations, more like priestly homilies, that challenged the "pandemic selfishness and egotism" that led to the economic crisis and warned of ecological collapse and the need for a renewed veneration for "Mother Earth."

Yet despite the rich nations’ best attempts to isolate him politically, many of d’Escoto’s reform proposals received support from the misnamed Group of 77 nations — which actually represents more than 130 developing nations. D’Escoto made clear his decision to side with the majority against a false unity with a powerful minority: "The U.N. is made up of 192 countries …. I criticize the rich countries, made up of about 25 countries, because they don’t represent the majority but pretend they do…. We must ensure those countries most affected by the crisis have a voice in resolving the crisis."

D’Escoto’s role reflects the emergence of a more confident and powerful southern hemisphere, with nations like India and China presenting an economic challenge to traditional powers in the northern hemisphere and with Latin America posing a vocal political challenge through the likes of presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Rafael Correa of Ecuador.
Many point out that the United Nations charter (drawn up in San Francisco in 1945) gives the job of global economic coordination to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Yet this job was usurped by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which are largely controlled by the U.S. Treasury. The Obama administration’s U.N. representative John Sammis’ assertion at the recent U.N. Conference that it believes "any decisions on reform of the international financial institutions or the manner in which they conduct their business are the prerogative of their shareholders and their respective boards of governors" is clearly a blatant rear guard attack on d’Escoto’s efforts to bring democratization to the global economic system.
Beyond the geopolitics, d’Escoto’s probing challenge to the world’s economic powers also gives voice to a breakdown of faith in the credos of free markets, unlimited economic growth, and living to consume. His homilies may occasionally be esoteric, but when d’Escoto proposes the creation of a Global Economic Council or speaks to the importance of values such as solidarity, compassion, and cooperation, they seem much more lucid than the U.S. determination to continue with "business as usual."

Editor’s Notes

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June 30, 2009

0

tredmond@sfbg.com

Lucy Dalglish, the director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, is about as much of a national leader on open-government and free-speech issues as we have in this country. She’s been watching (and fighting) the battle against government secrecy for more than a quarter century as a reporter in St. Paul, a media lawyer, and since 2000 the head of RCFP. So when she sounds an alarm, it’s worth listening.

And at the annual conference of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, she warned that the decline of daily newspapers — something those of us in the alt-media often treat as a spectator sport, jeering at the losers who for years couldn’t figure out how to print news people wanted to read — is going to have a serious impact on open government.

The thing is, conservative, weak, and lame as so many dailies were, they have been the ones funding almost all of the major freedom-of-information lawsuits and organizations. The case law that protects the news media (including bloggers) from nuisance libel suits? That came from The New York Times. The law preventing the government from using prior restraint to block the publication of material it thinks might damage national security? The New York Times. The most important open-government cases in the nation? Mostly filed by medium-sized dailies like The Press Enterprise in Riverside.

I’m not here — lord knows, I’m not here — defending the likes of Knight-Ridder and Copley and Scripps-Howard, which are mostly very conservative newspaper chains that have decimated news coverage, kowtowed to the powerful, and screwed up a lot of communities. But Dalglish has a point: as the old guard in the media spirals into decline, who’s going to take up the free-speech and open-government banner — and by that I mean, who’s going to put up the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to file and defend these key lawsuits and keep these organizations alive?

"It isn’t," Dalglish said, "going to be Google."

The Chronicle ran a story June 29th talking about the growing discussion of the need to reform Proposition 13. It was mostly a political piece, looking at the popularity of the measure and the complications of trying to change a law that has pretty much defined public finance in California for 30 years.

Robert Cruickshank at Calitics.com brought up something in response to the Chron story that hadn’t really occurred to me:

"Since 1978," he wrote, "California has experienced two massive housing bubbles. The 1980s bubble, which seemed large at the time, was primarily focused on California and caused widespread unaffordability before the 1989 crash. The 2000s bubble was a nationwide phenomenon, but Prop. 13 played a role by removing a brake on housing inflation. If homeowners saw tax assessments rise in relation to their values, instead of being largely fixed at the rate at the time of purchase, it seems unlikely we would have had the enormous and destructive boom and bust in the housing market we witnessed."

