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Bread and Circuses: Mexico and the World Cup

Zelda Bronstein
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Bread and Circuses: Mexico and the World Cup

MEXICO CITY (June 11th) — The Caliente Sports Book down the street is buzzing with betters studying dog and horse races, Major League Baseball, even golf, on the multiple screens. Of particular interest are those channels running wrap-ups of the afternoon match between Mexico and 2006 World Cup champion Italy, from which the national team emerged victorious in a final prelim before this year’s edition of the Copa del Mundo gets underway later this week.


Italy, it may be remembered, won the much-coveted cup four years ago on penalty kicks after France was reduced to playing with ten men on the field when super-star Zenedine Zidane was disqualified for ferociously head-butting a rival who purportedly called his mother and sister “whores.” Beating Italy was a decided plus for Mexico’s downtrodden spirits as the Mundiales approach.


One group of aficionados was not much interested in Mexico’s fortunes in the upcoming fandango in South Africa. Instead, they gathered around a big screen in one corner of the betting parlor cheering on the Los Angeles Lakers in a National Basketball Association Finals match-up with the Boston Celtics. “Forget about football,” sneered “El Guerro” Gonzalez, a regular, “this is where the real money gets made.” Because pro basketball games routinely rack up hundred-point scores, betters have multiple opportunities to wager on winners and losers, over and under point spreads, total points in a quarter, and whether Kobe Bryant will hit the next three-pointer.


But the basketball euphoria will dissipate post haste as the World Cup takes center stage. Although the NBA’s despotic commissioner David Stern promotes his product as the world game, basketball hardly holds a candle to what the U.S. provincially terms “soccer” and the rest of the Planet Earth calls football.


Indeed, the “Copa del Mundo” (“Cup of the World”) will soon sweep every other sporting event from the screens — let alone political scandal, of which there is plenty in this distant neighbor nation, including the upcoming Super Sunday gubernatorial elections July 4th, and even droughts, floods, and other natural disasters. The interminable drug war that has taken 23,000 lives in the past three years will move to the backburner. Ditto an economy that is tailspinning out of control — a million workers lost their jobs in the first three months of this year alone despite President Felipe Calderon’s rosy claims of “recovery.”


Speculation about the disappearance of one of the nation’s most powerful politicians will fade from the primetime news, and the first year anniversary of the incineration of 49 babies in a government-run day care center owned in part by the first lady’s cousin will not even be noticed. The military takeover of the great Cananea copper mine and the dissolution of the miners union, is not news. New revolutions — this is, after all, the hundredth year anniversary of our landmark revolution — could rock the land, but for the next month, Mexico will live and die on what happens to the national team in South Africa.
“In football, we find our revenge against the adversaries of our lives,” philosophizes sociologist Jose Maria Candia in a recent Contralinea magazine interview, “if it goes badly at work, in the economy, politics, the project of the nation, when 11 boys put on the green jersey and do well in an international tournament, we feel vindicated by life.”
With 32 national teams from all five continents in the competition for the World Cup, the fate of the “seleccion” will have palpable impact on domestic tranquility. The political outfall of the Mundiales is unpredictable. Pumped up on toxic nationalism and xenophobia, football is a blood sport in southern climes. Honduras and El Salvador once fought a full-fledged war over soccer.


If the national team wins or acquits itself well, success will strengthen the government in charge no matter how poorly it has served the country. Likewise, a shoddy performance can topple rulers. In Mexico, increasingly unpopular president Felipe Calderon, who won high office in fraud-marred elections three years ago, is banking on the national selection’s triumphs in the opening round to invigorate his deteriorating image. Calderon’s bet is hardly a sure thing.


Mexico, Number 17 on the Federation of World Football Federation’s rankings (now the Coca Cola FIFA rankings), plays host South Africa in the inaugural match of the tournament, and “His Excellency” Felipe Calderon (dixit South African president Jacob Zuma) will be a guest of honor. The “Bafana Bafana” (“Boys Boys”) as the locals are worshipped, have won their last four prelim matches and in the 2009 Confederation Cup took Spain, which some football gurus fix as the best team in the world, into overtime. Their fanatics’ incessantly droning “vuvazelas” or plastic trumpets are said to drive opponents mad.


On the other hand, should Mexico beat sentimental favorite South Africa, it will make Calderon few friends on the African continent — five other African teams are in the draw, with war-torn Cote d’Ivoire the cream of the crop.


Aside from the Bafana Bafana, France and Uruguay are the real class of Mexico’s four-team group — while the French have appeared lackadaisical of late, whipping the South Americans is improbable. Anything less than reaching the quarterfinals will not rehabilitate Calderon’s popularity.


Mexico has a young team that fluctuates between indifference and playing out of control. It is anchored by seven Mexican players from the European and Turkish leagues, and the wily but slow-footed veteran Cuauhtemoc Blanco. Burned repeatedly by the national team’s poor performances in the Mundiales, many fans such as Manuel Garcia, a waiter at the old quarter Mexico City eatery Café La Blanca, consider that only divine intervention can save Mexico — and Calderon — from ignominious elimination.


When and if Mexico wins its matches though, wild celebrations are guaranteed to erupt around the gilded Angel of Independence on the bustling Paseo de Reforma — drunkenness, fisticuffs, and hooliganism are de rigor. Flag-draped caravans of honking cars will jam the boulevards of this conflictive megalopolis. On game days, half the population of Mexico, led by its president, will don green jerseys and play hooky from work and school. Saloons will fill to the brim with fans spilling out into the streets, jostling for a peek at the plasma screens. Masses to insure that God is on Mexico’s side will be pronounced from the altars and saints dressed up in the national colors.


Although football is tantamount to religion in this country where 70% of the population lives in and around the poverty line, only the super rich will have the wherewithal to jet off to Africa. Instead, the underclass will monitor the Mundiales at the “FIFA Fan Fest” on giant screens erected in the great Zocalo plaza from which nearly a hundred hunger-striking members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME), near death after a month of voluntary starvation, will no doubt be evicted so as not to dampen the fiesta.


Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico’s two-headed television monopoly, which will transmit the games (the premium package includes 3-D) will have the nation eating out of its hands (and guzzling Corona beer.)  The TV monoliths have leased rights to broadcast the Mundiales from the Swiss-based FIFA, the absolute dictator of the sport for the past 106 years that counts 204 out of 208 football federations worldwide on its roster. FIFA TV revenues are expected to top $167,000,000 for the 2010 World Cup.


This year’s Copa del Mundo is awash with drama. Will the Argentine selection, a perennial favorite, graced by the world’s best player, Leonel “the Flea” Messi, blow up under their sometimes psychotic coach Diego Maradona, himself a Mundiales’ immortal? Will the first round match between England and the U.S. (14th on the FIFA listings with a world-class star, Landon Donovan, to prove it) invoke the star-crossed Yanqui upset of the Brits 60 years ago in 1950 in Brazil, the only time these two teams have ever met in the World Cup?


If the U.S. gets by England, a match between Mexico and its hated gringo rival would up the drama quotient here considerably. A face-off between South Korea and North Korea, both of which are in the draw albeit in separate groups, could lead to nuclear confrontation.


How will tiny, bruised Honduras, which played through a coup d’etat to qualify, fare against the big guns? What kind of karmic reward is in store for France, which slimed its way into the World Cup with mega-star Thierry Henry’s illegal hand-slap goal against the Irish? Will Germany be dispirited by the suicide of its troubled veteran goalie (is this a Wim Wenders’ film)? Will five-time champ Brazil, which is hosting both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, be so overloaded with hubris that the selection will forget to play football?


But unquestionably the drama of dramas is focused on host South Africa, the land of blood and gold, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Joe Slovo, and the last great struggle for liberation from colonialism.


South Africa, an unlikely site for the World Cup, was promised the games by Swiss football impresario Joseph Batter during his 1998 campaign to become the czar of the FIFA. Blatter, who was said to have been backed by Middle East oil money, needed African votes to put him over the top. Although Nigeria and Morocco were also proposed to host the 2010 Cup, South Africa, the continent’s fastest-growing economy, was chosen both as a tribute to African football and to Nelson Mandela. Blatter even flew the frail, aging apostle of African liberation, to London to ballyhoo the designation.
Whether the beloved Mandiba will be well enough to attend the inauguration is the drama within the drama.


In his youth, Nelson Mandela was a keen amateur boxer and enthusiasm for sports has colored his life. Football is indeed the national sport of black South Africans, 75% of the population. During Mandela’s 28 years of imprisonment on Robbin Island for the crime of defying apartheid, his fellow prisoners and comrades in the African National Congress (ANC), played football incessantly, taping up rags into balls, and booting them up and down the narrow prison corridors. But Madiba was held in isolation and could never participate.


Nelson Mandela’s vision for the new South Africa encompassed sports as a path to racial reconciliation. If football was a black sport in South Africa, rugby is an Afrikaner obsession — the Springboks were the maximum icon of the apartheid regime. As president, Mandela brought the 1995 World Rugby Cup to Johannesburg, a story fictionalized in the film “Invictus,” and won the hearts and minds of his former persecutors. Now the World Cup 2010 is slated to project South Africa before the world as a dynamic, multi-racial powerhouse.


The truth is always more diffuse. Jacob Zuma, the country’s very corruptible third president, and his predecessors have sunk between $3.7 and $6 billion USD in infrastructure to burnish their images in a nation where 43% of South Africa’s 45.000.000 peoples live on $2 or less a day. The gleaming $300,000,000 Soccer City Stadium where the July 11th finals will be staged, abuts Soweto, the festering high-crime enclave of 3,000,000 mostly threadbare citizens, 30% of whom suffer from AIDS, according to the World Health Organization. Gangs of orphaned children rule the street.


Similarly, the stadium at Port Elizabeth on Nelson Mandela Bay, which came in at $287,000,000, was built over a slum from which hundreds were evicted. A school complex was demolished to make way for the Neusprot venue (only $140,000,000) — 13 such stadiums have risen from the dust amidst a storm of charges of kickbacks, bribery, and favoritism.
If recent history is any hint, the new stadiums will quickly become certifiable white elephants. Even Beijing’s much-praised “Birds’ Nest” coliseum designed for the 2008 Olympics is reportedly tenantless, and the Greek economy just collapsed in part thanks to  the burden of debt incurred for infrastructure for its Olympic Games. 


With a population scuffling just to feed itself, filling all this dazzling stadia with paying customers is problematic. Even the $18 cheap seats — a week’s wages in the cities and a month’s income in some rural areas — are mostly out of reach in a country where 50% of the work force is out of work. To deflect a grave social crisis in the making, the FIFA is offering 120,000 free admissions, about 2,200 seats for each of the World Cup’s 62 contests. Riots have already occurred at “friendly” preliminary games.


Ever since the bad old days of ancient Rome, bread and circuses have been a powerful formula for social control. In South Africa, as in Mexico, the World Cup is designed to make the discontented forget their discontent. For the next month, the violence, corruption, and class and race hatreds that dominate daily life in Mexico, South Africa, and the rest of what used to be called the third world will disappear beneath the social surface.


Although conflict is my bread and butter, I’m not going to miss the 2010 Mundiales for the world. 


John Ross is at home in the maw of the Monstruo watching the World Cup. You can complain to him at johnross@igc.org


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Welcome to Peter Darbee’s world

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Welcome to Peter Darbee’s world

“The only thing worse than a thug is an ineffective thug,” a source, who has closely tracked Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s activities for years, told us yesterday. “And that’s what [PG&E CEO] Peter Darbee is revealing himself to be.”

That’s pretty harsh, and isn’t just some hot air blown off by a disgruntled employee or a customer angry about a power shutoff. PG&E’s problem now is that since Darbee set out on the political adventure known as Proposition 16, this kind of characterization isn’t so far off from the sentiments publicly expressed by a number of powerful figures that the company must continue to work with.

California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey wrote in an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News that, “Pure and simple, Proposition 16 is a clever, brazen, buzzword-driven effort by one company to manipulate the California Constitution to protect its current monopoly.” Peevey isn’t exactly known as a PG&E hater –- green-power advocates have complained to the Guardian in the past that they think he’s too willing to honor the company’s requests. But Prop 16 clearly irked Peevey, who presides over the commission that decides whether PG&E will be allowed to raise rates.

Half a dozen state senators, including Senate pro tem Darrell Steinberg, rebuked PG&E over Prop 16, writing in a formal letter in December that it “calls into question your company’s integrity.”

On June 9, the day after voters shot down Prop 16, PG&E shares dropped 2.2 percent — the greatest decline of electricity utilities in the S&P 500 — possibly signaling a fluctuation in shareholder confidence. The Los Angeles Times ran a story pointing out (as the Guardian did) that the majority of counties that voted “no” on Prop 16 overlap with PG&E’s service territory, suggesting that the initiative dubbed by opponents as “PG&E’s power grab” was roundly rejected by its own customers.

Yet amid all the signs that PG&E had gone too far, despite all the indications that the utility had alienated regulators and political allies and royally pissed off its customers to boot, CEO Peter Darbee was patting himself on the back. While others were beginning to see Darbee as an unaccountable power-monger, Darbee evidently regarded himself as a fearless, courageous leader.

In a memo obtained by the Guardian that the CEO sent out to PG&E employees the day after Prop 16 was defeated, Darbee compares PG&E’s $46 million, failed quest to alter the state constitution through Prop 16 to the company’s decision to withdraw from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The utility won the respect of environmentalists when it dumped the national business organization last fall, denouncing its do-nothing approach to climate change.

Darbee suggests that PG&E’s willingness to take a stand in both instances is evidence of strong corporate leadership, but it’s an odd comparison to make. As Steinberg and other senators pointed out in their December letter, Prop 16 would’ve served to limit renewable energy development, not facilitate it. “It is unacceptable for a company that is falling behind in meeting state adopted goals for clean energy to impede the efforts of others who would attain those goals through innovative means,” Steinberg wrote.

Without further ado, here’s what Darbee had to say after Prop 16 went down. The essay, which was submitted as an opinion piece to the San Francisco Chronicle, is prefaced with a note to employees.

——————————————————————————————–
From: A Message From Peter Darbee
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 2:18 PM
To: All PG&E Mail Recipients; All PGE Corp Employees
Subject: After Election Day, A Reflection On Leadership

To All Employees:

As we look forward after the culmination of a hard campaign on Proposition 16, I wanted to share with you a short opinion essay that we submitted today to the San Francisco Chronicle. It addresses head on some of the questions we have all seen about PG&E’s stance on tough issues-from Proposition 16 to climate change, or any number of other examples many of us can no doubt recall. It makes clear that, in each case, our focus is on leadership, even-or maybe especially-when it requires tremendous courage.

I believe passionately that this is one of the aspects of our character that sets PG&E apart from many other companies. That’s been true throughout our history, and it’s even more true today.

As is always the case, the paper may or may not choose to print this piece. We hope they will. It’s an important and timely message for our customers. But it’s just as important and timely for all of us as employees. And, whether it appears in print or not, it’s a message we can all take heart in and carry forward proudly to others.

________________________________

The Price of Leadership

By Peter Darbee, Chairman, CEO and President, PG&E Corporation

Prime Minister Tony Blair said a few years ago, “I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour, but sometimes it is the price of leadership. And the cost of conviction.”

I was reminded of that observation this spring, as Pacific Gas and Electric Company came under widespread criticism for its support of Proposition 16, a statewide initiative to give people the right to vote on proposals to create risky new public agencies to provide electric power.

Many of those who criticized our support of Proposition 16 have long applauded our leadership at the state and national level on environmental issues and as a clean-energy provider. At the state level, PG&E helped champion passage of AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

PG&E also supported California’s aggressive vehicle emissions standards, opposing efforts by a national business organization to overturn them.

At the national level, we were instrumental in forging an historic alliance of major utilities, other large businesses, national environmental groups and labor unions to support comprehensive and effective clean-energy and climate change legislation in Congress. The work of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, of which PG&E has been a major contributor, is widely credited with inspiring major congressional initiatives on this vital issue.

While PG&E has been frequently honored for its environmental performance and commitment, including Newsweek magazine’s ranking as the country’s greenest utility in 2009, our environmental leadership has aroused controversy as well.

