News

Converting the rock

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Native American spiritual leader Marshall "Golden Eagle" Jack admits he was just a kid in 1969 when a group of American Indians occupied Alcatraz Island. They claimed that the island’s reclassification as surplus property following the 1963 closure of Alcatraz Prison entitled them to take possession of the iconic island.

But Jack says he knows enough people from the American Indian Movement, which began advocating for urban Indians in the late ’60s, to understand that "the people standing up for their rights back then didn’t have enough clout in the legal system" to keep the island and build an American Indian cultural center on its craggy slopes.

Instead, the island became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which is operated by the National Park Service. Today it attracts 1.5 million visitors per year, the GGNRA’s chief of public affairs, Rich Weideman, says. But having a brutal former prison as one of San Francisco’s top tourist attractions is unsettling to some.

So Jack and AIM founder Dennis Banks, Chief Avrol Looking Horse, Laynee Bluebird Woman, and Rose Mary Cambra of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe have sponsored Proposition C, a nonbinding declaration on the February 2008 ballot that would make it city policy to explore acquiring Alcatraz Island and setting up a global peace center in place of the prison.

They envision a white domed conference center, a labyrinth, a medicine wheel, and what their campaign literature calls an "array of architecturally advanced domed Artainment [sic] multimedia centers," which sounds more like a new age resort than a Native American cultural center. But Jack said the most important thing is turning the page on the island’s bleak modern history.

"My bottom line is getting the actual prison off the island," Jack explains. "There’s a lot of crystal energy, spiritually wise, on the island. It’s an icon for a lot of tribes around the Bay Area who were here way before the Europeans. A Global Peace Center idea is just an option, but if it doesn’t manifest that way, if it becomes an ecological center, fine."

Jack serves as assistant director of the Global Peace Foundation, a branch of the nonprofit San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, which Mill Valley resident Da Vid founded in the late 1970s — about the time he first had a vision of domes on Alcatraz.

"I saw them during a Celestial Healing Festival on Mt. Tam in 1978, seven years after the Indian occupation ended," says Da Vid, who says he is a medical doctor and artist — and currently serves as treasurer of the Alcatraz Conversion Project, a political action committee whose coffers contain $30,000 from Da Vid’s mother, Miriam Ornstein.

Da Vid is also the founder of the Light Party, which he describes as "a spiritual–political party using its resources to promote the Alcatraz Conversion Project in order to garner support for the construction of a Global Peace Center."

But to the San Francisco Republican Party, Prop. C represents nothing but a tax burden. "Were this proposal implemented the burden of maintaining and operating Alcatraz would shift from the federal government to San Francisco taxpayers," San Francisco Republican Party chair Christine Hughes writes in an official ballot argument against the measure, also claiming the measure’s sponsors are "an unaccountable and loosely organized nonprofit which envisions a billion dollar project administered by a local-international trust."

Yet GPF assistant director Kevin Ohnsman told the Guardian, "We feel that the Republican Party’s opposition to Prop. C is our best endorsement.

"Once acquired by the city, a portion of the considerable revenue from the ferryboats will be shared with the city," Ohnsman said. "This income will be more than sufficient to cover the minimal administrative costs for maintaining Alcatraz."

Currently ferry tickets to Alcatraz cost $16.50 each, of which about 25 percent, or $4.5 million annually, goes to the GGNRA, with the bulk of those monies covering Alcatraz’s night security and maintenance of the buildings and sewer.

According to San Francisco controller Ed Harrington, "should the proposed policy statement be approved, it would not increase the cost of government."

But that’s only because the policy statement wouldn’t do anything.

"However, should San Francisco actually work to acquire Alcatraz Island from the feds," Harrington adds, "there would be significant costs."

But Da Vid says there’s something more important at stake than money. He asks, "The bottom line is, do we want an old, decaying prison to continue to be a prominent landmark for the Bay Area or do we want to create a new Alcatraz, which will define a new emerging paradigm committed to progressive, enlightened values?"

Weideman cites Alcatraz’s landmark status and the 10,000 birds that nest on the island each spring as major hurdles in Vid’s path: "To remove the prison, which is a national historic monument, along with the Civil War–era fort beneath it, would take an act of Congress."

Stop holiday Media Giveaway

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Stop the FCC’s Quiet Holiday Giveaway to the Big Media

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Since the Big Media are blacking out the story, let me pass along the news and the action plan to mobilize the message and the troops to stop the latest media giveaway by the Bush Administration. It’s payback time for their support of the Iraq war and occupation.

stopmedia.gif

People across the country are building a wall to stop the FCC’s plan to let Big Media swallow up more local stations.

Dear Media Reformer,

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin refuses to listen to the public, but Congress is starting to pay attention. This week, the House announced a formal investigation into the way the FCC conducts business. And yesterday, during a House oversight hearing, Congress scolded the FCC for a “short-circuited decision-making process” and “abuse of power.”

Our campaign is gaining momentum, but we need you to join us in our stand against Big Media.

Stop FCC Chairman Martin & Big Media

In response to a growing public outcry, the Senate Commerce Committee this week passed the Media Ownership Act of 2007 (S. 2332). This crucial legislation would force Martin to slow down, give the public more time to comment, and address the negative impact of media consolidation on minority and female ownership.

Senators Boxer and Feinstein are already a co-sponsors. Thank your senators being leaders on this important effort.


Thank Your Senators for Co-Sponsoring the Media Ownership Act

Chairman Martin hopes you aren’t paying attention. He wants to vote on his proposal to let Big Media get even bigger on Dec. 18. If you think we need more local, diverse, and democratic media, now is the time to act.

Congress is taking action, but we need to show that this isn’t just another inside-the-Beltway issue. Too much is at stake, and they need to see the faces of the millions of Americans who are fed up with another massive giveaway to Big Media.

Build the Wall: Ask Your Senators to Co-sponsor the Media Ownership Act

In 2003, nearly 3 million citizens like you stood up to the FCC and put a stop to media consolidation. We can do it again. But we need to put a public face on the resistance to media consolidation.

Write Your Senators. Add Your Picture to the Wall. Stop Big Media.

Onward,

Alexandra Russell
Program Director
Free Press
www.freepress.net
www.stopbigmedia.com

P.S. To fully understand what Chairman Martin doesn’t want you to know about his new ownership rules, read our new report: Devil the Details

——————————————————————————–

View more information about this campaign at: www.action.freepress.net/campaign/tyownership

Tell your friends about this campaign at: www.action.freepress.net/campaign/tyownership/forward

The California experiment

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› news@sfbg.com

If you wiped California off the face of the planet, just made it disappear — leaving behind no car or SUV, politician, person, or cow — you’d eliminate only about 1.6 percent of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

Keep California and lose Texas, and you’d more or less double the benefit to the planet, but you’d still be a long way short of solving the problem of global warming.

So it’s hard at first to see how California’s highly touted experiment in planet saving, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, Assembly Bill 32 for short, is going to make much of a difference.

But on a human scale, on the scale of what government can do, AB 32 is an enormous undertaking. "We’ve got only five years to develop regulations for every sector of society," Stanley Young of the California Air Resources Board explained.

The plan was signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006, and its goal is to reduce California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. In that way, AB 32 is meant to mirror the Kyoto Protocol.

In 2007, California is expected to put about 496 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Most of that is carbon dioxide, but mixed in are nitrogen oxide, methane, and a whole cocktail of less common but more harmful gases produced by transportation and industry.

What do 496 MMT of greenhouse gases look like? CARB figures that just 1 MMT of CO2 would fill 200,000 hot air balloons. So all of California’s greenhouse gases for a year would fit into about 99 million hot air balloons.

Right now the best estimate we have of greenhouse gas emissions for California in 1990 is somewhere around 436 MMT. Getting from 496 to 436 doesn’t sound all that impressive. Just as 87 million hot air balloons doesn’t sound any more manageable than 99 million.

But take the longer view. If we do nothing to slow the steady growth of CO2 and other global-warming pollutants, we’ll reach something close to 680 MMT of the stuff by 2020. Suddenly, just getting back to the pollution levels of 1990 looks pretty good.

CARB has until December 2008 to figure out how to get California there. According to the new law, all of the regulations to meet the 2020 goal have to be in place and in force by 2012.

One of the most promising tools California has in its climate-change toolbox is AB 1493, also called the Pavley bill, after its author, former assemblyperson Fran Pavley. The Pavley bill requires that by 2020 all cars and trucks sold in California emit 30 percent less greenhouse gas from their tailpipes. That’s about 30 MMT — a whopping 17 percent of the overall goal of AB 32.

The problem is that the US Environmental Protection Agency won’t let California enforce the Pavley bill. In 2005 the state asked for a waiver from the federal government to enforce the rule, because automakers argued that only the federal government, not California, could make regulations affecting fuel efficiency. Two years later the George W. Bush administration still isn’t saying whether it will grant the waiver or not. In fact, California had to sue the federal government last month just to try to get an answer. If the answer turns out to be no, the state will likely sue again.

Setting aside the uncertain future of the Pavley bill, the next big category of greenhouse gas reductions comes in the form of CARB’s "early action items," some of which are supposed to go into effect by 2010 and many more by 2012.

Each of these chips away at California’s total inventory of greenhouse gases. In combination, the early action rules are supposed to move California another 24 percent closer to AB 32’s overall goal.

For example, requiring ships at California ports to get electricity from shore rather than their own diesel engines could shave about 500,000 metric tons from California’s greenhouse gas inventory. Similar benefits are predicted from rules requiring people to keep their tires properly inflated and for tougher regulations on the manufacture of semiconductors.

Requiring trucking companies to make their rigs more aerodynamic will net a little more than 1 MMT. And capturing more methane from landfills could knock out 2 to 4 MMT of greenhouse gases.

Altogether, CARB is proposing 44 different regulations just to cobble together that 24 percent. And any one of these regulations could lead to a political fight. Each regulation affects a particular industry or a particular part of the California lifestyle.

Let’s see: 17 percent plus 24 percent … that leaves 59 percent of the CO2 pie still to be accounted for. CARB only has until the end of 2008 to figure out where those remaining reductions will come from.

Some of the rules are on the drawing board already. The state’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, called for in an executive order from Schwarzenegger earlier this year, could reduce California’s total emissions by 10 to 20 MMT a year. State laws requiring California to use more renewable energy should also contribute to the reduction.

After all that, you’d still end up putting just as much CO2 into the air in 2020 as you did a generation earlier. But you would also be the first generation to force the line on the graph measuring global-warming pollution to go down, not up. And that’s a good thing.