So Prop. 13 causes high housing prices. Probably high rents, too. Worth thinking about. *

Bending toward oblivion

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June 24, 2009

0

culture@sfbg.com

Gay liberation changed Martin Duberman’s life. In the 1960s, Duberman taught history at Princeton, hardly a bastion of radical thought. Yet he found himself invigorated by nascent counterculture movements and became a champion of the left, penning essays in The New York Times and serving as faculty advisor to the Princeton chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. At the same time, Duberman spent years in intensive psychotherapy in desperate attempts to "cure" his homosexuality. Soon after the emergence of the gay liberation movement, however, he rejected this homophobic vision and embraced a gay identity. His work also became queerer.

Over the years, he has written more than 20 books — biographies, plays, memoirs, history texts, and a novel — on a wide range of topics ranging from antislavery activism to the civil rights movement and Stonewall. His new book, Waiting to Land: A (Mostly) Political Memoir, 1985-2008 (The New Press 352 pages, $26.95), is a combination of diary entries and recollections from the Reagan years to the present. This latest work serves as a window into Duberman’s activist and scholarly careers, as well as his critiques of the mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian movement.

SFBG We’re approaching the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the symbolic event of early gay liberation, and I’m wondering if you think there’s any of this liberationist spirit left in the gay movement.

Martin Duberman Well, I guess it depends on how you define liberationist. In the early days, gay liberationists were aware of a great many other ills in the society besides their own. Their own were real, and they were well aware of that. But there was a lot wrong, they felt, with the system, and their central goal was to challenge many of the established institutions and values. Today most LGBT people seem to think of themselves — certainly they tell the mainstream — as "just folks," except for this little matter of a separate sexual orientation. That they’re patriotic Americans and they want the same things that everybody else wants, etc.

SFBG In Waiting to Land, you cover this assimilationist turn in the gay movement. You talk about the March on Washington in 1993 where gays in the military became the dominant issue. You also talk about Stonewall 25, which happened one year later in New York City, where one of the biggest fundraising events was held onboard a U.S. aircraft carrier, and where corporate sponsorship arguably overwhelmed any celebration of resistance, history, or culture. Has anything changed in the last 15 years?

MD The early ’70s were still fueled by the countercultural movement of the ’60s, and the early gay movement built on the insights and the demands of, say, the feminist movement or the antiwar movement. I mean there was so much going on in the ’60s, and together it all amounted to a challenge to the so-called experts. There was an across-the-board challenging of many traditional views, so finally that began to seep down, or up — whatever it is — to us. That’s the whole trouble, I think, with the assimilationist turn. It denies our own gay past and our culture and our politics. I mean, they’re willing to throw all that away in order to make stronger the claim that we’re just folks.

SFBG And do you feel like mainstream gay people have become more heterosexualized? I mean in that particular way of embracing long-term committed partnership, monogamy, or now even marriage, as the only type of love or intimacy that’s valid?

MD Yeah. Once again, the banner of lifetime monogamous pair-bonding has been raised. Now some of that is the result of AIDS, in which people were scared to death, so they settled down into so-called permanent relationships. Not everybody. But many more than had done so in the ’70s.

SFBG When you talk about AIDS in Waiting to Land, it punctures the style of your writing. You’ll be writing something that’s more ruminative, and then you’ll have three or four sentences about a friend who died or a series of friends who died, and then you go back into your thoughts about something outside of that.

MD I think that’s right. It’s why I put that subtitle in. I say "mostly political," because when it came to the death of friends, I did talk about my personal feelings, and my sadness, whereas most of the time in Waiting to Land I’m talking about external events or public policies.