Last year, in a widely discussed move, PG&E withdrew its membership in a national business organization over fundamental differences on the need for climate change legislation. While a number of other major businesses followed our lead, others questioned why we broke ranks to support actions that could increase energy costs. We have explained, without apology, the science behind our stand and our careful choice of policies to utilize market forces to minimize costs.

Some of our longtime supporters, who decried Proposition 16, believe the PG&E they once admired lost its way somewhere along the line. I would tell them that their disagreement with us-which we respect-is the price of our leadership on important issues of the day. By staking out bold positions, we of course invite controversy. But the alternative is to be cowed by fear of criticism into ducking our leadership opportunities and responsibilities. Surely our society needs more leadership, not less.

After a lively debate, the voters have now spoken on Proposition 16 and we respect the outcome. We hope our critics will equally respect our willingness to participate in the system and engage on the important issues of the day. Through mutual engagement and mutual dialog, we can improve our company, our communities and our country.

Everyone hates PG&E

Zelda Bronstein
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Everyone hates PG&E

Well, maybe not everyone, but the results from last night’s election are fascinating. A $50 million campaign, with the opposition struggling to come up with $100,000 — and PG&E still lost. Calitics has a fun comparison that makes one of the key points: The company lost most heavily in its own service areas. People who have to deal with PG&E — and its high rates, poor service, blackouts, botched smart-meter program and financial greed — voted strongly against allowing the company to further entrench its monopoly power. In essence, PG&E lost at home.


A couple of other interesting factors: The results show, I think, that whatever you say about the decline of newspapers, their endorsements still matter. Every major newspaper in the state opposed Prop. 16, and that clearly had an impact. The No on 16 campaign didn’t have the money for any media buys; the press coverage and strong anti-PG&E endorsements had to carry the message.


TURN, Ross Mirkarmi, Mark Leno, Tom Ammiano and consultant Gail Kaufman deserve credit for raising what little money they could and leveraging it into a stunning statewide victory. Considering that the turnout skewed heavily Republican, the defeat of Prop. 16 will go down as one of the great progressive victories in California history.


The local numbers were astounding: In San Francisco, Prop. 16 went down 2-1, with 67 percent of the voters rejecting PG&E’s ploy. That’s the strongest mandate for public power I’ve ever seen. Same for the rest of the Bay Area: Alameda County, 64 percent No. San Mateo County, 60 percent No. Marin County, 61 percent No. Mayor Gavin Newsom ought to take a look at the map on the Secretary of State’s website; it shows that the voters he needs to get elected lieutenant governor have rejected PG&E and want a public-power option.


The collapse of PG&E’s attempt to buy democracy in California gives San Francisco some breathing room on its community choice aggregation contract, which is excellent news. The supervisors can now take some time to go over the details — and prepare for the next major battle, the marketing campaign to education local residents about the value of community-controlled green energy.


PG&E is clearly on the run — CEO Peter Darbee has driven the company to a point where it has no friends left. Could be a great era for public power efforts.

How safe is your cell phone?

David Talbot
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How safe is your cell phone?

By Brittany Baguio

news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY In the wake of recent studies suggesting that extensive cell phone use might be linked to some types of cancer, consumer advocates are pushing to require phone companies to publicize the level of radiation their devices emit.

It seems like a simple idea. If fast-food restaurants are required to post the calories and fat content of their junk food, why shouldn’t cell phone companies post the level of radiowave energy coming out of their products? But it’s proving to be a tough fight — in part because the scientific studies are so complex, and also because the industry is fighting furiously against disclosure rules.

The California State Senate narrowly rejected June 4 a bill by Sen. Mark Leno (D-SF) that would have taken a modest step toward better disclosure. Leno’s measure, SB 1212, would have mandated that manufacturers and phone providers disclose radiation levels, or specific absorption rate (SAR), on their Internet websites and online user manuals. They would also be required to state the maximum allowable SAR value, and what it means.

“The federal government has set a standard for this type of radiation and already requires reporting,” Leno told us, “At the very least, consumers should have the right to know about the relative risks of the products they’re buying.”

There’s a similar measure in the works in San Francisco. On May 24, the Board of Supervisors City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee passed Mayor Gavin Newsom’s plan to require retailers in the city to reveal the amount of radiation released by cell phones. That would make San Francisco the only city in the United States mandating that retailers acknowledge radiation information.

The most recent and largest study focusing on cell phone radiation, the Interphone Study, was released this year. Conducted by 21 scientists in 12 participating countries, the study looked at the long-term risks of certain brain cancers.

The results are mixed. The study found some results of increased risks of tumors, although the authors could not agree on how to interpret the data.

The researchers surveyed 5,000 brain cancer patients, and found that people who were “heavy” cell-phone users (defined as using the phone 30 minutes or more a day) had a slightly higher risk of some kinds of cancer. But, as an Environmental Working Group analysis of the study noted, “most of the people involved … used their cell phones much less than is common today.”

Cell phones emit radiowaves through their antennas, which in newer models are often embedded in the phone itself. The closer the distance from the antenna to a person’s head, the more exposed he or she is to radio frequency energy.

However, as the distance between the antenna and a person’s body increases, the amount of radio frequency energy decreases rapidly. Consumers who keep their phones away from their body while doing activities such as texting are absorbing less radio frequency energy.

The Federal Communications Commission has set a safety level for a phone’s SAR — a measure of radiation energy — at 1.6 watts per kilogram of body mass. All cell phone manufacturers must produce phones at or below this level.

Renee Sharp, director of California’s Environmental Working group, says the evidence doesn’t have to be conclusive to warrant caution. “We aren’t trying to say that cell phones are dangerous because we don’t have definite answers yet and we need more research,” Sharp said. “But when you look at studies with long-term use of 10 years of longer, you see increases in certain kinds of brain tumors. We are trying to give people as much information as we can to make informed decisions because it may or may not impact their health.”

Cell phone manufacturers aren’t required to disclose SAR information directly to phone buyers; they send the data to the FCC. Although the FCC makes this information available on its website, the information is incomplete and hard to find. A list of cell phone SARs information compiled by the Environmental Working Group is at www.ewg.org/cellphoneradiation/Get-a-Safer-Phone.

The telecommunications industry strongly oppose Leno’s bill. Joe Gregorich, a lobbyist for Tech America, an industry group, told us that the requirement in Leno’s bill “has an assumption that a lower SAR is safer than a higher SAR. The FCC, FDA, and Inter Agency Working Group regulate the SAR and have set a SAR threshold where cell phones are considered safe. All cell phone manufacturers make cell phones below this SAR threshold.”

According to Sharp, the FCC’s standards are out of date. “The FCC set SAR standards 14 years ago and has not updated them since,” Sharp said. “This was before we found out that children have thinner skulls and are more susceptible to radiation effects, and before phones developed and exploded into what they are now.”

Harris declares victory in AG Democratic primary

Mary Magee
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San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris declared victory in the Attorney General Democratic primary in an energized  speech around 11 p.m. at Mimi Silbert’s Delancey Street Foundation at 600 Embarcadero.

Harris’ speech came soon after the room buzzed with the news that Santa Clara voters had approved a $937 million stadium deal for the 49ers at a site near Great America, and immediately on the heels a rousing introduction by State Sen. Mark Leno.

“With her kind of leadership, we’ll be able to reinvest dollars in the best crime prevention programs,” Leno said.

Harris’s campaign raised $3 million in the Democratic primary, and Leno indicated that supporters would need to “triple or quadruple that in the general election.”

Leno promoted medical parole and praised Harris’ Back on Track program for reducing recidivism rates for young, first time offenders.

“With your help we will elect the first woman to be Attorney General for the state of California,” Leno promised.

 Then Harris took the podium, dazzling in a chic black outfit and pearls.

Acknowledging the work and efforts of her supporters, Harris broke into a big smile.

“I do humbly accept the Democratic nomination for Attorney General of California,” she  said.

She praised good ideas that her fellow Democrats raised during the primary around fighting gang crime, corporate greed and fraud, protecting kids and the environment.

‘It’s been an honor to work with you,” Harris said, promising to call her opponents, “to ask you to help us put those great ideas to work.”

Then she talked about getting “tough and smart on crime” by addressing gang crime, but also focusing on early intervention and truancy.

She talked about cracking down on predatory lenders, supporting health care reform, and protecting California’s environment.

“When the President passed healthcare reform, it was the right thing to do,” Harris said. “People deserve to have medical care when they need it. The Attorney General has got to stand up and support that. It must be the work of the next Attorney General to ensure that the disaster and tragedy that happened in the Gulf of Mexico never happens in California,” she said, warning of attacks on AB 32, which set California’s 2020 greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal into law in 2006. “

And she described her campaign touching down in Modesto, Bakersfield, Oakland and Palo Alto and stretching from “grassroots to net roots,” ,

“We may seemingly be different because of our zip codes, perhaps, but we are all the same in terms of what we want for children.. elders,” Harris said, promising, “to protect poor people, the vulnerable and people who are the targets of bias.”

“We have a lot of work to do before November…but we are clear of purpose, clear of mind,” Harris said. “We believe in hard work, but we also believe that if can be fun work. Let’s celebrate tonight!”

And then she was off the stage, shaking hands with fans .Asked about the possibility of becoming the first female California Attorney General, Harris flashed that dazzling smile.“I’m sure a man could do the job just as well,” she said. “Let’s leave it at that for now.”

 

 

Another bloody budget

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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6
Another bloody budget

rebeccab@sfbg.com

In the days since June 1, when Mayor Gavin Newsom unveiled his proposal for San Francisco’s $6.48 billion budget for the next fiscal year, public sector employees and community organizations have been poring over the hefty document to determine how their jobs, services, and programs survived cuts made to close a $483 million shortfall.

For police and firefighters, a key Newsom constituency, the news is good. There were no layoffs to San Francisco firefighters, and while members of the Police Officer’s Association gave up $9.3 million in wage concessions under the lucrative contract Newsom gave them a few years ago, police officers will still receive a 4 percent wage increase on July 1.

For others, the release of the mayor’s budget signified a tough fight looming before the Board of Supervisors, one with high stakes. Cuts to homeless services, mental health care, youth programs, and housing assistance, along with privatization proposals, have raised widespread concern among labor and liberal advocacy organizations. Public input on the budget will continue at the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee until July 15, when the amended document is considered by the full board.

At a June 1 announcement ceremony, Newsom asserted that the budget was balanced “without draconian cuts,” saying, “We were able to avoid the kind of cataclysmic devastation that some had argued was inevitable in this budget.”

Nearly a week later, Board President David Chiu told the Guardian that sort of cataclysm wouldn’t be staved off for long if the city continues on the course of repeatedly making deep budget cuts without proposing any significant new sources of revenue.

“Now that the smoke has cleared, it is clear that the mayor’s proposed budget is perfect for a mayor who is only going to be around for the short term, but it does not address the long-term fiscal crisis that our city is in,” Chiu said. “Next year, we’re looking at over a $700 million budget deficit. The year after that, we’re looking at almost an $800 million budget deficit. The budget proposal that Newsom put out balances the … deficit on many one-time tricks and assumptions of uncertain revenue.”

Meanwhile, advocates said even the cuts proposed this time would bring serious consequences, especially with unemployment on the rise, state programs being cut in Sacramento, and families feeling the pinch more than ever.

“Poor and working class families, and families of color in San Francisco, are facing kind of an assault on funding and on safety net services on multiple levels,” said Chelsea Boilard, family policy and communications associate for Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. “I think a lot of it is that families are concerned about their ability to stay in the city and raise their kids here.”

 

“NO NEW TAXES”

During the budget announcement, Newsom emphasized the positive. He found $12 million in new revenue simply by closing a loophole that had allowed Internet-based companies to avoid paying that amount in hotel taxes. He said 350 currently occupied positions would be cut, but noted that it was less than a cap of 425 that public sector unions had agreed to. Cuts were inevitable since the ailing economy inflicted the city’s General Fund with significant losses, particularly from business and property tax revenues.

Nonetheless, Newsom’s budget is already coming under fire from progressive leaders. For one, there are no new revenue-generating measures in the form of general taxes, which could have averted the worst blows to critical safety-net services and might help remedy the city’s economic woes in the long-term.

“There are no new taxes in this budget,” Newsom declared. “I know some folks just prefer tax increases. I don’t.”

Yet Chiu said many of Newsom’s assumptions for revenue were on shaky ground, prompting City Controller Ben Rosenfield — Newsom’s former budget director — to place $142 million on reserve in case the projected revenues don’t pan out.

“These budget deficits continue as far as the eye can see,” Chiu noted. “Even if those amounts come in, something like 90 percent of them are one-time fixes. So even if the mayor is right, it doesn’t solve next year’s problem, or the year after. Which is why many of us at the board believe that we have to consider additional revenue proposals to think about the long-term fiscal health of the city.”

Sup. John Avalos, chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, described Newsom’s budget as “pretty much an all-cuts budget,” noting that he and Chiu planned to introduce revenue-generating measures. They were expected to introduce proposals — including an increase in the hotel tax and a change in the business tax — at the June 8 board meeting.

Because despite Newsom’s rosy assessment, many of his proposed cuts are deep and painful: the Recreation and Park Department would be cut by 42 percent (with its capital projects budget slashed by 90 percent), Economic and Workforce Development by 34 percent, Ethics Commission by 23 percent (basically eliminating public financing for candidates), Department of the Environment by 14 percent, Emergency Management by 10 percent, and the list goes on.

 

CUTS TO SOCIAL SERVICES

Progressives say Newsom’s budget reflects skewed priorities. While relatively little is asked of public safety departments, health and human services programs face major staffing and funding losses. “Poor people are being asked to shoulder the burden,” noted Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness.

Nearly $31 million would be slashed from the Department of Public Health, and more than $22 million would be cut from the Human Services Agency under Newsom’s proposed budget. While this reflects only 2–3 percent of the departmental budgets, there’s widespread concern that the cuts target programs designed to shield the most vulnerable residents.

Proposals that deal with housing are of special concern. “We have more and more families moving into SRO hotel rooms. We have families in garages. We have a really scary situation for many families,” Friedenbach said.

Affordable housing programs within the Mayor’s Office of Housing would get slashed from $16.8 million currently down to just $1.2 million, a 92 percent cut. Other cuts seem small, but will have big impacts of those affected. Newsom’s budget eliminates 42 housing subsidies, which boost rent payments for families on the brink of homelessness, for a savings of $264,000. Meanwhile, a locally funded program that subsidizes housing costs for people with AIDS would be cut, for a savings of $559,000.

Transitional housing would be affected, too, such as 59 beds at a homeless shelter on Otis Street, which Friedenbach says would be lost under Newsom’s budget proposal. “We’ve already lost more than 400 shelter beds since Newsom came to office, so that’d be a huge hit,” she said. Since the recession began, she added, the wait-list at shelters has tripled. The Ark House, a temporary housing facility that serves LGBT youth, would also be closed.

Overall, homeless services delivered by HSA would take a $12 million hit in Newsom’s budget, or about 13 percent, offset slightly by homeless services being increased by $2 million within the Mayor’s Office budget, a 71 percent increase.

Outpatient mental health services, such as Community Behavioral Health Services, would also be affected (See “Cutting from the bottom”), in violation of current city law. Several years ago, then-Sup. Tom Ammiano introduced legislation establishing a “single standard of care” to guarantee access to mental health services for indigent and uninsured residents.

“If timely, effective, and coordinated mental health treatment is not provided to indigent and uninsured residents who are not seriously mentally ill, those residents are at risk of becoming seriously mentally ill and hence requiring more expensive and comprehensive mental health care from San Francisco,” according to the ordinance, which was passed in June of 2005. Newsom’s budget proposes changing this legislation to enable cuts to those services, which would result in 1,600 people losing treatment, according to Friedenbach.

Unfortunately, advocates for the poor has gotten used to this ritual of trying to restore cuts made by Newsom. “There are some sacred cows that seem to survive year after year, and then we’re left fighting over what we can get,” said Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC).