Turn up the volume

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER I read the news the other day, oh boy, and the dimming days of early winter appear to have gotten darker: the Xmas lights have begun to twinkle down my street, above the Red Poppy House, but they can’t draw attention away from the little shrine of bedraggled plastic balloons and dampened candles around the corner dedicated to 21-year-old Erick Balderas, who was shot to death at Treat Avenue and 23rd Street on Nov. 18. I hobbled home from No Country for Old Men and a lychee-infused cocktail just a few hours before he was slain only a block away, but I failed to hear the gunshots. Thinking about his death and that of 18-year-old Michael Price Jr., shot near the Metreon box office by, allegedly, another teenager, one wonders why nightlife has grown so deadly for the kids who can really use some fun.

Reading is a safe substitute. When going out seems to be getting more hazardous, who can blame a culture vulture for wanting to stay in and nest with a good book and a CD, preferably the two combined in one? Those in the market for juicy boomer-rock dirt will likely dig this year’s Clapton: The Autobiography (Broadway), ex Pattie Boyd’s Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me (Harmony), and Ron Wood’s Ronnie: The Autobiography (St. Martin’s) — survivor’s tales all. But perhaps this is also the moment to revisit a musician who perished as violently and mysteriously as autumn’s lost boys: Elliott Smith. Photographer Autumn de Wilde manages to skate between the coffee table and the fanzine rack with a handsome tome of photos, many snapped around the time of Smith’s Figure 8 (DreamWorks, 2000).

Figure 8 was a divisive recording, alienating early lo-fi lovers and seemingly reaching out to the "Miss Misery" masses, and Smith looked self-consciously awkward slouching in front of the music store swirl that turned into a shrine after his death. Talking to friends, exes, family, managers, and producers who haven’t gone on the record since Smith’s death, de Wilde gathers snatches of intriguing info — for instance, it was engineer ex-girlfriend Joanna Bolme who gave Smith the sorry bowl haircut that de Wilde documents — and thoughts on the art of capturing spirits like Smith on the fly. Centering Elliott Smith (Chronicle) on images from her "Son of Sam" video, a poignant reworking of The Red Balloon, she finds the innocence that made Smith’s songs — and their anger over quashed hope — possible amid the listener cynicism and the songwriter’s lyrical bitterness. The kicker: an accompanying five-song CD of live acoustic solo Smith tracks, culled from 1997 appearances at Los Angeles’ Largo, including a sweetly screwed-up rendition of Hank Williams’s "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down."

Another volume to really turn down the covers with is Wax Poetics Anthology, Volume 1 (Wax Poetics/Puma), a mixologist’s spin cycle of stories from the great mag. Editor Andre Torres taps interviews with golden era hip-hop knob twirlers Prince Paul, the RZA, and Da Beatminerz, as well as pieces on James Brown’s drummer Clyde Stubblefield, reggae producers King Tubby and Clive Chin, salsa giant Fania Records, Henry Chalfant of Style Wars, and much more than you can down in one chill evening. Extensive discographies aside, the only thing that’s lacking here is a soundtrack.

Not so with the much slimmer but no less passionate new issue of Ptolemaic Terrascope zine, once financed by the Bevis Frond. Mushroom drummer and Runt–Water Records consultant Pat Thomas has assumed the editorship. Apparently after 15 years and 35 issues, previous head Phil McMullen was "burned out, for lack of a better word," Thomas told me from his Oakland home, where he was happy to get away from a take-home exam on menstrual cycles. The new editor is even on the cover, looking appropriately put-upon; it’s the Alyssa Anderson photo shot in the Haight that was adapted for Devendra Banhart’s Cripple Crow (XL). Banhart is so ubiquitous these days that some Guardian staffers are tempted to start a swear jar to gather quarters every time his name is invoked. But he’s a natural cover star, also doing a jukebox jury piece with Thomas and Vetiver’s Andy Cabic within Terrascope.

United Kingdom folk luminaries like Shirley Collins and Davey Graham crop up in interviews and on the zine’s CD, which teems with wonderful unreleased tracks by the Velvet Underground’s Doug Yule, Willow Willow, Six Organs of Admittance, Ruthann Friedman, and Kendra Smith, among others, all playing off the issue’s Anglo-folk orientation, though pieces on Elaine Brown and the Black Panther Party parallel Thomas’s ongoing work assembling a box set for Water on the Panthers’ music and spoken word. The editor already has interviews with Wizz Jones and Ian Matthews ready for the next issue, but he’s tempted to put the zine on hold while he assembles a guidebook to black power music, foreshadowing new turns in Terrascope. "The magazine was always, for lack of a better word, very white," Thomas quips. "I want to blacken it up a little bit." 2

For more picks, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

THE RUBINOOS BASSIST AL CHAN’S TOP MUSIC BOOKS

•<\!s>The Kinks: All Day and All of the Night: Day by Day Concerts, Recordings, and Broadcasts, 1964–1997, by Doug Hinman and the Kinks (Backbeat, 2004)

•<\!s>The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, by Michael Weldon (Ballantine, 1983)

•<\!s>Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of the Who, by Andy Neill (Virgin, 2005)

•<\!s>Hollywood Rock, by Marshall Crenshaw (HarperCollins, 1994)

•<\!s>The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, eighth edition, by Joel Whitburn (Billboard, 2004). "I can just sit down with that on an eight-hour flight and look at charts. I’m a total music geek!"

The Rubinoos open for Jonathan Richman, Thurs/6, 8 p.m., $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.musichallsf.com.

For rent sale

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Luz Moran, 75, fingers through a shoebox full of certified envelopes from her landlord’s attorney, squinting at the English words. She’s sitting on a red couch in the living room of her modest Mission District apartment, her feet barely touching the floor.

"This is another check he sent me, look," she mutters in Spanish, pointing out two checks amounting to $3,752.85. The money was sent along with an Ellis Act eviction notice, the first half of the $7,500 in relocation benefits city law requires be given to elderly or disabled tenants who are removed through the state law (if the tenant is not elderly or disabled, the landlord only needs to provide them with $4,500).

"I don’t know what we will do. Other apartments are expensive, and we can’t afford them," Moran says. The money is barely enough to cover moving costs and the first month’s rent at another place, she says, adding, "I don’t think this landlord is dying because of lack of money."

The eviction was not her landlord’s first attempt to move Moran, along with her 92-year-old mother and her son, from their two-bedroom apartment. In May 2006 he offered to sell them the unit for a discounted rate of $310,000, which was out of the family’s price range. Then he suggested a buyout agreement so they would leave voluntarily, but said he couldn’t offer much more than the Ellis Act’s required compensation. After the initial attempt to subdivide the building and all other negotiations failed, the landlord finally issued the eviction. He now wants to sell the units as tenancy in common apartments. But the Morans — and some other tenants in the building — are refusing to cash his checks.

"Because if we accept the money, it says that we are willing to leave here," Moran says.

The word eviction brings back bad memories for many residents of San Francisco, where the number of people thrown out of their homes numbered 2,878 in 1999. Then, at the height of the dot-com era, long-term renters were booted to make room for higher-paying tenants and out-of-towners prepared to buy six-figure homes.

But Moran’s story highlights two new additions to the renter woes that fill the San Francisco Tenants Union these days: landlord buyouts and a surge in TIC homeownership. With San Francisco’s housing prices on a seemingly perpetual upswing, it’s no wonder TIC ownership has increased twelvefold in the past decade. In 1996, 55 TIC units were sold through the San Francisco Multiple Listing Service, and in 2006 that number rose to 650, according to Realtor groups.

At first glance, it looks as if this trend should answer the prayers of middle-class families while avoiding an increase in no-fault tenant evictions. The city’s total evictions have been going down since 2001, hovering around 1,500 since 2003. But over the past five years Ellis Act petitions have slowly picked up, then petered off again, according to Rent Board data. And Ted Gullicksen, office coordinator at the Tenants Union, says these numbers don’t take into account relocation as a result of unregistered buyouts and threats, which can often lead to TIC ownership.

Each weekday at the Tenants Union dozens of renters shuffle through the doors, plop into mismatched chairs, and wait for hours to spill their complaints and legal paperwork onto the desk of a volunteer counselor.

"We’re pretty busy here at the Tenants Union," Gullicksen says on a Friday afternoon during counseling hours. "It’s pretty close to what it was during the worst of the dot-com years."

Gullicksen reports an increase in the number of threats and buyouts of tenants in the past year. He attributes that to 2006 legislation passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors prohibiting the conversion of buildings after the eviction of elderly or disabled tenants or multiple units. By avoiding putting an Ellis Act or other no-fault eviction on the record, the landlord can eventually convert the building into a condominium because its history hasn’t been tainted.

A building with no eviction history goes for more on the MLS, according to Gullicksen, which explains why landlords are willing to pay up to $60,000 for a "voluntary" tenant relocation. The private landlord-tenant agreement may be lucrative to the individuals involved, but it results in an almost undetectable loss of an affordable rental unit.

Gullicksen says it’s impossible to determine how many tenants relocate due to buyouts on a citywide level, but about 60 people seek help with one at the Tenants Union every month. Most tell a similar tale: A developer or landlord will offer between $2,000 and $60,000 to tenants to voluntarily vacate. The tenant may ask for a higher sum, and they’ll negotiate back and forth. Eventually, the tenant may be either bought out or evicted.

"It’s a game of chicken, really," Gullicksen says.

The loss of rental units at the hands of TICs or buyouts is not a small matter in a city where two-thirds of residents are renters (on the national level only 34 percent of housing units were rentals in the year 2000), and there is already a shortage of affordable housing.

US Census data show that San Francisco lost 18,474 rental-occupied housing units between 2000 and 2006. And the city isn’t doing much to plug the drain. According to the Planning Department, 13,795 new units have been built and ready for occupancy since 2000, and approximately 12,600 of those are condominiums.

Although the terms "TIC" and "condo" are often used interchangeably, they’re legally different. TICs follow a shared-homeownership model involving one deed and multiple live-in shareholders. They aren’t registered or restricted by the city, whereas condominium conversions are capped at 200 a year. Most notable is the price differential: TICs go for about $200,000 less than a median-priced condominium in San Francisco, which currently runs at $783,000, according to the San Francisco Association of Realtors.

TIC owners typically buy in hoping to raise their property’s value by eventually converting their units to condos through the city’s lottery system. Proponents call TICs one of the city’s only affordable homeownership options. Critics call them a loophole in condo conversion restriction laws.