SFBG You yourself have played a role as both an insider and outsider in a variety of realms. In Waiting to Land, you deliver scathing critiques of the rigid hierarchies and competitive structures of academia. You talk about the homophobia of the straight left, and you talk about the limited agenda of the gay mainstream. You talk about the exclusiveness of establishment theatre and mainstream media. Yet you’ve also worked inside all these structures. So I’m wondering how these institutions have formed your politics and how you’ve helped to form or transform these institutions.

MD [W.E.B.] Du Bois, the great African American leader, once said something — I think he called it double vision. He said that although he had had a superb education and was accepted by mainstream whites, nonetheless he felt he was a spy in the culture, a spy who was bringing the news about the mainstream back to his own people. And on one level, I have had a very easy time passing — I went to very good schools, I was on the tennis team in high school, etc. Nobody, I think, or very few people, guessed that I was in fact homosexual, and I did my best to play along with that. I was very career-oriented, I was very competitive — I always wanted to be first in my class, win the best prize for an essay, and that’s where most of my energy went throughout my 20s. But then once the counterculture began, I sort of leapt on it. I was immediately sympathetic, and I wrote lots of essays during the ’60s in which I was very strongly on the side of the New Left. And then it took a while longer after that before I realized that of course the same applies to being gay.

SFBG In terms of your role as both insider and outsider, do you feel that that’s helped you to develop stronger critiques of all those institutions, whether on the straight left, in the gay mainstream, or in establishment theater and media?

MD I think so, because I knew the inner workings of many of these mainstream institutions, and so I was able to see the falsity of many of the attitudes, especially toward people who are not middle-class whites. White men, I should say.

SFBG I think one thing you’ve tried very deliberately throughout your career, whether as a writer, an academic, or an activist, is to build movement ties across lines of class, race, gender, and age. In the new book, you talk about trying to bring an awareness of queer and feminist issues into the straight left, and an awareness of race and class into the gay mainstream — and feeling mostly like you’ve failed.

MD I think it’s because the mainstream left is no more receptive — they all claim that, "well of course we believe you people should have your rights, and of course we’re tolerant of your lifestyle." But when it comes right down to it, you cannot get them to hang around long enough to listen to the ways in which queer values and perspectives might inform their own lives. They don’t believe that for a second. And that hasn’t changed at all. At least, if it has changed, I haven’t seen it.

SFBG And what about in terms of the other side of the equation? With the dominant agendas of the big gay institutions centering on marriage, military service, ordination into the priesthood, adoption, and unquestioning gentrification and consumerism, do you think that those particular emphases prevent a deeper analysis of structural issues of racism and classism?

MD Well, of course they do. Mainstream America is still further behind the gay movement in dealing with any of those issues. So when you’re bending your energy to turning into the mainstream, you’re simultaneously burying your awareness of the class and racial and economic divisions that continue to characterize our country.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the author, most recently, of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights) and the editor of an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull).

Intelligent design

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June 24, 2009

0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

The first world is so jammed with manufactured stuff we can’t perceive most of it — even the stuff we buy rapidly and take for granted, to be replaced by each next-model thingy. This process is now our economy’s bedrock, as was underlined when the government’s first order of business after 9/11 was to encourage partying like it’s $19.99 via those "America: Open for Business" signs with Old Glory as shopping bag. Yet the economy and consumerism’s ever-more-tangible impact on our planet seem to scream, "Shop less!"

Durability vs. disposability and perennial style vs. trendiness are conflicting impulses on both sides of the buyer/seller equation. In theory we might all agree everything we buy should be functional, sturdy, and attractive enough to keep until it gives out. But this flies in the face of nearly all marketplace logic, and purchaser desire. The whole idea is to generate decisions made on what you want, not what you need. Better still if that line blurs.