The Central City SRO Collaborative, which supports tenants living in single-room occupancy hotels in the mid-Market Street area and is operated through THC, is slated to be cut by 40 percent along with three other similar programs — a replay from last year when the mayor proposed eliminating funding and the Board of Supervisors restored the cut.

“I think you’d see more fires, more people dying from overdoses. You’d see really bad conditions,” Jeff Buckley, director of the program, told us of the potential consequences of eliminating the inspections and resident training that is part of the program.

Funding was also eliminated for THC’s Ellis Eviction Defense Program, the city’s only free legal defense program with capacity to serve 55 low-income tenants facing eviction under the Ellis Act.

 

THREAT TO RENTERS

One of the most controversial proposals to emerge from Newsom’s budget is a way for property owners and real estate speculators to buy their way out of the city lottery that limits conversion of rental properties and tenants-in-common (TICs) to privately-owned condos if they pay between $4,000 and $20,000 (depending on how long they have waited for conversion), a proposal to raise about $8 million for the city.

“I went back and forth because I know the Board of Supervisors can’t stand this,” Newsom said as he broached the subject at the June 1 announcement. “I still don’t get this argument completely. Except it’s a big-time ideological discussion. It’s so darn ideological that I think it gets in the way of having a real discussion.”

Yet Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, said the argument is quite clear: making it easier to convert rental units into condos will accelerate the loss of rental housing in a city where two-thirds of residents are tenants, in the process encouraging real estate speculation and evictions.

“It will encourage TIC conversions and evictions because it makes the road to converting TICs to condos that much easier,” Gullicksen said. “It’s going to be a huge gift to real estate speculators.”

Newsom press secretary Tony Winnicker disputes that impact, saying that “these units were going to convert anyway, whether next year or six years. This merely accelerates that conversion without altering the lottery to protect jobs and services.”

But Gullicksen said the proposal obviously undermines the lottery system, which is the only tool tenant advocates have to preserve the finite supply of rent-controlled apartments, noting that even if the condos are later rented out, they will no longer to subject to rent control. That’s one reason why the Board of Supervisors has repeatedly rejected this idea, and why Newsom probably knows they will do so again.

Avalos said he and other progressive supervisors will oppose the proposal, despite the difficulties that will create in balancing the budget. “It’s kind of like putting a gun to our heads,” Avalos said of Newsom’s inclusion of that revenue in his budget.

To offset that revenue loss, Avalos has proposed a tax on alcohol sold in bars and Gullicksen is proposing the city legalize illegal housing units that are in habitable condition for property owners willing to pay an amnesty fee.

Some housing advocates were also struck by the timing of proposing condo conversion fees while also eliminating the Ellis Eviction Defense Program. “We’re really the only ones doing this,” Shaw noted. He said the program is crucial because it serves low-income tenants, many of whom are monolingual Chinese or Spanish speakers who lack the ability to pay for private attorneys to resist aggressive landlords.

 

PRIVATIZATION PROPOSALS RETURN

The Department of Children, Youth. and Families budget would be reduced by 20 percent under Newsom’s budget, with the greatest cuts affecting after school and youth leadership programs. Roughly a $3 million cut will result in the loss of around 300 subsidized slots for after school programs, said Boilard of Coleman Youth Advocates. Another $3 million is expected to come out of violence-prevention programs for troubled youth; an additional $1 million would affect youth jobs programs.

Patricia Davis, a Child Protective Services employee who lives in the Mission District with her two teenage sons, said she was concerned about the implications for losses to youth programs, particularly during the summer. “You can imagine what’s going to happen this summer,” she said. “I feel that a lot of kids are going to do a lot of things that they have no business doing.”

Davis, who says she’ll have to look for a new job come Sept. 30 because the federal stimulus package funding that supports her position will run out, said she was not happy to hear that police officers would be getting raises just as that summer school programs are being threatened with closure. “Couldn’t the 4 percent [raise] go somewhere else — like to the children?” she wondered.

Meanwhile, privatization proposals are causing anxiety for SEIU Local 1021 members, who recently gave millions in wage concessions and furloughs along with other public employees to help balance the budget. A proposal to contract out for jail health services cropped up last year and was shot down by the board, but it’s back again.

“When you make it a for-profit enterprise, the bottom line is the profit. It’s not about the health care,” SEIU Local 1021 organizer Gabriel Haaland told us. “It isn’t the same quality of care.”

Haaland said he believes the mayor’s assumption that the proposal could save $13 million should be closely examined. Other privatization schemes would contract out for security at city museums and hospitals.

Institutional police in the mental health ward at SF General Hospital and other sensitive facilities are well trained and experienced with difficult situations so, Haaland said, “the workers feel a lot safer” than they would with private contractors.

Regarding Newsom’s privatization proposal, Avalos said the board was “opposed last year and the year before, and we’ll oppose [them] this year.”

In the coming weeks, Avalos and other members of the Budget and Finance Committee will carefully go over Newsom’s proposed budget — which is now being sized up by Budget Analyst Harvey Rose’s office — and solicit input from the public. Chances are, they’ll get an earful.

“People are scared. They are scared to death right now,” Boilard said. “As it is, people’s hours are being reduced. And it’s getting harder and harder to find a job because so many people are out of work that the level of competition has gotten really fierce. This is the time that we need to invest in safety net services for young people and families more than ever — and all those services and programs and relationships that people depend on are disappearing.”

Steven T. Jones and Kaitlyn Paris contributed to this report.

A bit of good news from the East Bay

Zelda Bronstein
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It appears at this point as if Victoria Kolakowski, who is leading with 46 percent of the vote, may become the first transgender trial-court judge in the United States.

The news from back East

Zelda Bronstein
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One of the first telling primary races is over, and it appears that Blanche Lincoln has narrowly survived a primary challenge in Arkansas. The progressive Dems who fought hard to get rid of a senator who helped kill the public option and might as well be a Republican will be unhappy, but the fact that even with the (tepid) support of the president she only squeaked by with the narrowist of victories sends a signal to other fence-sitting Dems. The bad news: The Republicans will probably pick up this seat in November.

In Mexico, turtles and oil privatization

Zelda Bronstein
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In Mexico, turtles and oil privatization

MEXICO CITY (June 3rd) — The turtles of Caribbean Mexico are an ancient race. Their ancestors paddled with dinosaurs and prehistoric fish. Kemp’s Ridley turtles were burying their eggs in Gulf Coast sanctuaries countless millennia before the Olmecs, Mexico’s matrix civilization, installed their mysterious giant heads on the Veracruz plain. The presence of turtles in indigenous iconography is evidenced by artifacts displayed in anthropological museums in Mexico City and Jalapa Veracruz. The 20th Century naturalists recorded “arribos” (“arrivals”) of tens of thousands of Kemp’s Ridley females at Rancho Nuevo beach Tamaulipas; with few exceptions, Kemp’s Ridleys (named for an amateur turtle-ologist and the smallest and rarest of all sea turtles) nest only at Rancho Nuevo and Padre Island, Texas.


But for Gulf waters, turtles are like canaries in the coalmines. The 1979 blowout of Ixtoc 1, a Mexican National Petroleum Company (PEMEX) platform off the southern state of Tabasco, gushed uncontrollably for nine months. Some 3,000,000 barrels spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, fouling beaches and nesting grounds. The Rancho Nuevo arribos shrank below 4,000. Although Mexican Kemp’s Ridleys have staged a modest comeback (the population is now calculated at 8,000), the April 20th explosion of a British Petroleum deep-sea drilling rig on the Macondo Prospect (with apologies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 130 miles southeast of New Orleans could spell doomsday for these primordial creatures.


Across the Gulf, Mexican authorities are watching this travesty unfold with furrowed brows. The blow-out of the Deepwater Horizon platform that killed 11 and wounded 17 workers is now the largest oil spill in U.S. history, almost doubling the size of the Exxon Valdez fiasco in Alaskan waters (10,000,000 gallons) and threatening biblical devastation of Caribbean wildlife from Mexico to Cuba. Already, Gulf Coast fishing grounds have been shut down, shrimp and oyster beds contaminated, colonies of marine mammals such as dolphins and manatees are menaced, and bird life, particularly brown pelicans, is at extreme risk. In just the first 20 days of the catastrophe, 156 dead Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles were counted.


The good news — at least for Mexico — is that deep-water oil plumes have been caught up in loop currents that threaten environmental mayhem as far east as the Florida Keys and Communist Cuba, but will not touch home. The bad news is that, come August, when the hurricane season blows in (2010 is being touted as a record year for tropical hurricanes with 15 giant storms headed for the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico), those currents will shift dramatically south towards Mexico. Even now, deep water “cyclones” are sweeping gobs of oil towards Veracruz and Tamaulipas turtle breeding grounds, and Mexico’s environmental secretary, Rafael Elvira, is preparing to file suit against BP, whose $325 billion earnings in 2009 is larger than Mexico’s total annual budget.


BP efforts to plug the leak with everything from old tires to tons of mud, robot submarines and never-before-tested “domes” have met with serial failure. A slant drill to relieve pressure on the undersea gusher will not be in place until August, when the currents turn towards Mexico. Kemp’s Ridleys nest from April through August.


President Felipe Calderon’s brow is further corrugated by the prospect that the mammoth BP spill will torpedo his pledge to privatize (he calls it “modernize”) both Mexico’s oil industry and PEMEX, the national petroleum consortium. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, a joint venture between BP, Halliburton, and TransOcean (controlled by a Swiss holding company), has certainly slowed, if not slain, Calderon’s plans to contract similar transnationals for deep sea drilling in Mexico’s slice of the Gulf.


According to U.S. Department of Energy evaluations, Mexico has only nine years of proven reserves left before it becomes a net oil importer. Major offshore wells like Cantarell in the Sound of Campeche are played out, and no new land-based deposits have been located. Rummaging through the remains of the old Chicontepec field in Veracruz (Halliburton is an important subcontractor) has yielded meager results.


One joke making the rounds has Calderon delighted by the BP spill, because it will bring more oil to Mexican waters.


In the vision of Big Oil, Mexico’s only hope for economic survival lies in its “aguas profundas,” or deep waters, five miles down in the Gulf. Of course, only Big Oil has the technology to get at these riches. According to the transnationals, PEMEX must be reformed and partner up with them (“an association of capitals”) for a percentage of the take. So-called risk contracts are currently barred by the Mexican Constitution. 


Following orders from his backers (Halliburton, the number one PEMEX subcontractor, was a generous contributor to Calderon’s fraud-tarred 2006 election victory), the Mexican president submitted “energy reform” legislation to Congress in 2008 that laid out a “strategic alliance” with Big Oil and “flexibilization” of PEMEX opening the state company to private investment and risk contracts. The Calderon media machine cranked up an infomercial campaign depicting an azure Caribbean under which Mexico’s true wealth lay buried. “The Treasure of Mexico” was repeatedly shown at prime time on this distant neighbor nation’s two-headed television monopoly, Televisa and TV Azteca.


Mexico is fast running out of oil, the president warned to make his point. Deep sea drilling is the only option. “Energy reform” was put on congressional fast track.


By seeking to privatize Mexico’s petroleum industry, Felipe Calderon is swimming against global currents. World-class producers like Russia and Saudi Arabia are consolidating their state-run oil companies, Glasprom and Aramco, rather than selling them off to the private sector.


Petroleum is a volatile liquid in the Mexican mix. Oil and sovereignty have been joined at the hip ever since depression-era president Lazaro Cardenas expropriated and nationalized the industry in 1938 from Anglo and American owners — the so-called Seven Sisters — when they defied the Mexican Supreme Court during an oil workers’ strike. Those opposed to Calderon’s scheme went into hullabaloo mode to push back his privatization legislation.


Ex-left presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, from whom many Mexicans believe Calderon stole the 2006 election, organized his social base and the “Adelitas,” women partisans dressed up as “soldaderas” or female fighters in the Mexican revolution, donned sombreros and long skirts, toy carbines and bandaleros of fake bullets crisscrossed across their breasts, and encircled the Mexican Senate. Inside both houses of congress, Lopez Obrador’s colleagues seized the podiums and paralyzed all legislative activity for ten days.


The stand-off resulted in a series of nationally televised debates over the next four months during which energy experts, academics, Big Oil reps, PEMEX honchos, lawyers, leftists, senators, deputies, impresarios, and even a poet or two argued about the privatization proposal. The debates were carried live on a big screen in the great Zocalo plaza, where hundreds of outraged citizens gathered every afternoon to cuss out the privatizers.


By autumn 2008, a compromise was struck between Calderon’s PAN party and the former ruling PRI, which still holds a majority in both houses. Anti-Lopez Obrador elements within the left-center PRD also signed off on the deal, which delineated hundreds of exploration tracts in Mexican deep sea waters, but put a hold on transnational participation and risk contracts. The compromise did not please the transnationals, but Calderon okayed it reluctantly and was preparing fresh legislation to assuage their concerns when the Deepwater Horizon blew out at the bottom of the Gulf, putting the kibosh on Big Oil’s pipedreams.


The struggle to stop the privatization of PEMEX is symbolic and illusory. Thirty one out of the company’s 41 divisions are, in effect, subcontracted out to the likes of BP and Halliburton;  most contracts are concentrated in the PEP or exploration and perforation sector. Ironically, players like BP, the biggest producer in the Gulf of Mexico today, and Shell are reincarnations of British interests that dominated petroleum production in Veracruz before expropriation — Royal Dutch Shell evolved from Lord Cowdry’s (Weetman Pierson) Aguila Oil. Moreover, Exxon is reported to be dickering for BP (which now incorporates Amoco and Atlantic-Richfield), a merger that would restore John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil taken down by trustbusters in 1911. Standard Oil’s James Doheny and Pierson ruled Mexican oilfields before 1938, and once threatened to secede and form their own “Republic of The Gulf of Mexico.” 


The U.S. and Mexico dispute a pair of potentially abundant fields in the deep waters of the Gulf. Designated “Donas,” the eastern polygon is triangulated between the Yucatan, New Orleans, and Cuba. The much-larger (16,000 square kilometers) western polygon sits between Tamaulipas and Texas. Mexico’s share of the western “Dona” (62%) purportedly holds up to 34,000,000,000 barrels, twice current reserves.


Preliminary delineation of the Donas was agreed upon by Washington and Mexico City in 2000, and deep-sea drilling is set to begin as early as next year. Chevron and Shell have reportedly already won contracts to work the U.S. sites. But Mexico does not have the technology to get at its “treasure” and Houston oil guru George Baker confirms that it will be another decade before PEMEX comes into possession of the tools to drill baby drill at such depths.


Advocates for continued state control of Mexico’s oil like Professor Fabio Barbosa of the National Autonomous University (UNAM) rebut the claim that PEMEX cannot drill deep, citing development of the Nab platform in mile-deep waters off Yucatan  (the Dona reserves are thought to be three to five miles down in the Gulf.)


In a recent El Universal op-ed, Barbosa recalled then-BP vice president Cris Sladen’s warning to a 2006 oil conference in Veracruz that Mexico would go belly-up if it didn’t dissolve PEMEX and let the latest version of the Seven Sisters handle the deep sea exploration and drilling.


Closer to the bottom of the food chain, the voices of the turtles are not heard in this debate between privatizers and nationalists. Deep sea drilling presages unprecedented carnage for their already exhausted species. BP itself has an unblemished record of species genocide — its Arctic projects threaten protected bowhead whales in the Beaufort Sea and a 900,000 gallon spill in Prudhoe Bay in 2000 plus its plans to trash the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge put dozens of species, from Polar bears and caribou to the Arctic tern, the longest-flying migratory bird on Planet Earth, on the brink of extinction.


In an exhibition of unbridled cynicism, BP greenwashes its tarnished image with full-page New York Times professions of its concern for the environment and by handing out conservation awards and grants. So far as is known, no Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle has ever won one.


The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest liken the American continent to the back of a turtle — humans are allowed to live on it but must do so in harmony with the planet. “Turtle Island” is the translation of the name of the place where we live in several Indian languages, a designation that once lent its name to Gary Snyder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poems imploring environmental respect and salvation.


But the poet’s metaphors do not carry much weight in the boardroom. BP and its cronies in corporate crime and capitalist greed have put Turtle Island at the top of their hit list.          