Radhi Ahern, managing partner and broker at the TIC Group, doesn’t apologize for buyouts to make room for TICs. She acknowledges that TICs are obtained through financial negotiations with tenants.

"It’s the tenant’s choice on whether they get a buyout or don’t take a buyout. And it’s sometimes very lucrative," Ahern says from her spacious Union Street office. "I can honestly say nobody’s given me $25,000 to $50,000 to move into a place…. It’s a win-win situation."

A number of recent changes have increased TICs’ popularity, Ahern says. At first they were financially risky — with multiple people on one mortgage, everyone is affected if one defaults. But in recent years banks have taken on more responsibility through individualized loans to TIC owners. Ahern adds that there are virtually no foreclosures on TICs.

"With the advent of fractional financing, we’re going to see more and more people adopting TICs, just like co-ops were adopted in NYC," Ahern says.

In a city where about 90 percent of residents can’t afford a median-priced home, TICs are lifesavers to people like Scott Ozawa. The recently divorced 31-year-old father of two toddlers makes six figures at a dot-com but says buying into a Western Addition TIC was the only way he could own the home he wanted in San Francisco. Evictions shouldn’t be blamed on TIC owners, he says, but on the city’s faulty housing system and lack of new development.

"The lower-income and the middle-income folks are all vying for the same resources," Ozawa says. "But middle-income folks have more options that are open to them."

Meanwhile, Moran and her family plan to stay in the rent-controlled apartment she has lived in for 35 years and might have to fight an unlawful-detainer order in court this month. She says she likes her place — the neighbors all know one another, she’s close to transit, and her apartment’s thick walls offer protection from earthquakes. The family pays only $507 per month, less than one-fifth the average rate for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, according to the Tenants Union.

In September the Morans and other tenants at their apartment held a support rally outside their building, catering it with sandwiches and juice they prepared. Four elderly female tenants lined up on the front steps, taking turns speaking to the few dozen onlookers. Moran’s upstairs neighbor took out her oxygen tube to speak into a bullhorn. Moran stood beside her, later clapping along to a guitar-strumming activist singing, "Yuppie, yuppie stole my pad! Yuppie, yuppie, bad, bad, bad." As she smiled and mouthed the words in a language she doesn’t speak, a young couple wearing bandannas and carrying what looked like art supplies exited the building next door. They glanced toward the crowd with confused, down-turned brows but didn’t break their stride as they walked off the steps in the opposite direction.

Where’s Michela?

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Michela Alioto-Pier, carpetbagger.

That’s what her Democratic primary challenger called her in 1996, when Alioto-Pier ran for the House of Representatives from the 1st congressional district, which hugs the California coastline from the town of Napa to the Oregon border.

Alioto-Pier, a San Francisco native, had spent the previous two and a half years at the White House advising Al Gore on telecommunications issues. After returning to the West Coast, the ambitious 26-year-old packed up her belongings and moved to St. Helena in Napa County, buying a home there in November 1995 and registering to vote the following month.

Her opponent, Monica Marvin, promptly attacked with a commercial showing a moving van heading across the Golden Gate Bridge alongside a photo of Alioto-Pier and a voice-over condemning outside candidates.

"I think the perception was that someone who’d lived most of her life in the district had a more comprehensive grasp of the issues and the culture reflected by those constituents," Marvin told the Guardian recently.

Alioto-Pier nonetheless won the primary, but she narrowly lost the general election to a Republican incumbent named Frank Riggs. He too assailed her for moving to the district just before the race.

More than a decade later, District 2 supervisor Alioto-Pier hasn’t managed to escape accusations that she’s detached from her constituents, nor has she succeeded in clearly reestablishing residency here since beginning a new political career at San Francisco’s City Hall.

THE SECOND-HOME STORY


Alioto-Pier is registered to vote at a Vallejo Street condo that she bought in 2005 for $1.9 million, and she told us that she, husband Thomas Paul Pier, and their three children make it their primary residence.

"Depending on the time of year, we spend some weekends at our St. Helena house, which is on the same street as Congresswoman [Nancy] Pelosi’s St. Helena house," she said in a written response to our questions.

An Alioto-Pier office assistant, Gene Eplett, left a voice message with the Guardian insisting that second homes are commonplace. "You probably have one as well," Eplett said.

Not exactly. Particularly not one with a taxable value of $774,793.

And in some legal documents, Alioto-Pier lists the Napa County house as her residence.

In August the supervisor formed a limited liability company for the purpose of "wine production" with Pier, called Alioto-Pier Vineyards, according to state business registration records. Both listed their home address as the three-bedroom, two-bath St. Helena home on Zinfandel Lane. Alioto-Pier paid $590,000 for the place, which sits on 2.6 acres of world-famous Napa County soil.

Within days of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s appointing her to the Board of Supervisors in January 2004, she signed a deed of trust for a $100,000 equity line of credit, again listing the Zinfandel Lane property as her home address, according to Napa County records.

In early May 2003, not long before she joined the board, former mayor Willie Brown tapped her to sit on the powerful San Francisco Port Commission. That same week she reregistered another wine-making business in Napa County she’d founded years before called Alioto Cellars, a.k.a. Alioto Winery. In the area of the original form asking for a residence, she began to list the St. Helena property but thought better of it, crossing it out and replacing it with a San Francisco address on Jackson Street that she appears to have used for at least two years, according to Napa County records.

In response to questions regarding the business registration records for Alioto-Pier Vineyards, the supervisor said neither she nor her husband signed the form and that it was filled out by their attorney.

"Alioto-Pier Vineyards LLC is a small wine producing business (approximately 250 cases per year) whose business address is more suitable to where our vineyard (approximately one acre) is located — at our St. Helena property," she wrote.

The form asks for the addresses of the company’s managers separate from the location of the principal executive office. For both Alioto-Pier and her husband, Zinfandel Lane is given as the home address.

DISTRICT ISSUES


As a supervisor, Alioto-Pier has exhibited savvy on emergency preparedness, mothers in the workplace, energy use, and the threatened demise of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission, which treats primarily low-income patients.

Mick Suverkrubbe, president of the Marina Merchants Association, said the supervisor always has a presence at the group’s meetings.

"If she doesn’t show up, one of her aides shows up," Suverkrubbe said. "She’s always been real responsive when we’ve had questions."

But some critics say Alioto-Pier appears all too willing to take direction from the Mayor’s Office, well-financed business interests, and Democratic party functionaries rather than independently arriving at positions.

"She’s like the windup doll," said one City Hall insider who asked not to be named. "It’s fair to say every time I see Sean Elsbernd [her board ally] make a decision, I know that it’s coming from a policy perspective, not someone yanking his chain. It’s the exception, not the rule, that she comes up with her own policy perspective."

"She has three more years, and hopefully they’ll be better," Bill Barnes, an aide to Assemblymember Fiona Ma who formerly worked for Sup. Chris Daly, said of Alioto-Pier’s current board term. "The point of district elections is that supervisors respond to their neighborhood. The values and concerns in District 2 are going to be more moderate and conservative than some other areas, but you still have to provide that basic level of service."

ATTENDANCE PROBLEMS


Alioto-Pier’s attendance record has also caused her trouble and made her an easy target for political adversaries.

"I see her here on Tuesday afternoons," when the board meets, one City Hall staffer said. "She probably spends a full day here when she has a committee hearing with an item. Beyond that, her office is routinely shut on Fridays."

Alioto-Pier missed 17 of 160 board and committee meetings in 2004 and 2005 — that’s only about 10 percent. But throughout her tenure as a supervisor, she’s attended barely half of the meetings of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, where each of the supervisors automatically serves as a director, according to an analysis of the $100 payments the members receive for attending meetings.

"I missed Transportation Authority meetings related to the birth of my third child and the complications of that pregnancy," Alioto-Pier told us.

Alioto-Pier noted, as did others at City Hall, that she had health problems in 2006. She was pregnant with her third child, and there were complications. Further, she said, supervisors don’t get time off for maternity.

"All city employees with the exception of members of the Board of Supervisors are allowed to take a four-month maternity leave. I was the first member of the board in the history of San Francisco to give birth while in office. As such, there were no guidelines in place, and I had to place the health and safety of my newborn first," she said.

But for many months in 2004 and 2005, before that pregnancy, she missed all or almost all of the Transportation Authority meetings.

She also missed 16 of 20 scheduled meetings, including three public hearings, during the short time in 2004 that she spent as a director for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District.

Alioto-Pier left the district before her term was set to expire after serving only six months, complaining that she didn’t have enough time for the position. In her resignation letter, she acknowledged that the bridge was adjacent to her district and "given my ongoing commitment to improving waterfront security in San Francisco, I hope in the future I will once again be able to work with you and serve as a director." She never has, but four other supervisors have served on the district’s board for years.

And she’s apparently not too busy to be running a winery in St. Helena. It’s a modest operation, but it has to take some of her time.

WHERE DOES SHE VOTE?


Alioto-Pier’s voter registration history is confusing.

She doesn’t appear to have voted at all in the November 1999 election — at least not in Napa or San Francisco counties — but, curiously, she did vote in that year’s December runoff, when Willie Brown won a second term over Sup. Tom Ammiano.

She cast a ballot as an absentee in Napa County one year later, even though she was registered at that time to vote in San Francisco under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier, public records show. She voted here in November 1998 with the last name Alioto-Pier, but she didn’t marry her lawyer husband until May 2000, county records show.

In 2002 she voted in San Francisco during the primary and general elections under the name Michela Angelina Driscol Alioto, yet she was still registered concurrently under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier.

Alioto-Pier said that she and her husband returned to St. Helena in July 2000 but moved back here in early 2001, reregistering in both places. She added that San Francisco and Napa counties were at that time slow to remove "deadwood" registrations from their rolls.

"Clearly, once one reregisters, the county has the obligation to cancel all previous registrations for that person," she said. Alioto-Pier insisted that she voted in San Francisco’s November 1999 election, but an office attendant at the Department of Elections asserted that the system "says she was eligible but she did not vote."

Her 1996 Republican opponent, Riggs, also castigated her for failing to vote in 1994 and 1995. Alioto-Pier’s explanation, according to press accounts? Her permanent residency wasn’t clear.

"As best as I can recall from the events of a decade ago, I responded to Republican Frank Riggs by saying there was a mix-up with my absentee ballots," Alioto-Pier told us.