The New York Times’ "Consumed" columnist Rob Walker describes this drive as one for "the ‘New Now,’ a ‘New Next’" in Objectified, the latest documentary by Gary Hustwit. Like his Helvetica (2007), which looked at the stealthily enormous role of typeface in our lives, Objectified is more an appreciation than a critique of something utterly ubiquitous in this case product design — and a few stellar personalities behind it.

Hustwit isn’t interested in history or the full range of design as much as celebrating those idiosyncratic individuals whose design imprint falls within the ongoing tradition of 20th-century modernism, with its clean lines, minimal detailing, and whiff of yesteryear’s sci-fi future. "Good design is as little design as possible" insists retired innovator Dieter Rams of German home appliance giant Braun. Many of the film’s interviewees — mostly designers well-known within the industry by name or firm (IDEO, Smart) — muse on products rooted in the post-analog "connected world." With an item’s inner workings now reduced to the microchip’s all-powerful DNA, there’s little need for form to resemble function anymore; practically everything can be some sort of smooth, small, amorphous blob or plane.

Still, as Objectified emphasizes in Helvetica‘s same alert, amused, admiring way, the best designers don’t aim for depersonalizing aesthetic perfection (let alone garish flamboyance). Instead, their goal is honing every manufactured object we require or enjoy so it makes the world a mite more user-friendly. There’s an ingratiating segment here observing just how much thought goes into Smart’s creating garden-shear handles even an arthritic could love. Elsewhere, one colorful industry type rails that there’s simply no excuse for bad design anymore. Yet another GPS no one can figure out should occasion "riots in the streets," he says.

Objectified‘s primary images of rhyming-row merch in consumerist temples (IKEA, Target, etc.) are "globalization" personified. Yet as one person mercifully mentions here, that neverending parade of stuff only reaches a lucky 10 percent or so. Since the other 90 percent aspire toward disposable income and luxury goods, our insatiable minority now ponders how to tell them it’s all been a horrible mistake.

The designers here are aware of, yet somewhat flummoxed by, that crisis: It’s the very nature of their jobs that "most of what you design ends up in a landfill." It will fall to a different documentary to chronicle how product design adopts new agendas of quasi-permanence, successive useage, and biodegradability. When and if that truly happens, Objectified might turn into beautiful detritus, an artifact from a vanished age of elegant waste.

OBJECTIFIED

Wed/24-Sun/28, 1, 3, 5 p.m.

(also Wed/24-Sat/27, 7 and 9 p.m. ), $8–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

Gloria Vanderbilt’s Brooklyn sex mansion: anything but vanilla

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June 19, 2009

1

By Juliette Tang

Gloria Vanderbilt may be 85-years-old, but she will have you know that she is having none of your boring, vanilla bedroom fantasies. Famous for that whole 80s denim thing, and for being Anderson Cooper’s begetter, Vanderbilt’s erotic novel Obsession (about BDSM no less!) is due out on June 23, and, according to the New York Times, it comes with a healthy dose of flora, though not, apparently, of fauna:

Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by “The Joy of Cooking.” And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.

Charles McGrath cautiously sidesteps Ms. Vanderbilt’s own involvement in BDSM (and stiffly acknowledges that her novel “uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from”), but I doubt the author is any stranger to her subject.

Wine-by-the-glass battle: half full, half empty

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June 5, 2009

1

By Cécile Lepage

As expected, the Planning Commission granted the national franchise WineStyles a conditional use permit June 4 to add a wine bar to its premises on West Portal.

But the panel limited the hours and size of the bar beyond what the planning staff had recommended. (To stream the video of the hearing, click on item 8.)

WineStyles lined up impressive community support. Not only did the outfit’s backers submit 458 signatures and 58 letters in their favor, but 15 aficionados actually came in person to City Hall to rave about the wine store owners’ friendliness and their role in the community.

But the commissioners were also sympathetic to argument by supporters of a locally owned wine bar, Que Syrah, who fear that the big chain will drive the locals out of business.