John Ross is back in “El Monstruo,” the title of his latest cult classic (“pulsating and gritty” the NY Post) and can be reached at johnross@igc.org

Newsom’s budget includes a few ideas “Supervisors can’t stand”

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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City department heads, members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, representatives from major news outlets, and others crowded into the Luggage Store Art Gallery at 6th and Market streets on June 1 to hear Mayor Gavin Newsom discuss his proposed 2010-2011 budget.

Colorful artwork, such as a collage fashioned from cereal boxes, adorned the walls, and Newsom said he’d selected the venue to emphasize his commitment to improving the blighted mid-Market area.

Newsom’s $6.48 billion budget is being put forth in the face of a roughly $480 million deficit, which places the city in a similar financial situation to last year, when the mayor’s budget proposal sparked an outcry from progressive supervisors and a wide array of advocacy organizations for its deep blows to public health programs and critical services.

At first glance, the Department of Public Health seems to have fared better this time around, as a partial result of outside funding through federal programs. However, Newsom proposed slashing $22 million from DPH, compared with a total department budget of approximately $1.4 billion.

Newsom’s budget eliminates a total of 993 positions that are filled and unfilled, though the mayor said he anticipated 350 actual layoffs, bringing the total number of city employees to the lowest level in more than a decade. He thanked those he referred to as “enlightened city employees” for wage concessions that made fewer layoffs possible. There were no layoffs in the San Francisco Police Department or the San Francisco Fire Department, Newsom noted. The mayor also announced that an additional $5.9 million would be allocated to remedy the plagued crime lab.

The most contentious issue to emerge from the budget announcement was a proposal to generate $8 million through condo-conversion fees, under a system that would make it easier for people to turn rental units and tenancy-in-common units into condominiums.

Newsom accounted for funding from this proposal despite a lack of support from the Board of Supervisors. “I know the Board of Supervisors can’t stand this,” he said. “But I can’t stand the alternative. … This is a debate that I want to have, because I think this is principled and right.” He added that he thought supervisors’ resistance to accelerated condo conversions was “so darn ideological that it gets in the way of having a real discussion.”

Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the Budget & Finance Committee, said that he and other supervisors fear this could lead to more owner move-in evictions, a trend that would upend tenants’ lives and ultimately deplete the city’s affordable housing stock. “That’s been a concern of mine for months,” Avalos noted. Newsom’s decision to go forward with including it in the budget means that if the Supes reject it, they’ll have to find an additional $8 million to make up for the gap. “It’s kind of like putting a gun to our heads,” he said.

Newsom asserted that the budget was balanced “Without draconian cuts,” saying, “We were able to avoid the kind of cataclysmic devastation that some had argued … was inevitable in this budget.”

Yet Avalos described it as “pretty much an all-cuts budget,” because it contained no new revenue generating measures. “There are no new taxes in this budget,” Newsom said. “I know some folks prefer tax increases. I don’t.”

Avalos said he and other members of the board were working on a number of revenue-generating measures, including a nickel-per-drink tax on alcoholic beverages that would be aimed at the level of distributors, not small independent businesses.

Expect more on the mayor’s budget in coming weeks.

Film listings

David Talbot
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Erik Morse, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide. Due to the Memorial Day holiday, theater information was incomplete at presstime.

OPENING

*Best Worst Movie See "Green is Good." (1:33)

Get Him to the Greek At this point movie execs can throw producer Judd Apatow’s name on the marquee of a film and it’s a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s hard to say whether this Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) spin-off benefits from the Apatow sign of approval or if it would be better off standing on its own, but it definitely doesn’t benefit from comparisons to its predecessor. Russell Brand returns as the British rock star Aldous Snow, and Jonah Hill, playing a different character this time, is given the task of chaperoning the uncooperative Snow from London to LA in 48 hours. Despite a great cast, including a surprisingly animated P. Diddy, the story is pretty bland and can’t match the blend of drama and comedy that Marshall achieved. Of course, none of that matters because the movie execs are right: if you like Apatow’s brand of humor, you’re going to have a good time anyway. (1:49) (Galvin)

Killers Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher star in this comedy about marriage and hired assassins. (1:40)

Living in Emergency Filmmakers follow four volunteers of Médecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF) in Liberia and the Congo, from the initial shock of a first-timer to the overwhelming exhaustion of a veteran. Morally ambiguous decisions have left many of them arrogant and bitter and it’s apparent that these people are not the inflated heroes that we might wish, but normal people who were drawn to test themselves in circumstances of little hope. Some fail. Living in Emergency is an interesting glimpse into a provocative world, and the morally icky stuff is sometimes worse than the blood and death on screen. But a glimpse is all it is. The filmmakers clearly have an agenda that doesn’t include time for exploring the lives of any of the doctors, patients or procedures, and they leave the audience wondering whether there might be more lurking beneath the surface. (1:33) (Galvin)

Marmaduke Big. Talking. Dog. (1:27)

Micmacs See "Cute Is What He Aims For." (1:44) Smith Rafael.

*Ran Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 historical epic Ran brings the old adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely to life with such veracity and ambition, such magnificence and devastation, that its like has never been equaled since. Storyboarded by Kurosawa in paintings a decade prior to filming and equipped with the largest budget for a Japanese film up until that time, Ran is gorgeous to behold (in no small part to Emi Wada’s Oscar-winning costumes and thousands of extras) and harrowing to experience. Kurosawa fuses the premise of Shakespeare’s King Lear with historical accounts of Warring States-era general Mori Motonari to tell the tragedy of Lord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai), the senile patriarch of the once powerful Ichimonji clan who erroneously decides to divide his kingdom among his three sons. Like his Shakespearean counterpart, Hidetora is certainly a fool, but unlike Lear, he’s also a merciless despot who learns firsthand, as his empire crumbles around him and he sinks further into dementia, that bloodshed can only be repaid with further bloodshed. Nakadai, his face made up to resemble the furrowed intensity of a Noh mask, turns out a performance as resplendent as it is terrifying, equaled only by Mieko Harada’s turn as the Lady MacBeth-like Lady Kaede, who welcomes Hidetora’s downfall with vengeful relish.Catch this 35mm restored print while you can, since no home entertainment system, no matter how pimped out, can truly do Kurosawa’s late masterpiece justice. (2:42) (Sussman)

Solitary Man Michael Douglas has a (post?) midlife crisis. (1:30)

*Splice See "In the Cut." (1:45)

*Trash Humpers What is Trash Humpers? Is it filmmaker Harmony Korine’s rage against his experiences making 2007’s Mister Lonely? Despite being characteristically bizarre, with tales of celebrity impersonators and flying nuns, Mister Lonely was Korine’s most technically polished (i.e., expensive-looking) film to date. By contrast, Trash Humpers, shot on the quick and mega-cheap, literally looks like "an old VHS tape that was in some attick [sic] or buried in some ditch," per the film’s charmingly lo-fi press kit. There’s also Trash Humpers’ rather, uh, subversive content. Basically, it’s 78 minutes of shenanigans, starring a trio of ne’er-do-wells who are either wearing elderly-burn-victim masks or are actually supposed to be elderly burn victims. The creepy crew and their pals cavort through an unidentified Nashville, smashing TVs, slipping razor blades into apples, guzzling booze, spanking hookers, setting off firecrackers, cracking racist and/or homophobic jokes, eating pancakes doused in dish soap, and humping trash cans. Lots of trash cans. Primitive video technology (the film was edited on two VCRs) makes everything look even worse, if that’s even possible. Now, if you or I submitted Trash Humpers, the programmers at the Toronto International Film Festival would chuckle condescendingly and fling it into the nearest (humpable) trash bin. But you have to consider the source: Salon recently dubbed Korine "the most hated man in art-house cinema," which if true is probably the director’s most cherished triumph. (1:18) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (Eddy)

Women Without Men Potent imagery has always been at the forefront of photographer and installation artist Shirin Neshat’s explorations of gender in Islamic society, and her debut feature Women Without Men certainly has its share. Loosely based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same name, the film follows four Iranian women (down from the novel’s original five) — Fakhri, an upper-class military wife who longs to reconnect with an old lover; Zarin, a traumatized prostitute who escapes captivity; Munis, a housebound young woman reborn as a political dissident; and her friend, Faezeh, who longs to marry Munis’ domineering brother — in the days leading up to the 1953 coup d’etat that overturned democracy and restored the Shah to power. From the suicidal leap — filmed so as to suggest flight as much as falling — which opens the film, to the mist-shrouded groves of a rural orchard that becomes a refuge for the women, each shot is as striking for its beauty as it is uneven in conveying the allegorical significance behind all the lushness. The casts’ largely stilted performances don’t help much in this regard either. "All that we wanted to was to find a new form, a new way," says Munis in voiceover. As a creative act of mourning for Iran’s short-lived experiment in democracy — a moment, Neshat acknowledges in the film’s postscript, that clearly resonated with last year’s Green revolution — Women Without Men ambitiously attempts, albeit with mixed success, to envision just that. (1:35) (Sussman)

ONGOING

Alice in Wonderland Tim Burton’s take on the classic children’s tale met my mediocre expectations exactly, given its months of pre-release hype (in the film world, fashion magazines, and even Sephora, for the love of brightly-colored eye shadows). Most folks over a certain age will already know the story, and much of the dialogue, before the lights go down and the 3-D glasses go on; it’s up to Burton and his all-star cast (including numerous big-name actors providing voices for animated characters) to make the tale seem newly enthralling. The visuals are nearly as striking as the CG, with Helena Bonham Carter’s big-headed Red Queen a particularly marvelous human-computer creation. But Wonderland suffers from the style-over-substance dilemma that’s plagued Burton before; all that spooky-pretty whimsy can’t disguise the film’s fairly tepid script. Teenage Alice (Mia Wasikowska) displaying girl-power tendencies is a nice, if not surprising, touch, but Johnny Depp’s grating take on the Mad Hatter will please only those who were able to stomach his interpretation of Willy Wonka. (1:48) (Eddy)

*Babies Thomas Balmes’ camera records the first year in the lives of four infants in vastly different circumstances. They’re respectively born to hip young couple in Tokyo’s high-tech clutter; familiar moderately alterna-types (the father is director Frazer Bradshaw of last year’s excellent indie drama Everything Strange and New) in SF’s Mission District; a yurt-dwelling family isolated in the vast Mongolian tundra; and a Namibian village so maternally focused that adult menfolk seem to have been banished. Yes, on one level this is the cutest li’l documentary you ever saw. But if you were planning to avoid thinking that is all (or most) of what Babies would be like, you will miss out big time. Void of explanatory titles, voice-over narration, or subtitle translations, this is a purely observatory piece that reveals just how fascinating the business of being a baby is. There’s very little predictable pooping, wailing, or coddling. Instead, Balmes’ wonderful eye captures absorbing moments of sussing things out, decision-making, and skill learning. While the First World tykes firstborns both — are hauled off to (way) pre-school classes, the much less day planned Third Worlders have more complex, unmediated dealings with community. Those range from fending off devilish older siblings to Mongol Bayarjargal’s startlingly casual consorting with large furry livestock. (Imagine the horror of parents you know were their baby found surrounded by massive cows — a situation that here causes no concern whatsoever for adults, children, or bovines.) So accustomed to the camera that it doesn’t influence their behavior, the subjects here are viewed with an intimacy that continually surprises. Babies is getting a wider-than-usual release for a documentary, one cannily timed to coincide with Mother’s Day. But don’t be fooled: this movie is actually very cool. (1:19) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Big River Man Some people are just larger than life. Martin Strel is 53-year-old overweight, alcoholic, endurance swimmer from Slovenia who has made it his calling to swim the world’s longest rivers. Borut Strel, his son and primary publicist, might say his father does it to increase awareness about pollution or, in the Amazon’s case, deforestation, but we quickly see that there is a deeper compulsion that goes into Martin’s swims. Big River Man chronicles Martin’s descent down the Amazon river, from Peru to Brazil, as he scoffs at piranhas and alligators, all while drinking two bottles of wine a day. Martin is definitely a funny guy and he helps make Big River Man a funny film, but most impressive is the subtle shift from quirky human interest documentary to Heart of Darkness-style thriller when too many days in the sun cause Martin to lose his grip on reality. (1:34) Roxie. (Peter Galvin)

*City Island The Rizzo family of City Island, N.Y. — a tiny atoll associated historically with fishing and jurisdictionally with the Bronx — have reached a state where their primary interactions consist of sniping, yelling, and storming out of rooms. These storm clouds operate as cover for the secrets they’re all busy keeping from one another. Correctional officer Vince (Andy Garcia) pretends he’s got frequent poker nights so he can skulk off to his true shameful indulgence: a Manhattan acting class. Perpetually fuming spouse Joyce (Julianna Margulies) assumes he’s having an affair. Daughter Vivian (Dominik García-Lorido) has dropped out of school to work at a strip joint, while the world class-sarcasms of teenager Vinnie (Ezra Miller) deflect attention from his own hidden life as an aspiring chubby chaser. All this (plus everyone’s sneaky cigarette habit) is nothing, however, compared to Vince’s really big secret: he conceived and abandoned a "love child" before marrying, and said guilty issue has just turned up as a 24-year-old car thief on his cell block. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta made a couple other features in the last 15 years, none widely seen; if this latest is typical, we need more of him, more often. Perfectly cast, City Island is farcical without being cartoonish, howl-inducing without lowering your brain-cell count. It’s arguably a better, less self-conscious slice of dysfunctional family absurdism than Little Miss Sunshine (2006) — complete with an Alan Arkin more inspired in his one big scene here than in all of that film’s Oscar-winning performance. (1:40) (Harvey)

The City of Your Final Destination In James Ivory’s latest literary adaptation, Omar (Omar Metwally), an Iranian American graduate student of Latin American literature, precipitously descends on a rural estate in Paraguay, hoping to petition the relatives of deceased writer Jules Gund for authorization to write his biography. Numbering among the somewhat complicated ménage are Gund’s widow, Caroline (Laura Linney), his mistress, Arden (Charlotte Gainsbourg), their child, Portia (Ambar Mallman), the author’s brother, Adam (Anthony Hopkins), and Adam’s lover, Pete (Hiroyuki Sanada), a household that the film depicts as caught in a sedative isolation obstructing any progress or flourishing or change. But where Gund’s violent suicide has failed to produce a cataclysmic shift, the somewhat hapless Omar manages to interrupt their idle routines and mobilize them, stirring up sentiment and ambition. The notion of redirected fate is telegraphed by the title, but what the film does best is show the calm before the storm (really more of a heavy downpour) — and showcase the fineness of Hopkins’s and Linney’s dramatic abilities. In the final act, we see the characters being moved about rather than moved, and the sound of screeching brakes applied as the film reaches its conclusion undoes much of the subtlety invested in their performances. (1:58) (Rapoport)

Clash of the Titans The minds behind Clash of the Titans decided their movie should be 3D at the last possible moment before release. Consequently, the 3D is pretty janky. I don’t know what the rest of the film’s excuse is. Clash of the Titans retreads the 1981 cult classic with reasonable faithfulness, though Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion effects have been (of course) replaced with CG renderings of all the expected monsters, magic, gods, etc. Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes — as other reviews have pointed out: Schindler’s List (1993) reunion! — glow and glower as Zeus and Hades, while Sam Worthington (2009’s Avatar) once again fills the role of bland hero, this time as a snooze-worthy Perseus. You might have fun in the moment with Clash of the Titans, but it’s hardly memorable, and certainly nowhere near epic. (1:58) (Eddy)