She’s listed a string of San Francisco addresses in public records over the past two decades in addition to her St. Helena dwelling. But in 2005 she finally bought the condo on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. She didn’t file for a homeowner’s exemption on the condo in 2006, but neither has she taken advantage of the tax break on her Zinfandel Lane home during any year since 1997, according to property records.

Alioto-Pier said she was unaware of qualifying for the homeowner’s tax exemption. "However, we declare as a deduction the mortgage interest from our Vallejo Street home on our federal tax returns," she said. Taxpayers are permitted to benefit from the deduction on a second residence.

Whispers at City Hall surrounding the time Alioto-Pier spends in St. Helena and away from her District 2 constituents have dogged her increasingly since she replaced Newsom.

But she’s never faced the punishing regimen of banner headlines endured by District 4’s onetime supervisor Ed Jew. He’s also been suspended by the mayor and faces civil charges that he lied to voters about living permanently in the district he was elected to represent.

Alioto-Pier offered a few telling words in a recent robocall to San Francisco voters opposing mandated appearances by the mayor before the Board of Supervisors: "We need to get our house in order before we invite any guests."

Now, which house would that be?

You’re getting warmer

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>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR SPECIAL GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT

› news@sfb.com

I remember so well the final morning hours of the Kyoto conference. The negotiations had gone on long past their scheduled evening close, and the convention center management was frantic — a trade show for children’s clothing was about to begin, and every corner of the vast hall was still littered with the carcasses of the sleeping diplomats who had gathered in Japan to draw up the first global treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But when word finally came that an agreement had been reached, people roused themselves with real enthusiasm — lots of backslapping and hugs.

A long decade after the first powerful warnings had sounded, it seemed that humans were finally rising to the greatest challenge we’d ever faced.

The only long face in the hall belonged to William O’Keefe, chairman of the Global Climate Coalition, otherwise known as the American coal, oil, and car lobby. He’d spent the week coordinating the resistance, working with Arab delegates and Russian industrialists to sabotage the emerging plan. And he’d failed. "It’s in free fall now," he said, stricken. But then he straightened his shoulders and said, "I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we can get things under control."

I thought he was whistling past the graveyard. In fact, he knew far better than the rest of us what the future would hold. He knew it would be at least another decade before anything changed.

TEN YEARS WARMER


The important physical-world reality to remember about the 10 years after Kyoto is that they included the warmest years on record. All of the warmest years on record.

In that span of time we’ve come to understand that not only is the globe warming but we’d also dramatically underestimated the speed and the amount of that warming. By now the data from the planet outstrips the scientific predictions on an almost daily basis. Earlier this fall, for instance, the seasonal Arctic sea ice melt beat the old record — by mid-August. Then the ice kept melting for six more weeks, losing an area the size of California every week.

"Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts," the headline in the New York Times reported. And the scientists were shaken by rapid changes in tundra permafrost systems, not to mention rainforest systems, temperate soil carbon-sequestration systems, and oceanic acidity systems.

Planetary climate change has gone from being a problem for our children to a problem for right about now, as evidenced by, oh, Hurricane Katrina, California wildfires, and epic droughts in the Southeast and Southwest. And that’s just in the continental United States. Go to Australia sometime: it’s gotten so dry there that native Aussie Rupert Murdoch recently announced his News Corp. empire is going carbon neutral.

The important political-world reality to remember about the 10 years after Kyoto is that we haven’t done anything.

Oh, we’ve passed all kinds of interesting state and local laws, wonderful experiments that have begun to show just how much progress is possible. But in Washington DC, nothing. No laws at all. Until last year, when the GOP surrendered control of Congress, even the hearings were a joke, with "witnesses" like novelist Michael Crichton.

And as a result, our emissions have continued to increase. Worse, we’ve made not the slightest attempt to shift China and India away from using coal. Instead of making an all-out effort to provide the resources for them to go renewable, we’ve stood quietly by and watched from the sidelines as their energy trajectories shot out of control: these days the Chinese are opening a new coal-fired plant every week. History will regard even the horror in Iraq as just another predictable folly compared to this novel burst of irresponsibility.

A HINT OF A MOVEMENT


If you’re looking for good news, there is some.

For one thing, we understand the technologies and the changes in habit that can help. The past 10 years have seen the advent of hybrid cars and the widespread use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Wind power has been the fastest-growing source of electricity generation throughout the period. Japan and Germany have pioneered, with great success, a subsidy scheme required to put millions of solar panels on rooftops.

Even more important, a real movement has begun to emerge in this country. It began with Katrina, which opened eyes. Then Al Gore gave those eyes something to look at: his movie made millions realize just what a pickle we are in. Many of those millions, in turn, became political activists.

Earlier this year six college students and I launched stepitup07.org, which has organized almost 2,000 demonstrations in all 50 states. Last month the student climate movement drew 7,000 hardworking kids from campuses all over the country for a huge conference. We’ve launched a new grassroots coalition, 1sky.org, that will push Congress and the big Washington environmental groups.

All of this work has tilted public opinion — new polls have energy and climate change showing up high on the list of issues that voters care about, which in turn has made the candidates take notice. All of the Democrats are saying more or less the right things, though none of them, save John Edwards, is saying them with much volume.

THE RACE OF ALL TIME


Now it’s a numbers game. Can we turn that political energy into change fast enough to matter?

On the domestic front the numbers look like this: we’ve got to commit to reductions in carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2050, and we’ve got to get those cuts under way quickly and reduce emissions by 10 percent in the next few years. The marketplace will help — if we send it the message that carbon carries a cost. But only government can do that.

Two more numbers we’re pushing for: zero, which is how many new coal-fired power plants we can afford to open in the US, and five million, which is how many green jobs Congress needs to provide for the country’s low-skilled workers. All that insulation isn’t going to stuff itself inside our walls, and those solar panels won’t crawl up to the rooftops by themselves. We can’t send the work to China, and we can’t do it with the click of a mouse; this is the last big chance to build an economy that works for most of us.

Internationally, the task is even steeper. The Kyoto Accord, which we ignored, expires in a couple of years. Negotiations begin this month in Bali, Indonesia, to strike a new deal, and it’s likely to be the last bite at the apple we’ll get — if we miss this chance, the climate is likely to spiral out of control. We have a number here too: 450, as in parts per million of carbon dioxide. It’s the absolute upper limit on what we can pour into the atmosphere, and it will take a heroic effort to keep from exceeding it.

This is a big change — even 10 years ago, we thought the safe limit might be 550. But the data is clear: the Earth is far more finely balanced than we thought and our peril much greater. Our foremost climate scientist, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s James Hansen, testified under oath in a courtroom last year that if we don’t stop short of that 450 redline, we could see the sea level rise 20 feet before the century is out. That’s civilization challenging. That’s a carbon summer to match any nuclear winter anyone ever dreamed about.

It’s a test, a kind of final exam for our political, economic, and spiritual systems. And it’s a fair test — nothing vague or fuzzy about it. Chemistry and physics don’t bargain. They don’t compromise. They don’t meet us halfway. We’ll do it or we won’t. And 10 years from now we’ll know which path we chose.

Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is an author and environmentalist who frequently writes about global warming. McKibben’s essay was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Approximately 50 AAN member papers will be publishing the essay this week.

Race, violence, and money

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The shooting death of football’s Sean Taylor was mangled by the Media
By A.J. Hayes

Fox News isn’t the only media outlet that lets the facts get in the way of a good story.

Last week the sports media throughout the nation stumbled over themselves painting a “Boyz n the Hood” story line behind last week’s tragic shooting death of pro football star Sean Taylor in south Florida.

taylor.jpg

The theory was that Taylor just couldn’t shake his ghettoized past.

It’s an idea that’s quickly becoming one of the most commonly used race-related clichés in sports. It’s a versatile stereotype too, adaptable to any African-American athlete who’s either a crime victim or is implicated in a violent crime.

While police in the early stages of their investigation said the attack did not appear to have any gangland connection, the media – columnists and sports talk show hosts who had minimal knowledge of Taylor’s life away from the gridiron – weren’t having any of it.

It was clearly a “home invasion” they said, orchestrated by a vindictive group of Taylor’s former running mates, who were kicked to the curb when Taylor inked a $19 million contract to play defensive back for the Washington Redskins.

Rykarda Parasol

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rykarda.jpg

Hi there
I just wanted to give you a heads-up. SFBG misprinted the wrong date for my band’s show. Not playing on the 5th, but 25th. CafeduNord.com had their site setup where 2007 came up and not 2008. We played on Jan 5 in ’07 so it’s very confusing. I made the same mistake! Below is the press info I sent a week ago.

I posted a notice on my myspace and web site.

Nooooo biggy. We appreciate the nod and the pic is nice 🙂

Happy 2008,
Rykarda Parasol

PS: new presskit PDF is downloadable here: http://hivesf.com/music/Press_Kit.pdf

***************************************************
Rykarda Parasol and the Tower Ravens are pleased to announce this next show with Mellowdrone from Los Angeles:

Friday January 25th, 2008
Café du Nord, San Francisco
Rykarda Parasol and the Tower Ravens (headline)
Mellowdrone (from LA)
Excuses for Skipping
10pm, $12, 21+

Cheers!
Rykarda Parasol
www.Myspace.com/rykardaparasol
www.RykardaParasol.com

Very Recent News: “Our Hearts First Meet” was just released by Glitterhouse Records in Europe and will be touring in Europe next spring. Rykarda and band are in the process of putting a new album here in the states as well. If you’d like to receive a press kit, please contact rykarda@hotmail.com. OR you may download photos and information from the following: http://rykardaparasol.com/hi-res.html

Description:
William Faulkner meets Ingmar Bergman. Rykarda Parasol describes her music as underhanded and stark. Comparisons to Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, and the Velvet Underground come to mind. Her album, “Our Hearts First Meet” on Three Ring Records is a haunting escape into dark hearts and isolation. Rykarda and her band, the Tower Ravens have a bombastic and dramatic live presence.