Although the CEO of the Winestyles chain, Robert Spuck, told the New York Times in 2007 that blurring the line between a bar and a retail store was part of the company’s mission, the local WineStyles attorney, Tuija Catalano, argued that the establishment wants to remain primarily a liquor store. So the commissioners decided that sales of wine by the glass will have to cease at 8 p.m. daily instead of 10 p.m. The number of seats will be limited to 8 instead of 15.

Both WineStyles owner James Robinson and Que Syrah owner Stephanie McCardell declined to comment.

Editor’s Notes

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June 2, 2009

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› Tredmond@sfbg.com

The absolute most stunning statement of how messed up the state of California is emerged last week from the state director of finance, explaining why the proposed budget cuts fall so heavily on services for the poor. Let me quote directly from The New York Times:

"Government doesn’t provide services to rich people," Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. "It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.

"You have to cut where the money is," he added.

Um … government doesn’t provide services to rich people? What about, say, the roads they drive on, and the airports they fly in and out of? What about the vast sums the state spends putting out fires that threaten wealthy enclaves in Southern California? What about the public education system, which trains workers for businesses? What about the entire criminal justice system, which exists to a significant extent to prevent poor people from taking rich people’s money?

Do you think Sergey Brin and Larry Page would have become Google billionaires if the Internet — developed and paid for by the government — didn’t exist?

No. Federal, state, and local governments all spend money on services for the rich. And by and large, those services don’t get cut when budgets are busted, and by and large, the rich don’t pay their fair share for the services they get — and by and large, nobody in politics talks about that when these nasty decisions get made.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s just remember that as 900,000 kids lose their health insurance and California becomes, in the words of Mayor Gavin Newsom, the first state in the industrialized world to have no welfare system at all. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Cutting services for the poor, as opposed to cutting things rich people want and need, or making them pay a tiny bit more to keep society stable, is a political choice.

The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees just put out a fascinating document looking at alternatives to the governor’s cuts — including a bunch of things that can be done without the two-thirds vote required to raise taxes. There are, for example, about $2.5 billion worth of useless and wasteful tax loopholes identified by AFSCME that could be closed (hurting the rich, helping the rest of us). That would save a lot of health and welfare programs.

San Francisco has choices, too. Downtown parking fees hit wealthier people; Muni fare hikes are a tax on the poor. A congestion management fee on downtown would overwhelmingly hit wealthier commuters; cuts in public health overwhelmingly hit the poor. The Tenderloin’s Community Justice Center hurts low-income people (and helps rich tourists and the hotels scare away the homeless).

The thing that kills me is that some of us have been saying over and over — for years and years — that the city needs to develop a better tax system (which will require a public vote) to minimize these cyclical crises. And some of us have been pointing out that a public power system would generate several hundred million a year (and that private power is sucking $600 million a year out of the local economy).

Do we have to keep blundering from disaster to disaster? For how long?

*

The rich don’t use public services

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June 1, 2009

11

By Tim Redmond

That’s what Gov. Schwarzenegger’s finance director told the New York Times:

Nearly all of the billions of dollars in cuts the administration has proposed would affect programs for poor Californians, although prisons and schools would take hits, as well.

“Government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.” He added: “You have to cut where the money is.”

But that’s just wrong.

California spends a ton of money protecting rich people’s homes from fires. California spends billions on law-enforcement and prisons, much of that money going to ensure that poor prople can’t take money from rich people. Who do you think state highways serve? (Mostly the middle-class.) Who gets to live safer, more secure lives because desperatly mentally ill people aren’t wandering the streets?

Does the public school system and the state college and university system not train workers for the state’s wealthiest corporations?

And what about all of the excessive tax breaks that go to big businesses? Tax breaks are money that comes out of the government’s pocket. Tax breaks are handouts, just like welfare payments are handouts. Except that the tax breaks tend to be much bigger.

When you add up all the benefits that state government provides for the wealthy — and you look at how modest the tax payments from the wealthy are in this state — you get a sense of why we’re in this budget mess.