*Exit Through the Gift Shop Exit Through the Gift Shop is not a film about the elusive graffiti-cum-conceptual artist and merry prankster known as Banksy, even though he takes up a good chunk of this sly and by-no-means impartial documentary and is listed as its director. Rather, as he informs us — voice electronically altered, face hidden in shadow — in the film’s opening minutes, the film’s real subject is one Thierry Guetta, a French expat living in LA whose hangdog eyes, squat stature, and propensity for mutton chops and polyester could pass him off as Ron Jeremy’s long lost twin. Unlike Jeremy, Guetta is not blessed with any prodigious natural talent to propel him to stardom, save for a compulsion to videotape every waking minute of his life (roughly 80 percent of the footage in Exit is Guetta’s) and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. When Guetta is introduced by his tagger cousin to a pre-Obamatized Shepard Fairey in 2007, he realizes his true calling: to make a documentary about the street art scene that was then only starting to get mainstream attention. Enter Banksy, who, at first, is Guetta’s ultimate quarry. Eventually, the two become chummy, with Guetta acting as lookout and documenter for the artist just as the art market starts clambering for its piece of, "the Scarlet Pimpernel of street art," as one headline dubs him. When, at about three quarters of the way in, Guetta, following Banksy’s casual suggestion, drops his camcorder and tries his hand at making street art, Exit becomes a very different beast. Guetta’s flashy debut as Mr. Brainwash is as obscenely successful as his "art" is terribly unimaginative — much to the chagrin of his former documentary subjects. But Guetta is no Eve Harrington and Banksy, who has the last laugh here, gives him plenty of rope with which to truss himself. Is Mr. Brainwash really the ridiculous and inevitable terminus of street art’s runaway mainstream success (which, it must be said, Banksy has handsomely profited from)? That question begs another: with friends like Banksy, who needs enemies? (1:27) (Sussman)

*The Father of My Children Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) is a perpetual motion machine: a Paris-based veteran film producer of complicated multinational whose every waking moment is spent pleading, finessing, reassuring, and generally putting out fires of the artistic, logistic, or financial kind. But lately the strain has begun to surpass even his Herculean coping abilities. Debtors are closing in; funding might collapse for a brilliant but uncommercial director’s already half-finished latest. After surviving any number of prior crises, Gregoire’s whole production company might finally dissolve into a puddle of red ink and lawsuits. He barely has time to enjoy his perfect family, with Italian wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) and three young daughters happily ensconced in a charming country house. Something’s got to give — and when it does, writer-director Mia Hansen-Love’s drama (very loosely based on the life of a late European film producer) drastically shifts its focus midway. Her film’s first half is so arresting — with its whirlwind glimpse at a job so few of us know much about, yet which couldn’t be more important in keeping cinema afloat — that the second half inevitably seems less interesting by comparison. Still, for about 55 minutes The Father of My Children offers something you haven’t quite seen before, an experience well worthwhile even if the subsequent 55 are less memorable. (1:50) (Harvey)

*The Ghost Writer Roman Polanski’s never-ending legal woes have inspired endless debates on the interwebs and elsewhere; they also can’t help but add subtext to the 76-year-old’s new film, which is chock full o’ anti-American vibes anyway. It’s also a pretty nifty political thriller about a disgraced former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) who’s hanging out in his Martha’s Vineyard mansion with his whip-smart, bitter wife (Olivia Williams) and Joan Holloway-as-ice-queen assistant (Kim Cattrall), plus an eager young biographer (Ewan McGregor) recently hired to ghost-write his memoirs. But as the writer quickly discovers, the politician’s past contains the kinds of secrets that cause strange cars with tinted windows to appear in one’s rearview mirror when driving along deserted country roads. Polanski’s long been an expert when it comes to escalating tension onscreen; he’s also so good at adding offbeat moments that only seem tossed-off (as when the PM’s groundskeeper attempts to rake leaves amid relentless sea breezes) and making the utmost of his top-notch actors (Tom Wilkinson and Eli Wallach have small, memorable roles). Though I found The Ghost Writer‘s ZOMG! third-act revelation to be a bit corny, I still didn’t think it detracted from the finely crafted film that led up to it. (1:49) (Eddy)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo By the time the first of Stieg Larsson’s so-called "Millennium" books had been published anywhere, the series already had an unhappy ending: he died (in 2004). The following year, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo became a Swedish, then eventually international sensation, its sequels following suit. The books are addicting, to say the least; despite their essential crime-mystery-thriller nature, they don’t require putting your ear for writing of some literary value on sleep mode. Now the first of three adaptive features shot back-to-back has reached U.S. screens. (Sorry to say, yes, a Hollywood remake is already in the works — but let’s hope that’s years away.) Even at two-and-a-half hours, this Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by necessity must do some major truncating to pack in the essentials of a very long, very plotty novel. Still, all but the nitpickingest fans will be fairly satisfied, while virgins will have the benefit of not knowing what’s going to happen and getting scared accordingly. Soon facing jail after losing a libel suit brought against him by a shady corporate tycoon, leftie journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) gets a curious private offer to probe the disappearance 40 years earlier of a teenage girl. This entangles him with an eccentric wealthy family and their many closet skeletons (including Nazi sympathies) — as well as dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), androgynous loner, 24-year-old court ward, investigative researcher, and skillful hacker. Director Niels Arden Oplev and his scenarists do a workmanlike job — one more organizational than interpretive, a faithful transcription without much style or personality all its own. Nonetheless, Larsson’s narrative engine kicks in early and hauls you right along to the depot. (2:32) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Harry Brown Shades of Dirty Harry (1971) for the tea cozy and tweed set: elegantly rendered and very nicely played, Harry Brown might be the dark, late-in-the-day elder brother to 1971’s Get Carter, in the hands of eponymous lead Michael Caine. He’s a pensioner mourning the passing of his beloved wife, his mysterious life as a Marine stationed in Northern Ireland firmly behind him. Then his chess-playing pal Leonard (David Bradley) is terrorized and killed by the unsavory gang of heroin dealing hoodlums who lurk near their projects in a tunnel walkway like gun-toting, foul-mouthed, sociopathic trolls. Harry Brown is, er, forced to forsake a vow of peace and go commando on the culprits’ asses, triggering some moments of ultraviolence that are unsettling in their whole-hearted embrace of vigilante justice. Like predecessors similarly fixated on vengeance in their respective urban hells, a la Hardcore (1979) and Taxi Driver (1976) (Harry Brown echoes key moments in the latter, in particular — see, for instance, its keenly tense, eerily humorous gun shopping scene), Harry Brown is essentially an arch-conservative film, if good looking and even likable with Caine meting out the punishment. The overall denouement just might make some seniors feel very, very good about the coiled potential for hurt embedded in their aging frames. (1:42) (Chun)

How to Train Your Dragon (1:38)

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) Director Tom Six had a vision, a glorious dream of surgically connecting three human beings via their gastro-intestinal systems, or as Kevin Smith would say — "ass to mouth." When two girlfriends on a road trip across Europe get a flat tire, they stumble upon the home of a mad doctor (Dieter Laser) with a similar dream, who drugs them and ties them up in his basement laboratory. The Human Centipede is an entry into the torture porn arena, but it feels especially icky because you just know that the girls have zero chance of escaping the "100 percent medically accurate!" surgery. Once hooked up, there’s nowhere for the film to go and two out of three actors can’t talk because they are sewn to someone else’s anus. Still, as one-note as The Human Centipede is, I think we’d do well to encourage more films to be as batshit insane as this one. (1:30) (Galvin)

*Iron Man 2 Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) returns, just as rich and self-involved as before, though his ego his inflated to unimaginable heights due to his superheroic fame. Pretty much, he’s put the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" thing on the back burner, exasperating everyone from Girl Friday Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow); to BFF military man Rhodey (Don Cheadle, replacing the first installment’s Terrence Howard); to certain mysterious Marvels played by Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson; to a doofus-y rival defense contractor (Sam Rockwell); to a sanctimonius Senator (Garry Shandling). Frankly, the fact that a vengeful Russian scientist (Mickey Rourke) is plotting Tony’s imminent death is a secondary threat here — for much of the film, Tony’s biggest enemy is himself. Fortunately, this is conveyed with enjoyable action (props to director Jon Favreau, who also has a small role), a witty script (actor Justin Theroux — who knew? He also co-wrote 2008’s Tropic Thunder, by the way), and gusto-going performances by everyone, from Downey on down. Stay for the whole credits or miss out on the geek-gasm. (2:05) (Eddy)

Just Wright (1:51)

*Kick-Ass Based on a comic book series by Mark Millar, whose work was also the model for 2008’s Wanted, Kick Ass is a similarly over-the-top action flick that plays up its absurdity to even greater comedic effect. High school nerd Dave (Aaron Johnson) decides to become the world’s first real superhero. Donning a green wetsuit he bought on the internet and mustering some unlikely courage, he takes to the streets to avenge wrongdoing. Unsurprisingly, Dave is immediately beaten almost to death because he’s just a kid who has no idea what he’s doing, but Kick-Ass‘ greatest achievement is knowing exactly how to subvert audience expectations. Scenes that marry the film’s innocent story with enormously exaggerated violence enhance the otherwise Superbad-lite high-school comedy unfolding around them, and a parallel plot-line involving Nicolas Cage instructing his 12-year-old daughter to commit grievous murders will probably end up being the most gratifying aspect of the film. Though too much set-up and spinning gears mars the middle act, it’s hard to fault the film for competently setting up one of the most crowd-pleasing endings in recent memory. (1:58) (Galvin)

Kites As randomly exuberant, shamelessly cheesy, and as garishly OTT as an amalgam of Bollywood song-and-dance flash and ’80s Hollywood blockbuster can get, Kites is a lovable mutt through and through — ready for its stateside close-up with by way of a forthcoming Brett Ratner English-language "remix" treatment. But first the two-hour original: J (Hrithik Roshan) is a poor but studly, V-chested dance teacher who hits the jackpot in Vegas with Gina (Kangna), his besotted student and the daughter of a powerful and deadly casino owner. Their dance competition number — jumpily cut like a hybrid of Dancing With the Stars, Saturday Night Fever (1977), and Fame (1980) — lands J in the bosom of Gina’s family, where he meets her sadistic bro, Tony (Nick Brown), and his fiancée, Natasha (Barbara Mori), an illegal immigrant from Mexico. But J and Natasha have met briefly before, when she hired him to marry her for a green card. How can a connected, killer family possibly get in the way of true love — between two leads who resemble a youthful, performance-enhanced, manically happily Nicolas Cage and Megan Fox? Smoothly integrating the dance numbers into the predictable narrative, Kites has polished off any possible edge from its high-energy Bollywood riff on the movies of Michael Bay and Ridley Scott, but that doesn’t mean you can tear your eyes from the screen, or stop the music. (1:30) (Chun)

Letters to Juliet If you can stomach the inevitable Barbara Cartland/Harlequin-romance-style clichés — and believe that Amanda Seyfried as a New Yorker fact-checker — then Letters to Juliet might be the ideal Tuscan-sunlit valentine for you. Seyfried’s Sophie is on a pre-honeymoon trip to Verona with her preoccupied chef-restaurateur intended, Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal), who’s more interested in sampling cheese and purchasing vino than taking in the romantic attractions of Verona with his fiancée. Luckily she finds the perfect diversion for a wannabe scribe: a small clutch of diehard romantics enlisted by the city of Verona to answer the letters to Juliet posted by lovelorn ladies. They’re Juliet’s secretaries — never mind that Juliet never managed to maintain a successful or long-term relationship herself. When Sophie finds a lost, unanswered letter from the ’50s, she sets off sequence of unlikely events, as the letter’s English writer, Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), returns to Verona with her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan), in search of her missed-connection, Lorenzo. Alas, Lorenzo’s long gone, and the fact-checker decides to help the warm-hearted, hopeful Claire find her lost lover. Unfortunately Sophie’s chemistry with both her matches isn’t as powerful as Redgrave’s with real-life husband Franco Nero — after all he was Lancelot to her Guenevere in 1967’s Camelot and the father of her son. Still, Redgrave’s power as an actress — and her relationship with Nero — adds a resonance that takes this otherwise by-the-numbers romance to another level. (1:46) (Chun)

*Looking for Eric Eric Bishop (Steve Everts) is a single dad, frustrated at his inability to bond with his teenage sons and heartbroken over his failed marriage to Lily (Stephanie Bishop), the woman he walked out on 20 years ago but never managed to get over. Just when things are looking dire, Eric is delivered in surprising, magical fashion by hallucinatory visitations from Eric Cantona, his favorite soccer player, a philosophical Frenchman who was as renowned for his inscrutable press conferences as he was for his scintillating goals. Cantona plays himself, and passes pensive joints with Bishop as they slowly piece his shattered life back together. American viewers might be have trouble deciphering the intricacies of soccer culture or the molasses-thick Mancunian accents, but at its heart the movie (by Brit director Ken Loach) is an amusing, tautly crafted fable of middle-aged alienation giving way to hope and gumption. (1:57) Smith Rafael. (Richardson)

MacGruber Mudflaps, moptops, box-office flippity-flops, such is the sad transition Saturday Night Live skits make to the big screen. Handicapped as such MacGruber also has a very specific demographic in mind: the Gen-Xers who popularized the use of MacGyver as a verb and harbor a picture-tube-deep ironic affection for the lousy ’80s TV action shows of their youth. Does anyone younger — or older — than that population get MacGruber‘s interest in Howard Stern-style transgressive humor, its "Cunth"/dick/poop/butt jokes, and its shameful identification with badly dated hair styles? That said, MacGruber isn’t half bad if one keeps expectations nice ‘n’ low, much like its hero’s brow, and one enjoys a comic antihero who uses his buds as human shields and can’t MacGyver a weapon out of a tennis ball and rubber-band to save his life. Laughs can be had — as long as your bad Gen-X self is still in touch with your inner 13-year-old. MacGruber won’t make the Bay Area-born-and-bred Will Forte a superstar, but at least it gives Kristen Wiig fans another, if somewhat inexplicable, chance to glimpse their heroine in action, with little to do — someone get this smart, likable actress into a Nicole Holofcener comedy ASAP. (1:39) (Chun)

*Mid-August Lunch Gianni Di Gregorio’s loose, engaging comedy is about an aging bachelor still living with his ancient mum in their Rome flat. When his landlord offers to forgive some debts in return for briefly taking in his own elderly ma, Gianni (played by the director himself) soon finds himself in cat-herding charge of no less than five old ladies who delight in one another’s company while running him ragged. Gomorrah (2008) screenwriter Di Gregorio used nonprofessionals to play those parts in this semi improvised miniature, which is as light and flavorful as a first course of prosciutto and mozzarella. It’s a solid addition to the canon of palate-pleasing culinary flicks such as Big Night (1996) and Babette’s Feast (1987), as opposed to the repulsive ones like Super Size Me (2004) or Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983). (1:15) (Harvey)

La Mission A veteran S.F. vato turned responsible — if still muy macho — widower, father, and Muni driver, fortysomething Che (Benjamin Bratt) isn’t the type for mushy displays of sentiment. But it’s clear his pride and joy is son Jess (Jeremy Ray Valdez), a straight-A high school grad bound for UCLA. That filial bond, however, sustains some serious damage when Che discovers Jes has a secret life — with a boyfriend, in the Castro, just a few blocks away from their Mission walkup but might as well be light-years away as far as old-school dad is concerned. This Bratt family project (Benjamin’s brother Peter writes-directs, his wife Talisa Soto Bratt has a supporting role) has a bit of a predictable TV-movie feel, but its warm heart is very much in the right place. (1:57) Roxie. (Harvey)

Mother and Child Adoption advocates who railed against Orphan (2009) should turn their sights on Mother and Child, a ridiculous melodrama with a thoroughly vile message. I’d wager writer-director Rodrigo García didn’t set out to make an anti-adoption film: this is a movie about the relationship between mothers and daughters. But the undertones are impossible to miss. Annette Bening plays Karen, a miserable woman consumed by regret for putting her daughter up for adoption 37 years ago. That biological daughter is Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), who — despite having been adopted at birth — speaks dismissively of her "adoptive" parents as though they were never really hers. She’s cold and manipulative, sleeping with her boss and married neighbor because she can. Mother and Child offers no real explanation for why these women are so unpleasant, so we’re forced to conclude it’s the four decades-old adoption. Despite a stellar cast, which also includes Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and S. Epatha Merkerson, the film’s misguided politics are too distracting to ignore. (2:06) (Peitzman)