Cut the cleaners

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In stories on the $229 million budget deficit that San Francisco could be facing next year, both the Chronicle and the Examiner used the same telling quote from Mayor Gavin Newsom’s press secretary, Nathan Ballard: “Although he wants to trim the fat, the mayor made it abundantly clear he doesn’t want to see a reduction in people sweeping streets or police officers walking beats.”
Why is this guy so obsessed with street cleaning? As a bicyclist, I get irritated by the wet streets, which they often are since Newsom became mayor. As an environmentalist, I see this city’s manic scrubbing as a waste of water (which will grow more precious with climate change) and money and source of more toxic waste (as the Guardian reported last spring). My sense of social justice is also disturbed when street cleaners become a weapon against homeless loiterers, the working class, and street parties.
But the mayor seems to think daily street scrubbing is more important than the social services that his budget will ultimately target. Hell, his official website still prominent features (under “Recent News”) his “Back to Basics Budget” proposal from last spring, which focused on clean streets. With all due respect, Mr. Mayor, maybe it’s time to stop pandering to the conservatives and the business community and develop some kind of vision and agenda that we can all support.
sprayer-small.jpg
Images from SF Department of Public Works website

Mission to Caracas

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Chavez snubs IAPA journalists in Venezuela

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Scroll down for the IAPA press release in English and Spanish on its free press mission to Venezuela)

It was an amusing and telling moment in the history of freedom of the press:

I serve on the executive committee of the Inter American Press Association, and arrived in Venezuela on Nov. 17 as part of a mission to check on President Hugo Chávez’s accelerating crackdown on the news media. Chávez had a message waiting for our delegation.

It was a half-page advertisement from the Venezuelan National Assembly, in the big morning Caracas daily paper El Universal, reprinting a copy of a congressional resolution urging the executive branch to declare the IAPA non grata (not welcome) in Venezuela. (Scroll down to see a copy of the ad.)

That set the tone for our mission: The sponsor of the resolution refused to meet with the IAPA’s delegation. In fact, no member of the three branches of the Venezuelan government or the National Electoral Council was willing to meet with the IAPA.

However, Chávez, who was plastered all over the papers and television for his trip to Iran and France, did send us a Chavista group called Journalists for the Truth.

The president of the group told the IAPA mission that there was complete freedom of the press in Venezuela, then promptly went outside the room and told the waiting press that the IAPA had been “duped in good faith by the reports prepared by the ‘opposition’ Venezuela press.”

Gonzalo Marroquín, chairperson of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, immediately retorted to the press that “it would seem that the journalists were at another meeting.”

In fact, the IAPA expressed “deep concern at the instability of press freedom in general and warned of the limited debate and public awareness surrounding planned constitutional reform and called on authorities to create an appropriate framework of guarantees and transparency for the Dec. 2 referendum,” according to its press release on its findings.

Earl Maucker, who led the mission as the IAPA’s president and editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., noted in a press conference that “the government’s unwillingness to talk about issues of press freedom and free speech, so essential to a democratic society, strengthens our belief that there is no real climate of respect, or the tolerance and political will to hold an open and comprehensive dialogue at a time when a major constitutional revision is under way.”

The mission met with members of the Venezuelan Press Bloc, a constitutional attorney, representatives of a human rights group, polling experts, the mayor of Chacao, the head of the National Press Workers Union, and other knowledgeable civilians. The mission and its final press conference were widely covered in the Venezuelan print and broadcast press. Marroquín, director of Diario Prensa Libre in Guatemala and a former television newscaster, was most eloquent in debating the IAPA’s findings on the government radio and television stations.

There were no violent incidents and no attempts to intimidate nor demonstrate against the IAPA mission. However, Chavez has made it difficult, if not impossible, for IAPA to hold its scheduled assembly next March in IAPA. Three different hotels in three different cities offered to host the convention, then mysteriously canceled their invitations.
Suddenly, two hotels said they did not have enough rooms, the third said it had it had rooms but could not provide meeting facilities. Even the J.W. Marriott Hotel that our mission was staying in asked us to hold our meetings and press conference in a nearby hotel.

Interestingly, after I posted a report on my blog, a self-described Venezuelan named Palomudo offered a comment describing the IAPA as a club of rich media owners.

“Look who owns the media in the USA and ask yourself what they did to convince you of their lies,” Palomudo wrote, echoing the Chávez line. “Remember Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction? … The media is your worse [sic] enemy and people like Bruce B. Brugmann are nothing more than media mercenaries pay [sic] to lie!!!”

Quite a statement, considering the Guardian is one of the strongest critics in the nation of media concentration and has consistently written about and criticized the mainstream media’s misreporting on Iraq. As an independent paper with a left-liberal approach, we’d be open to supporting some of Chávez’s economic policies of fighting multinational oil companies and redistributing wealth.

But we also believe that all governments — left, right, center, and otherwise — need a free and vigorous press and unfettered public debate. As long as Chávez refuses to accept those essential conditions, we happily stand with the non grata editors and publishers in the IAPA, and the courageous editors, publishers, media, students, and everyone else fighting Chavez for press freedom in Venezuela. B3

bruce's photo.jpg
IAPA Deputy Director RicardoTrotti and IAPA President Earl Maucker touch up the press release on deadline shortly before the IAPA press conference on Tuesday, Nov. 20th.

Click here for IAPA press release (English version).
Click here for IAPA press release (Spanish version).
Click here to view El National ad.

Angels and Demons

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For as long as humans have been migrating, but not conquering their host countries, they have been demonized. Check out the Jews under Hitler. The Arabs in France. The Pakistanis in England. And all the jokes about the Poles/Irish/ Mexican (fill in ethnicity of the most reviled group of) immigrants in your ‘hood.

So, the Thanksgiving story about the young boy who was rescued by a Mexican who had just crossed the border in southern Arizona was miraculous in a number of ways.

Without the intervention of a 26-year-old Mexican called Jesus Manuel Cordova, things might have ended badly for the 9-year-old son of an American woman, who lost control of her van in a remote area just north of the Mexican border, and eventually died while awaiting help.

As the local county sheriff, Tony Estrada, reported to major news outlets, Cordova came across the boy, told him that everything was going to be all right, gave him a jacket, built a bonfire and stayed with him until about 8 a.m. the next morning. That’s when hunters passed by, called authorities–and the boy was flown to hospital.

The story was miraculous for the way it got all the major news outlets casting an “illegal immigrant” named Jesus as an angel.

What wasn’t miraculous about the story was how the boy’s rescuer then got taken into custody by the Border Patrol, who, assumedly, will deport him.

So, while it’s depressing to read the ugly comments at sfgate about “illegal immigration,” unfortunately, they aren’t at all surprising.

Call me a bleeding heart legal immigrant who, yes, had to pay through the teeth to get her green card, but I’d argue that millions of “illegal immigrants” are angels every day, as they look after the children, homes, gardens and farmlands of a nation full of people grown rich on the spoils of their own historically illegal settlement.

Kinda demonic, ain’t it?

Newspaper editor briefly seized by rationale

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Another of Dean Singleton’s editors has hit the dust. Here’s what Santa Cruz Sentinel editor Tom Honig — who stepped down after more than 35 years — had to say about the matter. For the record, the reporting staff of the San Francisco Bay Guardian couldn’t agree more:

“If I had two wishes, this is what they’d be: that people would stop complaining about hard-working, honest mainstream journalists long enough to appreciate the work they do — and second, that the people could be paid what they’re worth.”

At least an occasional love note from readers would be nice when another day at the office has crept into the wee hours yet again. All newspaper execs — including those at the helm of Singleton’s MediaNews — should be forced to cover a beat or balance several stories at once for at least three months out of each year.

Perhaps then all of the bloodletting would slow. They certainly shouldn’t be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in compensation if the only idea they have for saving the news is to kill the very people who gather it. How unoriginal for an industry that should always be one step ahead.

Lust and loss

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› lit@sfbg.com

Many dedicated faggots have made the comparison between cocksucking and prayer, especially when knees are planted in the ground, eyes closed because of something too powerful to look at. But Christopher Russell’s Landscape, a book of black-and-white photos of men cruising San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, at first appears to take this assertion one step further — with the trees towering above and light cascading onto shirts, hands, exposed asses, it’s almost as if these men have stumbled into heaven. If so, they appear unaware — in one early photo, someone crouches forlorn in the shadows between trees; above him beckon three perfectly crafted beams of light. There’s an eeriness to many of these photos, as the sumptuousness of the foliage and the brashness of the sunlight render the sex acts comparably mundane: white T-shirts pulled up and white briefs pulled down like on a porn set; the spooky silhouette of a face pressed against a waiting crotch; baseball caps and dark sunglasses holding distance.

It’s when the images become fractured that they reveal depth of feeling — faces merging with leaves and light, heads blending into trees awaiting sky, the motion of hands and arms and legs conjuring a certain type of flight. When the camera pulls back, it’s the sky that’s shimmering, a brightness between branches and leaves with just a tiny figure below. We see a face turned, or the back of a head — yet the action is not where the figure is gazing but above and around, leaves swaying in the breeze and branches shaking underneath the glow of the setting sun. It’s here that we can truly appreciate the complex landscape of lust and loss, adventure and longing.

In one photo, the silhouette of someone’s coat blends so neatly with that of a tree that it resembles a sagging branch, and it brings to mind an image reproduced in the French writer Tony Duvert’s Good Sex Illustrated, a scathing 1974 critique of a five-volume "liberal" sex manual published the previous year in France. The photo, taken from the handbook in question, shows a park somewhat more groomed and far less picturesque than Buena Vista, but we see light reflecting off trees and a man in an overcoat standing to the side of a path, his back to us. Unlike in Russell’s photos, however, it’s the man who seems monumental and the trees a backdrop as a child gazes up from several feet away, apparently immobilized by what he sees. The image, from the volume aimed at 10- to 13-year-olds, is meant to illustrate the dangers of pedophiles who apparently lurk in parks. But Duvert indicts the motives of parents who warn their children about such violence, declaring, "What they are really trying to do isn’t to protect the child but their own exclusive right to do whatever they want with him."

In Good Sex Illustrated, published in English for the first time this month, by Semiotext(e), Duvert skewers the emerging field of sex education as nothing but "science taking charge of the old moral order." With a savage glee, he dissects the volumes of the manual allegedly geared toward helping young adults discover their sexual selves but instead intent on "libidinal dismembering" and centered on a "pro-birth obsession." Duvert is most hilarious when he compares what the handbook calls a "feeling of total fulfillment" from pregnancy to that of a teenager getting fucked in the ass: "Jean scrubbed his ass pensively: is this what they call a feeling of total fulfillment?" In a related footnote he brilliantly comments, "It goes without saying that as soon as the pleasure of having a cock inside your body stops being depreciated, the honor of having a fetus there won’t be over-emphasized." But if this is one of Duvert’s most skillful reversals, it also illuminates a gap in his analysis. After all, he’s comparing a woman’s alleged feelings during pregnancy to a man’s response to getting fucked (we hear nothing about a woman’s sexual pleasure). While Duvert incorporates a nuanced gender critique into many of his readings, he prioritizes male sexuality throughout the book, which ends up thwarting him in his overall mission of subverting the social order by encouraging the sexual freedom of all children.

David Halperin’s What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity has a similar aim of moving conversations about sexuality (and sexual safety) away from standards of "healthy functioning" and "rational" or "irrational" behavior. Halperin seeks to champion queer cultural traditions over the judgments of psychology and the false dichotomy between risk and safety. (In a homophobic culture, what gay sexual behavior, after all, isn’t risky?) In searching for a more comprehensive approach to gay male sexual splendor, Halperin revisits a vulnerable and challenging 1995 essay by Michael Warner in the Village Voice, "Unsafe: Why Gay Men Are Having Risky Sex," in which Warner at one point states that "abjection continues to be our dirty secret." If Warner talks about abjection as a sense of "dirtiness" due to societal condemnation, Halperin describes it as "an experiment with the limits of both destruction and survival, social isolation and social solidarity, domination and transcendence." In other words, "the more people despise you, the less you owe them, and the freer and more powerful you are." Halperin proposes, "Instead of worrying about the appeal of abjection to gay men, … what we really should be doing is trying to think concretely about … how to make it work for us."

It’s a provocative idea, but unfortunately Halperin here departs from his methodical (and meticulously footnoted) analysis of safer sex strategies to endlessly circle around Warner’s essay and certain passages from the writing of Jean Genet, resulting in a repetitive rhetorical jumble. To be sure, Halperin provides a few illuminating examples (including the writing of porn star Scott O’Hara and the brilliant and short-lived zine Diseased Pariah News), but What Do Gay Men Want? could certainly have benefited from an analysis of the wealth of queer world-making in the era of AIDS that has centered on the possibilities (and perils) of an embrace of outsider status — the work of David Wojnarowicz, Samuel Delany, Derek Jarman, Gregg Bordowitz, Justin Chin, or Essex Hemphill, to name a few among innumerable possibilities. Or, perhaps, an analysis of Christopher Russell’s photos, where the messiness of desire becomes landscape.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the editor, most recently, of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity.

LANDSCAPE

By Christopher Russell

Kolapsomal Press

70 pages, $49.95

GOOD SEX ILLUSTRATED

By Tony Duvert; translated by Bruce Benderson

Semiotext(e)

184 pages, $14.95 paper

WHAT DO GAY MEN WANT? AN ESSAY ON SEX, RISK, AND SUBJECTIVITY

By David M. Halperin

University of Michigan Press

176 pages, $22.95

SF underground

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› news@sfbg.com

The proposed Central Subway project has arrived at a critical point in its planning stage, with the public comment period for its environmental documents coming to a close Dec. 10 after a series of recent workshops and meetings.

Proponents see the project as an important next stage of the Third Street Light Rail Project and a vital link to Chinatown, which was made less accessible when the Embarcadero Freeway was torn down. But even some transit advocates question whether the project, with a price tag of $1.2–$1.7 billion, has enough bang for the buck to be worth it.

The Central Subway would realize the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s long-standing vision for a subway system that links to the northeast sector of the city, alleviates traffic problems, and improves connections with BART and Caltrain.

This phase of the project, which proposes to connect the South of Market area to Chinatown by underground rail by 2016, has received the fiscal green light — $1.2 billion in state and federal funding is already pledged.

Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, whose District 3 includes Chinatown, called the Central Subway "a very good and wise investment in San Francisco.

"Any investment in public transportation is a good thing," he added. "Is it expensive? Yes. But so were" many other transit projects.

Rose Pak of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, an influential force in San Francisco politics, insists that the Central Subway project is imperative to the Chinatown community.

"It’s long overdue," she told the Guardian. "Over 70 percent of our people rely exclusively on public transit. It’s very important to them. They don’t own cars, but they still need to get here for work, to see friends and family."

But is a 1.7-mile stretch of subway the right priority for and the right way to spend San Francisco’s scarce transportation money? Tom Radulovich, elected BART board member and executive director of Livable City, said making the Central Subway a top priority is a "big mistake."

"If everything else was well with Muni, this might be a good project," he told us. "But we need to take care of first things first."

Radulovich emphasized that improving the existing Muni service is a better step toward resolving San Francisco’s transit problems. He pointed out that using state and federal government money for other projects would go a lot further in improving the overall system. He said the Central Subway project is prematurely being made a priority.

"It’s like trying to build a master bedroom suite on top of a foundation that needs reinforcement. It’s nice, but it doesn’t make much sense," he said.

When asked about the possibility of revamping the Muni bus lines that presently serve Chinatown, Pak explained that the existing bus service already functions at capacity.

"Stockton is one of the busiest streets in San Francisco," she said. "Have you ever tried to ride a bus there at rush hour? It’s almost impossible."

In fact, the project’s Supplemental Environment Impact Report states that bus service already runs at three-minute frequencies or better for most of the Central Subway corridor. It also affirms that the area is operating at capacity, "particularly Stockton Street."

Pak added that the Central Subway would allow for shorter transit times and a "minimum disruption of surface streets."

After the Embarcadero Freeway was disabled by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the decision was made to remove and not replace it. That angered many Chinatown merchants, who became the base of support for the Central Subway project.

At first the group "didn’t have the muscle nor the power," Pak told us. "But our community rallied. We did massive letter writing and postcard writing."

Now challenging the project or raising concerns about its cost or feasibility — which some critics and media reports have done — means doing battle with Pak and the Chinese American community, a substantial voting block. So Mayor Gavin Newsom, Sup. Peskin, and other top elected officials support the project.

At the San Francisco Planning Commission meeting held Nov. 15, David Chiu, a commissioner on the Small Business Commission (and candidate to succeed Peskin as District 3 supervisor), said he was "really looking forward to this project moving forward" but would like to see more detail in the SEIR about the process for relocating small businesses.

Commissioner Michael Antonini "strongly advised" extending the subway as soon as possible to North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf and all the way to the Richmond, arguing the current terminus in Chinatown doesn’t make long-term sense. But few at the hearing argued the project shouldn’t be built.

According to the SEIR, traveling from Fourth Street and King to Chinatown on the Central Subway would cut up to 12.4 minutes from the journey in 2030 — from the bus time projection of 17 minutes to less than five minutes in one subway alignment alternative.

Four "Alignment Alternatives," or designs for how the subway will be built, are laid out in the SEIR, which was released for public review Oct. 17 and made the subject of three community workshops and a Planning Commission hearing.

Options range from enhanced bus service and no subway to one that includes some surface rail along Fourth Street (with a new station at Moscone Center) to an option with more of the route underground and Chinatown stations in various spots.

Once an alignment plan is chosen, the SFMTA will vote on the final design next year. And if things go smoothly, construction on the project could start in 2010 and service begin in 2016.

www.sfmta.com/cms/mcentral/centralover.htm

Feed our students well

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GREEN CITY Not long ago a green vegetable was a rare and startling sight on a lunch tray at a San Francisco school. Carnival-style food was the standard, with corn dogs as a regular entrée, packaged apple turnovers as the "fruit" course, and fried potatoes as the staple vegetable.

School lunches have come a long way since 2003, when San Francisco Unified School District parent volunteers, staff, students, public health professionals, and other community supporters joined together to begin creating the school district’s Wellness Policy. Lunches are fresher, tastier, healthier, and leaner, and the SFUSD’s "no empty calories" policy has been a role model in the nationwide effort to improve school food.

But even after all of those changes, a high school group recently surveyed more than 2,000 of their peers and learned that students still complain that school food doesn’t taste fresh and costs too much, and some question how nutritious it is.

So a growing movement argues it’s time to take the next step: the greening of school meals. Surely a food-savvy, health-conscious, environmentally aware city like San Francisco, which is located in one of the world’s most fertile agricultural regions, should be feeding its kids fresh, local organic produce at every meal.

But there’s an obstacle, and it’s green too. Government reimbursement for a free school lunch is just $2.71, nearly half of which goes to pay for labor. Other fixed overhead eats up another large chunk, leaving just about $1 to pay for the meal itself, including 34¢ for the required milk.

No wonder it’s hard to respond to requests for fresher, healthier food and more of it. New salad bars placed in three schools as part of a pilot program address these concerns, offering students mixed greens and raw vegetables, several kinds of fresh fruit, and whole grain breads and muffins, in addition to the hot entrée. When the first salad bar was created last year at Balboa High School, the average number of students eating its cafeteria lunch every day increased 26 percent, with virtually all of the new diners low-income students.

But that $1 per meal won’t cover a salad bar at every school, which is the SFUSD’s goal. The cost of just the equipment for a salad bar — the bar itself, added refrigeration and sinks, a couple more tables — can run more than $10,000 per school, depending on how much work needs to be done to reconfigure the lunch line. Organic produce drives the meal cost higher too.

Unfortunately, the SFUSD doesn’t have that money. Because it’s currently left to the school district to provide meals, the SFUSD must require that the Student Nutrition Department budget break even or else cut into classroom funds to cover the deficit.

The good news is that thanks to grants from the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families and Mayor Gavin Newsom, salad bars are being started in 25 SFUSD schools this year, stocked with seasonal, local produce. Still, despite this additional funding, only about 25 percent of district students will have access to the salad bars. Social justice demands that every student have equal access to a healthier school meal.

Most city officials and the greater community probably aren’t even aware of the situation. It’s time to put the need to feed our children adequately on the radar of the whole community and ask officials to step in with funding to ensure that our children can eat well without sacrificing classroom resources to cover the cost of their food. The Public Education Enrichment Fund, better known as Proposition H, provides a growing pot of city money aimed at improving the schools, and part of it could be used to fund the opening of more salad bars, so more school kids can enjoy the benefits of fresh produce and whole grains.

Providing the money to put salad bars in every school would pay off in healthier kids and related positive effects. Better nutrition is linked with higher academic achievement, improved behavior, and other benefits.

Let’s become a city that commits to teaching our children well, feeding them well, and promoting a greener food system. *

Paula Jones and Caroline Grannan are members of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Defying the injunction

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While City Attorney Dennis Herrera can claim victory in winning court approval for his controversial gang injunctions, at least one targeted group is openly defying the terms of the preliminary order, trying to make a statement that they should be given a chance to heal the wounds they helped create.