*OSS 117: Lost in Rio The Cold War heated up a public appetite for spy adventures well before James Bond became a pop phenomenon. In fact, Ian Fleming hadn’t yet created 007 in 1949, when Jean Bruce commenced writing novels about Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, a.k.a. Agent OSS 117. This French superspy was ready-made to join the ranks of umpteen 007 wannabes, appearing in somewhere between six and 11 films (it’s unclear whether all involved de La Bath, or were just Bruce-based) through 1970, played by at least four actors. The series remained well-known enough to get a new life in 2006 when director Michel Hazanavicius and top French comedy star Jean Dujardin sought to spoof 1960s espionage flicks a la Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). That was a big hit, so now we’ve got a sequel. OSS 117: Lost in Rio isn’t as fresh or funny as the preceding Cairo, Nest of Spies. But it’s still a whole lot fresher and funnier than Austin Powers Nos. two (1999) and three (2002). Dujardin’s de La Bath is the very model of jet-set masculinity, twisting the night away at a ski chalet with umpteen soon-to-be-machine gunned "Oriental" lovelies in the opening sequence. Of course such pleasure pursuits take place strictly between car chases, shootouts, and karate fights. Agreeably silly, Lost in Rio doesn’t go for Hollywood-style slapstick and gross out yuks. Instead, its biggest laughs are usually droll throwaways, as when 117 explains a shocking sudden costume change with the unlikely declaration "I sew," or during an LSD-dosed hippie orgy proves quite willing to go with the flow — even when that involves another guy’s groovy finger breaching security up the pride of French intelligence’s derriere. (1:37) (Harvey)

*Please Give Manhattan couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are the proprietors of an up-market vintage furniture store — they troll the apartments of the recently deceased, redistributing the contents at an astonishing markup — and they’ve purchased the entire apartment of their elderly next-door neighbor (Ann Guilbert). As they wait for her to expire so they can knock down a wall, they try not to loom in anticipation in front of her granddaughters, the softly melancholic Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and the brittle pragmatist Mary (Amanda Peet). Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has entered this territory before, examining the interpersonal pressures that a sizable income gap can exert in 2006’s Friends with Money. Here she turns to the pangs and blunderings of the liberal existence burdened with the discomforts of being comfortable and the desire to do some good in the world. The film capably explores the unexamined impulses of liberal guilt, though the conclusion it reaches is unsatisfying. Like Holofcener’s other work, Please Give is constructed from the episodic material of mundane, intimate encounters between characters whose complexity forces us to take them seriously, whether or not we like them. Here, though, it offers these private connections as the best one can hope for, a sort of domestic grace accrued by doing right, authentically, instinctively, by the people in your immediate orbit, leaving the larger world to muddle along on its axis as best it can. (1:30) (Rapoport)

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time It takes serious effort to make a movie with a story dumber than the video game it’s based on. Director Mike Newell somehow accomplishes this feat with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a Disneyfied flop that flails clumsily in the PG-13 demilitarized zone, delivering sanitized violence, chaste romance, and dreary drama. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, an urchin boy — one jump, ahead of the bread line — adopted by the king and raised to be the wise-cracking black sheep in a family of feuding princes. He’s got Middle East ninja skills — one swing, ahead of the sword — and his infiltration of a sacred city nets him the magical Dagger of Time, a gilded rewind button coveted by his evil uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley), who wants to use it for, well, evil, and Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), who’s sworn to protect it. Pressing a button on the dagger’s hilt allows its wielder to undo past events. If you have the misfortune of seeing this movie, you’ll want one for yourself. (2:10) (Richardson)

Princess Kaiulani Well-meaning and controversial (the independent’s first title, Barbarian Princess, and the tragic events it depicts has distressed some native Hawaiians) in its own inoffensive way, Princess Kaiulani is unfortunately overshadowed by star Q’orianka Kilcher’s first film, 2005’s The New World, in which she portrayed Pocahontas. The Hawaii-raised Kilcher appears to be getting typecast as a tragic, romanticized native royal. Still, if you can get past director Marc Forby’s weak attempts to match New World director Terrence Malick’s searingly poetic montages and the clunky History Channel-by-the-numbers screenplay, you might give a little credit to the makers for bringing to the screen the tale of Hawaii’s last intelligent, beautiful, and accomplished princess — a young woman determined to fight an overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and battle its annexation against the white land owners and descendents of missionaries who tried to block the voting rights of native Hawaiians. Kilcher possesses some of the noble charisma claimed by the real Kaiulani, but the obligatory romance superimposed on the narrative and the neglect of some of genuinely promising threads, such as Kaiulani’s friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson, make Princess Kaiulani feel as faux as those who pretended to Hawaii’s rule. (2:10) (Chun)

Robin Hood Like it or not, we live in the age of the origin story. Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood introduces us to the outlaw while he’s still in France, wending his way back to Albion in the service of King Richard III. The Lionheart soon takes an arrow in the neck in order to demonstrate the film’s historical bona fides, and yeoman archer Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) — surrounded by a nascent band of merry men — accidentally embroils himself in a conspiracy to wrest control of England. The complications of this intrigue hie Robin to Nottingham, where he is thrown together with Maid Marion (Cate Blanchett), a plucky rural aristocrat who likes getting her hands dirty almost as much as she likes a bit of smoldering Crowe seduction. A lot of hollow medieval verisimilitude ensues, along with a good bit of slow-mo swordplay, but the cumulative effect is tepid and rote. (2:20) (Richardson)

The Secret in Their Eyes (2:07)

Sex and the City 2 Sex and the City 2 couldn’t be anymore brazenly shameless, dizzyingly shallow, or patently offensive if it tried. This is aspiration porn, pure and simple, kitted out in the Orientalist trappings of a Vogue spread and with all the emotional intelligence of a 12 year-old brat. As the first SATC film nearly made short work of any shred of nuance or humanity that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda carried over from their televised selves, SATC 2 fully embraces the bad pun-spewing, couture-clad clichés the girls have hardened into. Sure they have kids, husbands, career changes, and menopause to deal with, but who cares about those tired signposts of middle age when there is more shit to buy, more champagne to swill, private airlines to fly on, $22,000-a-night luxury suites to inhabit, Helen Reddy songs to butcher, and whole other peoples — specifically, the people of Abu Dhabi, who speak funny, dress funnier, and have craaazy notions about what it means to be "one of the girls" — to alternately boss around, offend, and pity? (Fun SATC2 fact: did you know that in the "new Middle East" women secretly wear designer duds underneath their abayas?) Oh, that one tiny pang of sympathy you feel during the tipsy confessional between Charlotte and Miranda in which they bond over how being a mother and giving up one’s life ambition is difficult? A mirage. Because really, the greater concern is flying back to JFK first class or bust. And let’s not even get into the few bones the film tosses to the homos, such as the opening set piece: a gay wedding only a straight man could’ve thought up, replete with a shopworn Liza Minnelli having her Gene Kelly-in-Xanadu moment. But seriously, Michael Patrick King, don’t get it twisted: Stanford may call it such, but it’s not "cheating" if you’re already in an open relationship. Then again, if being a foil for your straight BFF’s insecurities about the luxe confines of monogamy gets you a gift registry at Bergdorf’s, why not? The laughs are cheaper this time around, but SATC 2‘s fuckery is strictly price-upon-request. (2:24) Castro. (Sussman)

Shrek Forever After 3D It’s easy to give Dreamworks a hard time for pumping out a fourth sequel to a film that never really needed a sequel in the first place. But Shrek Forever After isn’t all that bad — it’s mostly just irrelevant. The film does begin on an interesting note, with Shrek discovering the consequences of settling down with a wife and kids: serious ennui. It’s refreshing to see a fairy tale in which "happily ever after" is revealed to be rather mundane. But soon there are wacky magical hijinks that spawn an alternate universe, a cheap way to inject new life into tired old characters. (You like Puss in Boots? Well, he’s fat now.) Luckily, the voice actors are still game and the animation remains top-notch. The 3D effects are well used for once, fleshing out Shrek’s world rather than providing an unnecessary distraction. The end result is a mildly entertaining addition to the franchise, but like the alternate universe in which Shrek finds himself stranded, there’s no real reason it should exist. (1:33) (Peitzman)

Survival of the Dead George A. Romero’s 2007 Diary of the Dead was a surprise hit, and with an eye toward delivering similar results, Survival of the Dead spins off one of its predecessor’s minor characters. Amid a zombie attack that already seems like old news by movie’s start, a disaffected soldier (Alan Van Sprang) goes AWOL with a few comrades and a teenage drifter they meet along the way. A possible refuge from the undead presents itself in the form of Plum Island, which despite being in the United States is populated by two extremely Irish families with a long-standing hillbilly-style feud that simply won’t be mended, zombies be damned. Props to Romero for finding a way to make movies on his own terms; the horror legend is back to working with a small budget and enjoying the kind of creative control that shaped his earliest films. But Survival of the Dead is tonally uneven, and its Western-inspired story veers into the ridiculous (surprise twins?!) End result: there’s more human drama than zombie fun. (1:30) (Eddy)

Touching Home Hometown boys (Logan and Noah Miller) make good in this based-on-a-true-story tale of identical twins who must divide their time at home between training for major league baseball and looking after their alcoholic father. The brothers, who also wrote and directed the film, aim for David Gordon Green by way of Marin, but fall short of mastering that director’s knack for natural dialogue. Ed Harris is, unsurprisingly, compelling as the alcoholic father, but the actors in the film who are not named Ed Harris tend to contribute to the script’s distracting histrionics. Touching Home has some amazing NorCal cinematography, and I could see how family audiences might enjoy its "feel bad, then feel good" style of melodrama. But while it’s awkward to say that someone’s real-life experiences come off as trite, there are moments here that feel as clichéd as a Lifetime movie. (1:48) Smith Rafael. (Galvin)

Newsom’s lousy economics

David Talbot
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0

EDITORIAL Every major newspaper in California should have plastered the May 2010 report from the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research across the front page. The headline: “Governor’s budget will destroy 331,000 jobs.”

It’s a stunning analysis. Ken Jacobs, who heads the center, and two associates used a sophisticated computer program to track exactly how the cuts would play out in the current California economy. If the governor’s proposals are adopted, the job losses would greatly exceed any new job creation, causing the unemployment rate in the state to rise by 1.8 percent.

On the other hand, the study shows, raising taxes on rich people and oil companies would save 244,000 jobs.

So if, as nearly every politician of every party in the state insists, the biggest policy goal in California today is job creation, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is going about it entirely the wrong way.

The good news is that the Democrats in the state Legislature are finally talking seriously about an alternative budget plan that includes about $5 billion in new revenue. The plans by the Assembly and Senate leadership aren’t perfect and will still require significant cuts to cover the budget gap. But after years of cuts-only budgets and a pervasive fear of tax increases in Sacramento, the Democratic proposals are encouraging. (Jerry Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor, shouldn’t worry about associating himself with the plans: two-thirds of Californians favor increased taxes on wealthy people to pay for better public education, according to the most recent Public Policy Institute of California poll.)

So at the very least, the state Capitol — a place not known as a bastion of progressive thought — is going to have an intelligent debate over how to address the budget deficit without further damaging the economy. Yet in San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom continues to cling to a no-new-taxes budget that will devastate community services — and add to the city’s unemployment rate.

That’s just disgraceful.

Every city-employee union has stepped up to the plate and offered concessions. City workers are taking furloughs (actually, pay cuts) and layoffs. They’re giving back scheduled raises. They’re making a good faith effort to be part of the solution — in fact, labor is now pushing for an increase in the hotel tax to help cover the costs of public services.

Newsom isn’t asking any of the wealthy businesses or individuals in town to give anything.

That’s not just bad politics, it’s bad economics.

The Berkeley study acknowledges that raising taxes on the rich and big corporations has an economic impact — an oil severance tax, for example, would raise $1.4 billion a year for the state, reduce economic output by $128 million, and lead to the loss of 400 jobs. A 1.5 percent increase in the top income tax rate for individuals who earn more than $250,000 would bring the state $2.1 billion, and lead to the loss of 13,000 jobs.

But on balance, both of those are a good deal for the state — because cutting that $3.5 billion from the budget would cost the state far, far more than 13,400 jobs. That’s because when you eliminate public sector jobs, particularly lower-paid jobs, there’s a direct, immediate impact on consumer spending. Although a rich person may spend slightly less if he or she has to pay slightly higher taxes, a middle-income worker who gets laid off stops spending much of anything — and the local merchants who relied on that person’s spending see the impact.

In fact, the Berkeley study points out, more than half the jobs that would be lost under Schwarzenegger’s plan would be in the private sector. The same goes for San Francisco: saving jobs requires new revenue solutions. And if Newsom’s budget doesn’t address that, the San Francisco supervisors must.

Newsom’s lousy economics

David Talbot
-
0
Newsom’s lousy economics

EDITORIAL Every major newspaper in California should have plastered the May 2010 report from the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research across the front page. The headline: “Governor’s budget will destroy 331,000 jobs.”

It’s a stunning analysis. Ken Jacobs, who heads the center, and two associates used a sophisticated computer program to track exactly how the cuts would play out in the current California economy. If the governor’s proposals are adopted, the job losses would greatly exceed any new job creation, causing the unemployment rate in the state to rise by 1.8 percent.

On the other hand, the study shows, raising taxes on rich people and oil companies would save 244,000 jobs.

So if, as nearly every politician of every party in the state insists, the biggest policy goal in California today is job creation, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is going about it entirely the wrong way.

The good news is that the Democrats in the state Legislature are finally talking seriously about an alternative budget plan that includes about $5 billion in new revenue. The plans by the Assembly and Senate leadership aren’t perfect and will still require significant cuts to cover the budget gap. But after years of cuts-only budgets and a pervasive fear of tax increases in Sacramento, the Democratic proposals are encouraging. (Jerry Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor, shouldn’t worry about associating himself with the plans: two-thirds of Californians favor increased taxes on wealthy people to pay for better public education, according to the most recent Public Policy Institute of California poll.)

So at the very least, the state Capitol — a place not known as a bastion of progressive thought — is going to have an intelligent debate over how to address the budget deficit without further damaging the economy. Yet in San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom continues to cling to a no-new-taxes budget that will devastate community services — and add to the city’s unemployment rate.

That’s just disgraceful.

Every city-employee union has stepped up to the plate and offered concessions. City workers are taking furloughs (actually, pay cuts) and layoffs. They’re giving back scheduled raises. They’re making a good faith effort to be part of the solution — in fact, labor is now pushing for an increase in the hotel tax to help cover the costs of public services.

Newsom isn’t asking any of the wealthy businesses or individuals in town to give anything.

That’s not just bad politics, it’s bad economics.

The Berkeley study acknowledges that raising taxes on the rich and big corporations has an economic impact — an oil severance tax, for example, would raise $1.4 billion a year for the state, reduce economic output by $128 million, and lead to the loss of 400 jobs. A 1.5 percent increase in the top income tax rate for individuals who earn more than $250,000 would bring the state $2.1 billion, and lead to the loss of 13,000 jobs.

But on balance, both of those are a good deal for the state — because cutting that $3.5 billion from the budget would cost the state far, far more than 13,400 jobs. That’s because when you eliminate public sector jobs, particularly lower-paid jobs, there’s a direct, immediate impact on consumer spending. Although a rich person may spend slightly less if he or she has to pay slightly higher taxes, a middle-income worker who gets laid off stops spending much of anything — and the local merchants who relied on that person’s spending see the impact.

In fact, the Berkeley study points out, more than half the jobs that would be lost under Schwarzenegger’s plan would be in the private sector. The same goes for San Francisco: saving jobs requires new revenue solutions. And if Newsom’s budget doesn’t address that, the San Francisco supervisors must.

 

The hidden zinger in Prop. 14

David Talbot
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11
The hidden zinger in Prop. 14

 

By Richard Winger

OPINION Proposition 14, a June 8 ballot measure, would mandate that all candidates for Congress and state office appear on the same June ballot, and that all voters use that ballot. Only the two candidates who got the highest vote totals could run in November. Even write-ins would be banned in November for Congress and state offices.

Prop. 14 also has a hidden zinger in it that would remove the Peace and Freedom and Libertarian parties from the ballot. But so far only one daily newspaper has mentioned it — the San Francisco Chronicle, in a March 11 story by Wyatt Buchanan. The state ballot pamphlet says nothing about this particularly nasty detail of Prop. 14.