Alleged members of the Eddy Rock gang in the Western Addition, from the Yerba Buena Plaza East housing complex at Eddy and Buchanan streets, have continued to hold small film festivals and other gatherings in an attempt to show the public that despite being labeled violent criminals, they are making a positive contribution to the community.

As the San Francisco Police Department and City Attorney’s Office say they are preparing to enforce the injunction, many of the named parties in the Western Addition say they will continue to congregate within the four-block "safety zone," an area where they are forbidden to loiter, be in the company of other gang members, or engage in other banned activities. In defying the injunction, they risk being jailed for up to five days.

"They’re trying to force us out of our community, but we’re [going to] fight it," Maurice Carter, a 32-year-old alleged gang member, told the Guardian.

The decision by targeted members to forge ahead with their community-building efforts is an attempt to sway city officials into easing the restrictions of the injunction, a prospect that seems unlikely at this stage.

"We’ve got the most influence of anybody," said Paris Moffet, whom the city attorney has identified as the leader of Eddy Rock, a label the 27-year-old disclaims. "But they don’t think so. Instead of putting us down, if they want to stop the violence, why aren’t they helping us?"

Superior Court Judge Peter Busch granted three injunctions sought by Herrera on Oct. 18 against two other gangs in the Western Addition and the Norteños in the Mission. The date for enforcing the injunction remains tentative, and city attorney spokesperson Matt Dorsey said, "Out of an abundance of caution, we will not begin to enforce the injunction against an enjoined gang member until after the proof of service for that individual has been filed with the court."

The city attorney is also holding sessions, with the help of the Gang Task Force, to properly train local police to enforce the measure. However, Lt. Ernie Ferrando of the task force said his unit can and likely will apply the restrictions to those who have already been served.

As of Nov. 26, 33 individuals have been served with injunctions, Dorsey said. Twenty people from the Western Addition — five from Chopper City, 10 from Eddy Rock, and five from the Knock Out Posse — have been given notice, along with 13 Norteños from the Mission.

Despite the measures being taken by police and the city attorney, which involve careful efforts to make sure only people named on the injunctions are prosecuted, critics of the approach say the injunctions may no longer be necessary in the Western Addition, where many of the targeted individuals seem to have made great strides over the past few months.

"I’ve been coming down here for four years, and this is the first summer that I haven’t had to drive over caution tape," said Sheryl Davis, program director of Mo’ Magic, which is based in the nearby African American Art and Culture Complex on Fulton Street. "So something is working."

The last gang-related homicide occurred in May, Northern Police Station captain Croce Casciato said. Police say the reasons for the decrease in violence are varied, but few can argue against its scope. The alleged gang members who have been targeted maintain that they — not outside forces or the injunction — are most responsible for the turnaround.

"There’s been a lot of bloodshed here. We’re trying to clean that bloodshed," Moffet said. About the looming threat of the injunction, he added, "We’re [going to] stand tall no matter what they say. Everybody makes mistakes. The main thing is trying to better yourself. That’s my leadership — stopping the violence."

Davis, who helped the film fest at Plaza East secure a digital projector, agreed that the respite in killings is directly attributable to the alleged perpetrators. While she didn’t criticize outright the efforts of the city attorney, she did say the recent positive actions by alleged gang members should be noted and that the injunction will likely act as a deterrent to such activities.

Of community-based efforts in the Western Addition, Davis said, they "should be duplicated, not shut down."

But proponents of the injunctions say they won’t hinder positive efforts. Nor will it be impossible for targeted gang members to be removed from the list. Public Defender Jeff Adachi is currently pushing for an opt-out provision that would permit injunction targets to petition for their removal by proving they are not involved with gangs. It’s an idea that has been supported in concept by the city attorney, though the details have yet to be worked out.

Lt. Ferrando pointed out that the injunctions might help gang members to escape the lifestyle without fear of retribution.

"This gives some guys the chance to leave the area for good," he said, noting that after the first injunction was approved, against the Oakdale Mob in Bayview–Hunters Point, several members simply never came back to the area and were never served.

Still, those named as members of Eddy Rock expressed concern that their recent positive efforts may go to waste.

"Some of the guys doing the good work are on the injunction. I find that very unique," said Marquez Shaw, a 26-year-old who is described in court papers as a member of the gang, though he is not on the list of targeted individuals.

In a video made by the group during a recent gathering, 20-year-old alleged member Hannibal Thompson says, "We got a lot of good stuff going on right now. Don’t take it away from us."

Remembering Harvey Milk Tonight

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One of the good things about email is that items often pop up that jog my memory. The latest example was the news flash just now from the Harvey Milk Club about its annual Harvey Milk Memorial Concert and Candelight March tonight, starting at 5:30 p.m. at Harvey Milk Plaza and marching to the site of his camera store down the street.

The news reminded me of the last words I heard Harvey say, a snapshot of his humor and his politics. Harvey came into the Guardian office on the Friday before Dan White assassinated him and Mayor Moscone in their City Hall offices on Monday, Nov. 27, 1978.

This was one of our regular City Hall update chats. The Guardian had been a critical early endorser and supporter of Harvey, and we supported his progressive and gay rights agenda as the strong innovative supervisor of his era. And so Harvey would come around and fill us in and tell us how he was faring.

On this Friday, he was a bit disconsolate. He was losing some friends and supporters on key votes. He was hoping Moscone would appoint a strong liberal supervisor to replace White as supervisor, who had resigned. He said there was so much to do and he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to do enough to fulfill the agenda that he had been elected to do. So he said, in wonderful Harvey Milkese, that he would keep on truckin’ but that he would also pay more attention to the Guardian in terms of keeping us informed and on top of his progressive agenda.

“I want to be your Deep Throat in City Hall,” he said.

I said we needed one, we shook hands, and Harvey headed off to City Hall. B3

PRESS Release: Harvey Milk Memorial March: TONIGHT Nov 27 5 PM

Harvey Milk Memorial Concert & Candlelight March on November 27 Remembering Harvey Milk and Celebrating His Life

The Harvey Milk Club invites you to join us for the annual Harvey Milk
Memorial March. This year, in addition to the candlelight march from Harvey Milk
Plaza to the site of Milk’s former camera shop down the street, there will
also be performances to celebrate his life. This occasion kicks off a year-long
series of events leading up to the 30th anniversary of Milk’s assassination
on November 27, 1978. The Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club was founded by
Harvey Milk, and renamed in his honor.

WHEN: Tuesday November 27th 5:30 PM
WHERE: Harvey Milk Plaza (corner of Castro & Market)

FEATURING:
Holly Near
SF Gay Men’s Chorus
Dance Brigade
Shawna Virago
Keith Hennessy
Melania DeMore

SPEAKERS:

Hon. Carole Migden
Hon. Mark Leno
Hon. Tom Ammiano
Cecilia Chung,Transgender Law Center
John Newsome, And Castro For All

– Presented by the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club –
Krissy Keefer, Event Producer

www.milkclub.org

Loving Blanche

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BLANCHE sml.JPG

By Todd Lavoie

Yeehaw for more twang-age! At last! Detroit’s delightfully skewed goth-country crackerjacks Blanche have finally seen album number two receive an American release, nearly a year after its European release, nearly a year after their former label V2 shut its doors suddenly and left its roster in the lurch. Happy endings have never been synonymous with these folks – murder ballads, yes, and odes to wronged love, certainly, but good news? Hardly!

But here we are, endless months after they got screwed over by Mister Record Company Man, and Little Amber Bottles (Original Signal) is finally available in the States. The wait’s been worth it: no “sophomore slump” for this nattily attired mob of medicine-show revivalists and Flannery O’ Connor torch-bearers. Dare I say it? Aw, shucks, why not? Little Amber Bottles is a quantum leap forward for the band – hell, it had quite firmly settled into my Top Ten of 2007 within its first half-dozen spins, even. Christ knows how many times I’ve listened since, but I remained just as intoxicated by it as I was the day I’d skinned it of its shrinkwrap and handed myself over to its many gauzy, dusty charms. Truth is, I could probably get drunk just from looking at it. Won’t you join me, then, in some good old-fashioned inebriation?

I’ll pour the first drink: Blanche is a quintet of old-school country-devotees who think like punks, write like O’Connor or William Faulkner, and sing like snake-oil salesmen, saloon floozies, and end-of-the-road auctioneers. Frequently performing in early 20th century vintage-wear, they very much look and sound like a mob of country-folk who high-tailed it to Birmingham or Chattanooga or Lynchburg and got themselves “citified,” so to speak. And it’s all entirely convincing, I should add. No mere dress-up here, Blanche manage to inhabit the world of 78 records, magic elixirs, and old black-and-white Sears & Roebuck catalogs straight from the printing press. It’s as if they just hiked down from Walton’s Mountain and hit the studio – only these folks are less John Walton/Olivia Walton and more Ike/Corabeth Godsey, the fancy-schmancy owners of the general store who left the mountain more than once every couple of months.

Obama’s moment

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When presidential hopeful Barack Obama came to San Francisco on Nov. 14, it was a potentially pivotal moment in his campaign, a make-or-break opportunity to become the one transcendent candidate who can offer hope for moving the country in a new direction. “In this moment, in this election, let’s reach for what we know is possible,” Obama said. Guardian City Editor Steven T. Jones was there and reports on a campaign struggling to find the resonance it needs to win.
– Read the main story: Obama’s moment
– Read the breaking news sidebar: Obama’s new Iraq position
– Listen to Obama’s speech
– Check the latest presidential primary polls
– Read The Atlantic cover story: Why Obama Matters
– Read Tom Hayden’s Nov. 9 letter to Obama

obama

Guardian photo by Lane Hartwell

Obama’s moment

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Barack Obama came to San Francisco with some pretty heavy baggage Nov. 14. His speech at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium was swarmed by a diverse crowd of about 7,000, with most of those we interviewed hungry for an answer to the big question: is Obama the one who can take this troubled country in a new direction?

The Illinois senator had just gotten a bump from a cover story in the Atlantic, "Why Obama Matters," which posits that he is the only candidate capable of moving our country past the divisive culture-war paradigms and into a period when fundamental change is possible.

But time is running out for Obama to take the Democratic presidential nomination from front-runner Hillary Clinton, who has locked up moderates and most women. And some progressives, including labor unions, are behind John Edwards. To win the nomination, Obama must find a way to quickly rally the left — including urban voters and the antiwar, social justice, LGBT, and labor movements — into an energized voting block.