California has six recognized political parties: Democratic, Republican, American Independent, Green, Libertarian, and Peace and Freedom. The parties remain ballot-qualified either by polling 2 percent of the vote for any statewide race in a midterm year (all parties get a free ride in presidential years) or by maintaining registration equal to 1 percent of the last gubernatorial vote.

In practice, it’s far easier for the smaller parties to meet the first test. The Peace and Freedom Party has 58,000 registered members, and the Libertarian Party has 85,000 registered members. But these parties always meet the 2 percent vote test. Minor parties typically draw far more votes than they have registered members.

The problem is that Prop. 14 eliminates, in practice, the 2 percent vote test. Under Prop. 14, no party officially has any nominees for any office except president and vice-president. And since minor party candidates almost never place first or second in the June primary, minor party members would never be able to run for statewide office in November. And, the catch is that only the November vote counts for meeting the 2 percent vote test.

Prop. 14 also says that members of unqualified parties will not be permitted to list their party label on the June ballot.

The real irony is that the big newspapers of California know about this problem with Prop. 14 but refuse to mention it. That’s ironic because back in 1981, when Democrats in the Legislature wanted to toughen the ballot-access requirements, the big newspapers of California denounced that bill with full fury. Forty of California’s biggest newspapers, TV stations, and radio stations editorialized against that measure.

This year the Los Angeles Times (which led the charge for minor-party access in 1981) refused to mention that Prop. 14 has the same characteristic as that bill, only worse. The Times has rejected at least 10 op-eds submitted by various individuals in the last year that mentioned this problem. None of the Los Angeles Times stories about Prop. 14 have mentioned it. None of the political columnists for that newspaper have mentioned it.

Prop. 14 is supported by the Chamber of Commerce, the for-profit health insurance companies, the for-profit hospitals, and various multimillionaires, and the Yes on 14 campaign has a huge war chest. Why won’t the L.A. Times even mention this flaw in the measure? Who are the big dailies afraid of offending?

Richard Winger is the editor of Ballot Access News.

 

Public employees step up; when will Newsom and downtown?

Sasha Cuttler
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7
Public employees step up; when will Newsom and downtown?

With news that Muni union leaders are backing salary givebacks to help close San Francisco’s $483 million budget deficit, all city employees are now making sacrifices to preserve city services that we all rely on. But as we eagerly await the release of the mayor’s budget on June 1 – in which some city departments have been asked to make cuts of up to 30 percent – the question is whether Mayor Gavin Newsom will find the courage to ask other San Francisco entities to help.

For example, will he support the 2 percent increase in the hotel tax that labor is pushing (and which polls show would probably pass muster with voters if Newsom backed it), a real estate transfer tax that would hit the comfortably rich, or a downtown transit assessment district that would make corporations finally help pay for the transit services their employees rely on?

So far, it’s doesn’t look like it (and his Communications Office won’t respond to the question). Instead, Newsom has cynically engaged in deceptive blame games that scapegoat public employees for a problem he created (for example, by approving bloated police and fire contracts to win political support and then blocking efforts to seek new revenue sources), while still pushing gimmicky new spending programs designed to burnish his political image as he runs for state office.

This could be Newsom’s last chance to finally show some leadership, and now is the time when it’s needed most. After offering cuts-only city budgets his entire tenure in office, most city departments are unable to go any further without sacrificing needed services.

The situation has become dire, as workers said Wednesday during a budget rally outside City Hall. Guardian news intern Kaitlyn Paris was there covering the action and offers this report:

Community groups from around San Francisco rallied in front of City Hall on Wednesday to protest the drastic reductions that health and human services face in the Governor’s proposed state budget and Mayor Newsom’s impending city budget.

A graveyard of tombstones representing each of the organizations stuck out of the sand next to the grassy square where participants gathered. Identifiable by their maroon sweatshirts, the largest faction present was the Community Housing Partnership. The proposed budget would cut over $100,000 from the agency and its programs that provide help with employment, substance abuse, and habitation development.

“Supervisors need to be constantly reminded of the merits of these services,” CHP employee Gabriel Haywood told us.

The partnership runs a jobs retention program that Haywood says has exceeded its city-mandated job retention rate by 25 percent, keeping 75 percent of the people it serves employed for longer than three months. Still, Cameron McHenry told the Guardian the city thinks the groups services are duplicative. [Editor’s Note: information in this paragraph has been corrected since his article was posted].

The city’s OneStop employment service is suited to workers displaced by the recession, not the multiple-burdened clients helped by CHP, said McHenry: “We can’t take a 30 percent cut and still do the work we do.”

After speakers from various groups addressed the crowd from a flatbed truck, District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi took to the stage to demand alternative ways of generating revenue. The progressive revenue tactics championed mainly involved increased hotel tax to reduce the budget burden felt by community service groups. Mirkarimi and members of the crowd also criticized the city for its continued funding of Sharp golf course in Pacifica.

“We’re trying to force the Mayor to have a fair budget,” Coalition on Homelessness Director Jennifer Fredenbach told us. “We believe he can do it through alternative revenue like the hotel tax, a more progressive tax base, and a property transfer tax on high end real estate. It has real consequences for poor San Franciscans, not only in quality of life, but in the ability to live.”

FCC seeks input on new media ownership rules

Sasha Cuttler
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0
FCC seeks input on new media ownership rules

By Kaitlyn Paris

The Federal Communications Commission filed a Notice of Inquiry on May 25 asking for public input on its changing media ownership rules. Citizens concerned about proposals to expand corporate control of local television, radio, and print should submit their views within 30 days via the FCC website. The list of 107 topics can be found here, along with Commissioner’s statements outlining the intent and scope of the rules and comments.

The request for public opinion is aimed at gaining information on almost every aspect of media for the purpose of shaping laws that encourage competition, localism, and diversity. In the last two reviews, however, the FCC decided to relax ownership rules across media platforms, giving corporations more leeway in acquiring multiple outlets and triggering an overwhelming backlash from the public.

“I have many times expressed my displeasure with the way this review was handled in its previous two incarnations,” wrote Commissioner Michael Copps in his inquiry statement. “Hopefully, the third time is the charm.”

The deregulation initiatives proposed in 2003 and 2007 were blocked by lawsuits, but with this Notice of Inquiry the process has officially begun anew even as the 2007 decisions are contested in court. “We want to finish this proceeding by the end of the year, but from my experience, it is a very hot button political issue,” FCC Media Bureau staffer Krista Witanowski told the Guardian. “It could take a year to two. The goal is to finish it within the year.”

After the time for comments has lapsed, the Commissioners will review them and issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. “We’re trying to get more concrete information,” Witanowski said. “But that doesn’t mean that when this gets going people won’t make a push for all intensive meetings with Commissioners.”

In preparation for its mandatory four year review, the FCC hosted the last of three cross-country “workshops” at Stanford on May 21. Since 1975 the FCC has banned a single entity from owning both television, newspaper, or radio in one local market. The possibility of increased corporate conglomeration of various media outlets brought together concerned citizens and a mix of panelists for discussion and public comment.

The Internet, big business interests argued, provides sufficient alternative news to avoid monopolization of editorial views and broadcasting resources. Ruth Robertson, a member of the Raging Grannies who protested with signs and cookies outside the workshop, is concerned about the digital divide and its effects on already marginalized groups. “It’s easier for someone younger than me to say the Internet is a whole new world,” said Robertson, citing the ease with which her children learned to use computers and the high proportion of seniors who don’t use the web. “Big media tries to make the case that ‘oh well there’s the Internet so there’s this great variety.’ In actuality you can search a certain topic but you’ll see the same quote over and over again.”

Ravi Kapur, panel member and vice president of KAXT-CA Channel One, contends that current news practices ignore the needs and concerns of Bay Area communities. If deregulation occurs, Kapur is worried that smaller frequencies like his will be quieted. “We’ll be wiped out and the corporations will do the same stuff. You’re not going to get Vietnamese newscasts or newscasts in Tagalog and that’s what we’re doing. Other broadcasters could easily do it but they choose not to, that’s why they complain and say they need to streamline their costs. Why don’t they innovate? I don’t want to encourage competition, but they have more resources than us.”

No Commissioners were present at the conference, though it was moderated by staffers from the Media Bureau. Public opinion weighed heavily on the side of upholding regulations. Tracy Rosenberg, a member of Media Alliance (a group involved in the lawsuit blocking the previous FCC decisions) described the concerns she and other attendees voiced: “As members of the public I think mostly their concerns were previous media consolidations. People anecdotally have seen more wire coverage, more repetitive stories, less independent investigative reporting in their neighborhoods.”

If you didn’t hear about the workshop, you’re not alone. Only one network, KGO 7, turned up to cover it. In the weeks leading to the meeting little was done to draw attention and public participation. Tiffiniy Ying Cheng, panelist and co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation, thought the FCC could have reached out to the Palo Alto community. “There were very few students and very few people in general, especially for public comments,” she wrote.

With the Notice of Inquiry the public now has a short chance to submit their opinions online without taking the time to attend a workshop. Even without wading through the 35 page inquiry, most Bay Area community members have some input on the current state of local news, issues surrounding consolidation, big media mergers, or net neutrality. Now is the chance to give the FCC a piece of your mind.

Another new model for newspaper ownership

Zelda Bronstein
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0
Another new model for newspaper ownership

Well, maybe it’s not entirely, new, but I haven’t seen it around here. The Point Reyes Light, a legend in West Marin, was just sold to a community-based group that’s almost, sortof a nonprofit. It’s actually called a “low-profit limited liability company” (not a bad name for most newspapers these days), and it’s going to be operated as a community trust, of sorts. Mark Dowie, the well-known investigative reporter, is involved, so that’s good news. And apparently, things weren’t working out with the previous owner.


Among the donors: Warren Hellman, who’s also involved in the (entirely) nonprofit Bay Citizen.

An extraordinarily good man

David Talbot
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0

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his Web site, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

It was 40 years ago this month that Walter Reuther died in a plane crash. Forty years. Yet the auto workers leader remains an important inspirational figure – a man whose life holds crucial lessons for those who are today seeking to revitalize the American labor movement.
 
I came upon him late in his career, and to me he seemed verbose, distant and a bit pompous: a do-gooder who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t wench; who did only good things, and always in the artfully arranged glare of publicity.
 
He couldn’t possibly be as good as those who had known the man for a long time claimed him to be. But they were right. Walter Reuther was an extraordinarily good man.
 
He was truly the conscience of organized labor – a crusader struggling very, very hard against the stagnation he found in a movement he had helped found, lead, and, finally, had tried to reform.
 
Reuther was the conscience as well of a lot of people who never paid union dues in their lives. I mean those who saw him as the embodiment of their hopes to change this imperfect society in ways that would better the lives of those at the bottom of its social, economic and political ladder.
 
It was Reuther, as much as any union leader, who brought dignity and economic security to the mass of Americans, expanding the country’s major concerns beyond the elementary economic concerns that preoccupied most people in the years before World War II.
 
Reuther’s specific contributions were many. There was the central role he played in establishing the United Auto Workers Union, over which he eventually presided.  There was his role in forging together the country’s industrial unions and in leading them, as president of the Congress of Industrial Organization – the CIO – in struggles for broad economic and social causes.
 
There was Reuther’s exceptional success in negotiating better wages, hours and working conditions for the auto workers that were pace-setting marks for workers in all industries and all occupations.
 
And there were Reuther’s many efforts to shift the labor movement in new directions.  His last attempt, and surely his boldest, came in 1969 when he led the United Auto Workers out of the AFL-CIO and into an “Alliance for Labor Action” with the then-unaffiliated Teamsters Union.
 
Reuther hoped the alliance of the country’s two largest unions could begin carrying out the programs he had suggested repeatedly to the AFL-CIO, only to be rebuffed by the former American Federation of Labor leaders who dominated the federation.
 
The alliance planned organizing drives among white-collar workers and other groups, particularly in the South, that the AFL-CIO had been neglecting. But the new organization hoped to go beyond organizing the unorganized, as important as that was.
 
The goals of the alliance were nothing less than a summary of the great needs of the country: Helping build low-cost housing, for instance; developing new job training programs; unifying the poor and minority groups; vastly improving education and health services; effectively attacking racial discrimination, poverty,  consumer fraud, and the particular problems of the young and the aged, and attacking urban decay, pollution and other environmental problems.
 
The alliance never really got going before Reuther’s death and dissolved shortly afterward.  Some of Reuther’s fellow labor leaders had scoffed, in any case, that it was actually nothing more than an attempt by Reuther to satisfy the ambitions for broad union leadership he had been unable to realize within the AFL-CIO.
 
“Walter,” they would tell you, “is just being Walter – all talk and no action.”
 
Well, they were right about one thing at least. The man could talk. Others were accustomed to it, after three decades of Reuther-watching, But he was new to me, and I marveled to see him hold audiences of thousands for an hour and more while speaking without a single note – strictly off the top of his head – and doing so with great and forceful eloquence.
 
I especially remember a talk he gave in 1966, in a dilapidated little auditorium in Delano, California, where vineyard workers led by Cesar Chavez just a few months before had begun the strike that someday would capture the attention of the entire country.
 
I played the sophisticate and smiled knowingly over Reuther’s wordy and dramatic promises to the farm workers. But then came the terrible news, four years later, of a plane down in Michigan, and I thought back to that cold December day in the grape country.
 
I remembered what those words had meant to the penniless, obscure and powerless band of farm workers who had gathered in the auditorium. There he was, one of the great leaders of America, promising to “stand with you until the end.”
 
I may have been fooled, but the farm workers were not fooled.  They knew that Walter Reuther meant exactly what he said.  He always did.
 
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Immigration update: good news, bad news

Mary Magee
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7
Immigration update: good news, bad news

Yesterday, the Board of Supervisors unanimously appointed tireless immigrant rights advocate Angela Chan to the San Francisco Police Commission.
That’s the good news.
The bad news? Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown declined San Francisco Sheriff Mike Hennessey request to allow San Francisco to opt out of Secure Communities, ICE’s latest federal-local law enforcement collaboration.
“I think this program serves both public safety and the interests of justice,” Brown said. “ICE’s program advances an important law enforcement function by identifying those individuals who are in the country illegally and who have a history of serious crimes or who have previously been deported.”
“ Before the inception of Secure Communities allowing fingerprint identification, if a county suspected an arrestee was in the country illegally, the county submitted the person’s name to ICE for a background check,” Brown stated.

What Brown’s letter didn’t say was that, up until now in San Francisco, the county only submitted folks’ names to ICE if they were charged with a felony. Nor did he address why the federal government is sneaking around, switching this program on, without openly and transparently announcing their intentions to the local community.

Eileen Hirst, spokesperson for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office said that, as a result of Brown’s letter, “As far as we know, San Francisco will be a part of Secure Communities as of June 1.”
In a statement, Sheriff Hennessey said, “I am disappointed with the Attorney General’s position and continue to be concerned that U.S. citizens and minor offenders will be caught up in the broad net of Secure Communities, and I will be studying the issue further to see how this program can be applied as fairly as possible and in the spirit of the sanctuary ordinance.”

So far, ICE’s data reveals the number of folks caught up in the Secure Communities net, plus a brief breakdown of the deportees’ level of crime.

It would be helpful, as several immigrants rights groups have suggested, if ICE revealed the nationality of these deportees, clarified if these folks were convicted of crimes or simply charged with them, and had to make frequent reports to Congress in which they included this data along with evidence that the program actually deports convicted criminals rather than folks simply arrested. Otherwise, the program could potentially be abused by renegades who realize that all you have to do to get someone deported is arrest them on trumped up charges

Anyways, you can read the rest of AG Brown’s letter below. My favorite line from Brown’s letter is, “Many of the people booked in local jails end up in state prison or go on to commit crimes in other counties or states.”  

Hmm. Does that mean that folks charged with crimes in this state are presumed guilty then, until proven otherwise? Or is that just the presumption about immigrants?