And that, some progressives say, means he’s got to stop playing it safe.
obama
Guardian photo by Lane Hartwell

Days before the speech, former California state senator and 1960s radical Tom Hayden sent Obama a letter taking issue with the latter’s comment that Democrats are paralyzed by Vietnam-era fights — and in particular, his response, "That’s just not my framework."

Hayden argued that Obama was squandering his advantage as the sole credible antiwar candidate by running a safe campaign that equally repudiates both political extremes — even though progressives have been far closer to the truth on issues of war, civil rights, economic equity, and the full range of traditional Democratic planks.

Hayden wrote, "The greatest gift you have been given by history is that as the elected tribune of a revived democracy, you could change America’s dismal role in the world. Because of what you so eloquently represent, you could convince the world to give America a new hearing, even a new respect. There are no plazas large enough for the crowds that would listen to your every word, wondering if you are the one the whole world is waiting for. They would not wait for long, of course. But they would passionately want to give you the space to reset the American direction."

Many attendees of Obama’s SF speech shared similar sentiments. "I’m interested in what he’s been saying in his books, but he’s become a kind of politician, so I want to hear what he has to say tonight," Jeremy Umland, 33, a third grade teacher from Oakland, said as he was waiting in line. "I think he had a lot of brave ideas in the past, and I’d like to see him get back to that."

Umland, who is white and gay, stood with his partner, Terrence Marks, 34, who is black. The couple are in the process of adopting a child and wanted to hear Obama call for legalizing gay marriage or for a health care plan that doesn’t involve insurance companies.

"I’d like to see him address it in a way that doesn’t evade this issue," Marks said. "I want to hear him talk not like a politician, but a real person."

Inside, Obama gave voice to many of those same themes.
"Running the same old textbook, by the numbers, Washington campaign just won’t do it…. The triangulation and poll-tested positions because we’re afraid of what Mitt [Romney] or Rudy [Giuliani] will say about us just won’t do it," Obama said, adding, "If we’re going to seize the moment, then we can’t live in fear of losing."

He said we are in "a defining moment in our history," when Americans need to grapple with war, a planet in peril, economic insecurity, and a political system that seems corrupt and incompetent. "We’ve lost faith that our leaders can or will do anything about it," Obama said.

Over and over again, Obama said he is running to deal with the most difficult issues: living wages, universal health care, human rights and dignity, racial harmony, honest foreign diplomacy, and a return to the principles of the New Deal. "I’m running for president of the United States because that is the party that America needs us to be right now.

"I am in this race," he said, "because of what Dr. King called the fierce urgency of now."

Good stuff, but is it too late? "I don’t see it happening, but it’s still possible that Hillary Clinton will slip in Iowa. She’s not invincible," Hayden told us.

In fact, a new ABC–Washington Post poll shows Obama taking the lead over Clinton in Iowa, 30 percent to 26, with Edwards at 22 percent.

"Seeing him through the eyes of my 34-year-old son and his wife, I could see there was a lot of new excitement among the younger generation and that it would be a shame if that just dissipates," Hayden told us. "The thing Obama needs most is what he steers around: he need a new social justice movement similar in strength to what we had in the ’60s."

Donald Fowler, a San Francisco resident and Democratic Party campaign consultant who ran John Kerry’s Michigan campaign in 2004 and Al Gore’s field operation in 2000, said Obama has suffered for trying to communicate detailed positions through an intense media filter.

"You get into the danger of running a government when you should be running a campaign," Fowler told us.

He and Hayden each said that particularly on the Iraq war issue, where Obama is strongest, he should have projected his stance more boldly, something he may now be starting to do.

"My guess is they have decided to be strong, state things clearly, and take back the discussion," Fowler said. Listening to Obama discuss this moment, that assessment seems likely.

"It’s because of these failures that people are listening intently," Obama said. "We have the chance to come together to form a new majority." *

To hear Barack Obama’s speech and read the Atlantic article and Tom Hayden’s letter, visit www.sfbg.com.

Green City: Early puberty’s toxic causes and effects

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GREEN CITY As if growing up weren’t hard enough, a new report published by San Francisco’s Breast Cancer Fund says girls, particularly African American girls, are hitting puberty earlier — and it’s lasting longer.

Environmental toxins, obesity, and psychological stressors are all cited as possible reasons for the trend in the report written by Ithaca College professor Sandra Steingraber. It was commissioned about a year ago to put together what she calls "pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle."

Steingraber found that many girls now start to develop breasts as early as eight years old — two years earlier than they did a few decades ago. On average, however, girls begin menstruating only a few months earlier than they once did — making puberty a lengthier process.

The consequences of growing up too soon are serious — depression and anxiety, eating disorders, sexual objectification, and early drug and alcohol abuse are just a few.

"As a mother of a nine-year-old girl," Steingraber says, "I was really impressed by the consequences, not just the causes. The world is not a good place for early-maturing girls."

The implications are not just psychological. According to Steingraber’s report, menarche before age 12 raises breast cancer risk by 50 percent.

"The data is pretty ample linking the two," she says. "The earlier a girl gets her breasts, the wider the estrogen window." Longer lifetime exposure to estrogen increases the risk of developing many forms of breast cancer.

Steingraber points to obesity and endocrine-disrupting chemicals (toxins that interfere with the hormonal system) as major factors in the new puberty equation. Phthalates, bisphenol A, and dioxin are a few of the culprits often cited by environmental health advocates as contributors to earlier puberty onset. These chemicals are often found in cosmetics and personal care products like shampoo, hand lotion, and sunscreen. They are also used in pesticides.

Dr. Tracey Woodruff, associate professor of reproductive health and environment at UC San Francisco, says the link has been researched and discussed anecdotally in scientific circles for the past 10 years, with the last major report issued in 1997.

A big obstacle to keeping kids safe, Woodruff says, is that most consumer products are not required to undergo US Food and Drug Administration approval before they are sold to the public, nor are companies required to disclose all ingredients.

"How chemicals are governed is somewhat archaic," Woodruff says.

Environmental health activists agree. In 2002 a national coalition of nonprofit organizations launched the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, an initiative to educate the public and influence policy. Marisa Walker of the Breast Cancer Fund — a founding member organization — says manufacturers jump through big loopholes in federal law to hide ingredients by claiming that chemicals are trade secrets.

An Environmental Protection Agency–administered program to test new chemicals was created more than a decade ago, but progress has been slow at best. In June the EPA announced it was still seeking comment on a draft list of 73 pesticides to be evaluated under the new screening program. Chemicals in consumer products are not slated for review.

The program has received widespread criticism, and in September the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform issued a letter to the EPA expressing its concern: "EPA’s actions have been a continued failure to protect the American public from these chemicals." The seven-page letter also requests that the EPA take immediate action.

Meanwhile, Woodruff, Steingraber, and many environmental health advocates point to Europe and neighboring Canada as better models of protecting consumer health. Their policies have a heavier emphasis on precaution. Woodruff says prevention can mean the difference between responding to a change in hormone levels and coping with a birth defect.

"At what point is there enough information to take action?" Steingraber asks. "Chemicals are turning up in the urine of some of these girls, and while more research needs to be done, we can’t even do more research until the industry gives us more data. The time of saying, ‘Hmmm, that’s interesting,’ is over. It’s time to take action." *

Save St. Lukes!

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OPINION For 136 years St. Luke’s Hospital has been a San Francisco landmark, serving the underserved communities in the southern half of the city.

Now St. Luke’s needs San Francisco’s help.

The hospital’s owner, Sutter Health, has embarked on a stealth strategy to close St. Luke’s, shuttering units one by one and gradually shifting personnel to facilities in wealthier neighborhoods — and their more upscale pool of patients.

This process is called medical redlining, or institutional racism, and it’s not just morally wrong — it’s contrary to the values that unite San Francisco.

Latino and African American patients accounted for 54 percent of the 23,000 emergency visits to St. Luke’s in 2005. This compares with only 8 percent at Sutter’s favored California Pacific Medical Center facilities across town. Similarly, 40 percent of hospital patients at St. Luke’s are Latino, versus only 1 percent at the CPMC site. There are 1,300 children born each year at St. Luke’s, most of them to families from the Mission, Bayview–Hunters Point, the Excelsior, and surrounding communities.

If St. Luke’s closes, where will these patients go? What will they do?

Some of them will head to San Francisco General Hospital, which is already struggling with too many patients and uncertain funding.

Sutter says it will treat the rest of these patients at its other facilities — all at least a 30-minute drive or a much longer bus ride away.

In reality, many patients will simply forego medical treatment. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that for lower-income patients, "traveling across town to access better resources or health care facilities is often beyond their means."

In this context, Sutter’s latest cuts to the neonatal intensive care and pediatrics units are especially cruel. Since the only private hospital serving the southern half of the city is in danger of closing, many of these families with sick babies and children will not seek or receive the medical attention they need until a crisis arrives.

All this, to improve on Sutter’s 2006 profits of $587 million.

The good news is that it’s not too late to save St. Luke’s.

Sutter’s actions have sparked a community outcry. Registered nurses from the facility went on strike in October and continue to insist that Sutter stop bleeding the hospital dry. Doctors, patients, and public health groups have actively protested and organized against the chain, and the city’s Health Commission is considering its options.

Sup. Sophie Maxwell recently introduced groundbreaking legislation to require a health impact review of all new permits granted to medical facilities. This would force Sutter to present an institutional master plan before moving forward with its proposed facility on Cathedral Hill and to justify this expensive new project in terms of what is best for the citywide public health infrastructure.

On a parallel track, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is proposing a resolution to give the Board of Supervisors more influence over Sutter’s plans and to direct the city attorney to explore legal options to counter Sutter’s medical redlining.

As the cuts at St. Luke’s continue, patients suffer — and so does the city’s health care safety net. It is time for San Franciscans to join together and save this city icon. *

Zenei Cortez, RN, is a member of the Council of Presidents of the California Nurses Association.

Great Anti-nukes news!

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Assemblymember Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) has withdrawn a ballot initiative that, if passed by voters, would have allowed more nuclear power plants in California. In a statement on his website, DeVore says:

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. While I am disappointed we will not be moving forward on a nuclear power ballot initiative for 2008, I am heartened by the fact that over the next two years we should see applications to build 32 new reactors in America. Eventually, California will catch up to reality.”

Yeah. Will do.

A Reuters article published today reports that the initiative was pulled for lack of support and DeVore plans to introduce a bill in January. Try, try again.

The initiative, if passed, would have overturned a 1976 state law banning the construction of new nuclear plants until a safe, reliable solution for the waste is established.

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