 

AG Brown’s letter:
“Dear Sheriff Hennessey:

I am writing in response to your letter regarding the Secure Communities program developed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The program is scheduled to be rolled out in San Francisco next month. You requested that the California Department of Justice (DOJ) block ICE from running checks on the fingerprints collected in San Francisco. The Secure Communities program is up and running in 169 counties in 20 states, including 17 counties in California. Because I think this program serves both public safety and the interest of justice, I am declining your request.

The DOJ Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigative Services is the entity designated by California law to maintain a database of fingerprints used in the state for law enforcement purposes. When someone is arrested, the county forwards the fingerprints to the DOJ to identify the person, determine his or her criminal history and to discover any outstanding warrants. As in every other state, the DOJ forwards those fingerprints to the FBI to check for a history of criminal activity outside of the state. Under the Secure Communities program, the FBI forwards fingerprints collected at arrest to ICE. If ICE finds a match to prints in its database, ICE notifies the county. ICE’s stated intent and practice is to place holds on those individuals who are in the country illegally and who have a history of serious crimes or who have been previously deported.

Prior to the Secure Communities program, the name, but not the fingerprint, provided by an individual on arrest was run through ICE’s database of people known by ICE to be in the country illegally. Often, individuals with a criminal history were released before their immigration status was discovered. Using fingerprints is faster, race neutral and results in accurate information and identification.

In these matters, statewide uniformity makes sense. This is not simply a local issue. Many of the people booked in local jails end up in state prison or go on to commit crimes in other counties or states.

I appreciate your concern. But I believe that working with the federal government in this matter advances important and legitimate law enforcement objectives.

Sincerely,

EDMUND G. BROWN JR.
Attorney General.”

Conspiracy Con will set you free

Andrew Lam
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0

Hair standing up on the back of your neck when you watch the news these days? Perhaps a little shiver of doubt when it comes to how our world’s being run? Trust no one, baby – Conspiracy Con 2010‘s coming to town, Sat/5-Sun/6. Buy your tickets now, before the government’s drones read your thought patterns and freeze your computer.

A word of intro from the website from executive producer, Brian William Hall™ (thought you were going to steal his identity huh, you succubus! You thought wrong – that thing is trademarked!):

There is a bumper sticker out there that sums up the “waking-up” process on this planet perfectly… “The truth shall set you free, but first it’ll piss you off!” And, I for one am pissed off. If you aren’t, then you’re either dangerously ignorant as to the way this world is truly run and controlled; you’re in complete denial about this reality; or you are a willing pawn in this global game of chess played by the worst of tyrants.

If you fall under that last category, I feel compelled to quote a line to you from the TV miniseries “V” in which a rebel declares, “Congratulations on selling out your race to a bunch of night crawlers.”

Well, there’s just no way, no how I’m selling out to the night crawlers. You shouldn’t either, so here’s a handy rundown of the skeptical geniuses who’ve cracked the code that you’ll find at Conspiracy Con X (tenth anniversary!) this year, their scam of expertise, and time slot so you can plan your weekend included:

 

Time slot: Sat/5 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Conspiracy cracker: Dr. Michael S. Coffman, PhD

Scam he’s wise to: The global warming scam

 

Time slot: Sun/6 3:15-4:45 p.m.

Conspiracy cracker: Dr. Bill Deagle, MD

Scam he’s wise to: The mankind-is-unadaptable-to-the-coming-apocalypse scam.

 

Time slot:Sat/5 5-6:30 p.m.

Conspiracy cracker: Dr. Leonard Horowitz

Scam he’s wise to: The H1N1 virus scam

 

Time slot: 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Conspiracy cracker: Ron MacDonald

Scam he’s wise to: The federal reserve “total slavery” scam

 

Time slot: Sat/5 1:30 -3 p.m.

Conspiracy cracker: Texe Marrs

Scam he’s wise to: The Rothschild-Obama-Palin-McCain-Bush death cult scam.

 

Time slot: Sat/5 9 -10:30 a.m.

Conspiracy cracker: H. Michael Sweeney

Scam he’s wise to: The new identification cards-systems scam (or “The Mark of the Beast” scam)

 

Time slot: Sun/6 9 -10:30 a.m.

Conspiracy cracker: Michael Collins Piper, featuring a live call to expert Jim Tucker

Scam he’s wise to: The Bilderberg Group scam

 

Time slot: Sun/6 1:30-3 p.m.

Conspiracy cracker: Michael Tsarion

Scam he’s wise to: Mind control through popular media scam (or the “Don’t Watch Avatar” scam)

 

Time slot: Sat/5 3:15- 4:45 p.m.

Conspiracy cracker: William White Crow

Scam he’s wise to: Unclear from program – possibly the government-alien mind control scam? White Crow is also well versed in “waking up the sheep.”

 

Time slot: Sun/6 5-6:30 p.m.

Conspiracy cracker: Special surprise guest, who “must remain anonymous up until the time of the conference for his own protection because of the nature of his research.”

Scam he’s wise to: The scam to stop the use of alternative energies

 

Conspiracy Con X 2010

Sat/5 (through Sun/6) 8 a.m. – 9 p.m., $99-129

Santa Clara Marriott

2700 Mission College, Santa Clara

(408) 988-1500

www.conspiracycon.com

Infectious

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Infectious

arts@sfbg.com

VIDEO What brings down a presidential campaign, makes Stephen Colbert break out his lightsabers, and inspires protest in Oakland and Tehran? The alpha and omega of online video: YouTube and my camera phone equal a jillion eyeballs and our itchy mouse finger clicking “Play” and passing it on. All those moments, all those sticky little memes, are now forever linked and embedded in the cultural fabric, touchstones certain to become engrained in our collective unconscious as the grainy image of the Beatles playing Ed Sullivan or the Challenger exploding on camera.

At all of five years old, YouTube can claim more than 2 billion views a day. Twenty-four hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute and admittedly few of those snippets find traction in the stream of life. Yet the evolution of online video is just beginning. So say knowledgeable observers like Jennie Bourne, author of Web Video: Making It Great, Getting It Noticed.

“Viral has become a dirty word in Web video because people’s concerns in going viral tend to be linked to trying to monetize a web video, and very often a video that’s getting a lot of views is not making a lot of money,” Bourne explains. And while the rise of citizen broadcast journalists and DIY documentarians is laudable, she adds, “I have to say the flip side of that — people walking around with cameras on their foreheads all the time video blogging — can get a little boring without a structure and style. I think there will be a shakeout at one point, and Web video will mature. It’s not there yet — it’s effective as a distribution medium and effective as a social medium but still developing as a commercial medium.”

For now, what do some of the last five or even (gasp) 10 years’ most widely distributed viral videos say about this generation’s particular sickness?

With the advent of camera phones, the revolution will be webcast Is it any surprise that moving images activate us more than words? The outrage over the BART station shooting of Oscar Grant was fueled by the sights captured by viewers with camera phones. Six months after Grant’s death, the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan during the Iranian election protests was captured by multiple observers, causing it to become a flashpoint for reformists and activists. The videos depicting what one Time writer described as “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history” ended up winning last year’s George Polk Award for Videography.

Pre-online video, the mainstream news media likely would have shielded the public from these images in the interest of so-called public decency. But the availability of these videos online — and the reaction they generated — triggered a rethink. The shadowy online presence of the beheading videos made by Islamist terrorists following 9/11 might have prepared some for the horrors of the very real faces of death, but obviously the intent behind more recent spontaneous acts of DIY documentation has been radically different. Consider this the nonviolent, amateur response to Homeland Security-approved surveillance — a quickly-posted flipside to the filter of traditional journalism.

We appreciate raw talent There’s the professional article, like the demo tape of Jeremy Davies’ lengthy Charles Manson improvisation. But viewers often prefer to feed on more unvarnished talent-show-esque efforts: the stoic, high-geek style of Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain,” or Eli Porter of “Iron Mic” infamy. As one aficionado said of the latter, Porter is an “enigma, for no one knows where the FUCK Eli is! His battle was done in 2003, and he sort of vanished, leaving legions of fans wanting more.” The invisible — both the private ritual and the would-be performer striving for a public — is made visible. This is why recent clips such as a little girl dunking through her legs or the “Dick Slang” video of circle-jerking hip-hoppers shaking their penii like hula hoops are so wickedly sticky.

The reveal can’t be concealed You can’t hide your anger management issues, whether you’re a Chinese woman punching and kicking on Muni or Bill O’Reilly flipping out about getting played out with a Sting song (“We’ll do it live! Fuck it!”). Nor can you forget that pesky Katie Couric clip if you’re Sarah Palin: the notorious snippet of the wannabe vice president attempting to explain her nonexistent foreign policy experience lives on in a YouTube feature box. If you decide to get more than 1,000 prisoners in the Philippines to replicate the “Thriller” video, rope a slew of tarted-up tots to do the “Single Ladies” routine, or organize a flash mob of dancers for your (500) Days of Summer-cheesy proposal in New York City’s Washington Square Park, you can bet it won’t stay a secret. Especially when a good portion of the bystanders blocking your shot are hoisting up cameras and phones of their own.

We like to play with our food and gobble pet vids The dancing fountains of “Diet Coke and Mentos” and the elegiac meltdowns of so many innocent, candy-colored sundaes and ‘sicles in “The Death & Life of Ice Cream” rock our pop, though they’re no match for sneezing baby pandas, dramatic chipmunks, very vocal cats, and dogs either verbalizing, skateboarding, or balloon-munching.

Passion counts Especially when it comes to Chris Crocker’s “Leave Britney Alone” protestations, Obama Girl’s undulations, the kakapo parrot shagging a hapless nature photographer’s skull, and Zach Galifianakis’ hilariously bad “Between Two Ferns” interviews. Even Soulja Boy’s vlogs, in which the pop tell-’em-all cranks the virtues of the Xbox, seem obsessed — with getting the viewer’s attention. That also goes for the “Numa Numa” xloserkidx singing along to O Zone’s “Dragostea Din Tei” and the twirling, ducking, and capering Canadian high-schooler in the “Star Wars Kid” video, which marketing company the Viral Factory estimates has been viewed more than 900 million times.

Just gird yourself for the edit “Star Wars Kid” is one primo example: it inspired Stephen Colbert to kick off a viral loop of his own, challenging viewers to edit and enhance the green-screen video tribute of his own lightsaber routine. No one is exempt from a little creative tinkering, an inspired tweak or 2,000, be it “Longcat”; Ted Levine in Silence of the Lambs; or pre-YouTube animated vid “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” the classic mother of all video hacks, where images ranging from beer ads to motel signs are Photoshopped with the Zero Wing Engrish subtitle. And you thought the remix was dead.

The chicken ‘n diet

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The chicken ‘n diet

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS We went down there, the Mountain and me, way down South of Market, and we found the little alley, placed our little order at the window, and sat on the loading dock, our feet dangling in the street. We sipped sweet tea and ate our breakfast out of boxes, with our hands. All my other friends, even Earl Butter, are fasting, doing cleanses, or otherwise flirting with vegetarianism by way of getting healthy — in response to which I have been eating nothing but chicken and waffles.

There’s good news out there. I’ll tell you what it is, and then I’m going on strike. But I wonder if I can trust the Guardian to print a blank page with just the words "Cheap Eats is on strike" in the middle of it. So maybe I’ll hold the spot with dada and gobbledygook … but wait, but that would be pretty much business-as-usual.

Hmm. It has also occurred to me of course to write restaurant reviews until my demands are met — to review the most boring restaurant(s) I can find, in the most boringly straightforward language I can mustard.

Think: completely unbuttered sentences without any grill marks whatsoever, stacked one on top of the other until you feel bricked in by important information, yet entirely unentertained.

Scary, innit?

Well, certainly flavorless, but I can do this, I think. The problem is it would be way more work than I am accustomed to, and I’m not sure that when you go on strike you’re supposed to work harder. Help me, labor organizers. It’s a topsy-turvy world, my world, and I am essentially (don’t forget) a chicken farmer. I don’t know anything about getting anything — except maybe eggs.

So …

Waffles. Chicken. Here’s what I know.

Farmerbrown’s Little Skillet is a good place to get greased, goo’d, and sweetened. And I mean all over your clothes, too, because there aren’t any tables to eat at. That’s OK, we’re human. This is why we have Laundromats. Not to mention napkins, but I don’t always remember about those.

You place your order at the window, then you eat across the alley on a loading dock or little wooden bench. And if you think that sounds just wonderful, wait’ll you crunch your teeth into that juicy fried chicken. It was the best I’d had since Auntie April’s, which was the best I’d had since Gravy’s. And suddenly we’re saying something.

Suddenly, chicken and waffles are alive and well — maybe even trendy — and not in Oakland this time, or even L.A., but right here in the city known as "The City." Where I live.

Auntie April’s Chicken ‘n’ Waffles is on Third Street in Bayview, and it’s an actual sit-down restaurant. Their Belgian-style waffles are about as satisfying as Gussie’s, but the chicken (fried to order, of course) is way, way better. And the combo is cheaper.

Even Farmerbrown’s Little Skillet, which is associated with Farmerbrown’s fancy-pants Tenderloin soul food restaurant, is cheaper than Gussie’s. Two pieces and a waffle for $8. Pick your pieces.

Not bad, considering one piece and a waffle at Gussie’s is $7.79, $9-something if you want a breast. (You don’t.)

Farmerbrown’s waffles, also Belgian style, were perfect: crispy outside with a soft middle. And their sweet tea was spectacularly sweet. Probably goes better with the pulled pork sandwich — which I think was the only other thing on the menu.

So I don’t know what to say. Slight edge to Auntie April for the fried. But Farmerbrown’s got her beat on the iron. Guess I’ve got two new favorite restaurants. Maybe more. There’s Frisco Fried, also in the Bayview, and Sockywonk says Hard Knox is doing chicken and waffles now too.

It’s an exciting time to be a restaurant reviewer. On a chicken-and-waffle fast. Send money. Someone. *

AUNTIE APRIL’S CHICKEN ‘N’ WAFFLES

Daily: 8 a.m.–3 p.m.

4618 Third St., S.F.

(415) 643-4983

Cash only

No alcohol

FARMERBROWN’S LITTLE SKILLET

Mon.-Sat. 9 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

360 Ritch, S.F.

(415) 777-2777

Cash only

No alcohol

Media experiments

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
Media experiments

news@sfbg.com

With traditional journalism outlets still struggling through the Great Recession and into an uncertain future, some interesting new media experiments have been popping in San Francisco, including much-anticipated The Bay Citizen, an initially well-funded newsroom that launches this week.

It will join a media landscape filled with a wide range of new ventures: general news websites ranging from the nonprofit SF Public Press to the theoretically for-profit SF Appeal; niche sites such as the popular SF Streetsblog; the Spot.us media funding experiment; and the MediaBugs accountability project. And it isn’t all online — McSweeney’s magazine put out the one-time San Francisco Panorama newspaper in December and SF Public Press plans to print a similar demonstration newspaper next month.

But for all the high hopes and talk of using strategic partnerships and new funding models to overcome economic and readership trends that have hobbled the San Francisco Chronicle and other big media companies, those who run The Bay Citizen and other start-ups still need to prove their worth and sustainability.

Whatever The Bay Citizen becomes, it will break new ground — nobody has ever put this level of money into creating a nonprofit, online-only daily newspaper in a major market, or had such significant media partners, ranging from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to The New York Times, which will run the newsroom’s content as its twice-weekly Bay Area section.

Some people think this is the future of journalism; San Francisco-based financier Warren Hellman, who provided the seed money, thinks it’s worth $5 million or more to get the project off the ground. But since there’s no model out there, the crew at The Bay Citizen will be making it up as they go along. And at this point, even with what most Web publications would consider a huge amount of money, it’s clear that The Bay Citizen will not be replacing the Chronicle any time soon.

Jon Weber, the publication’s editor, knows the world of mainstream daily journalism (he was a writer for the Los Angeles Times); the world of high-paced big-money startups (he ran the Industry Standard); and the world of low-budget fledgling operations (he founded the small online magazine New West). And the first thing he had to figure was exactly what this new online daily was going to look like.

With a staff of just six news writers — and a regional focus — The Bay Citizen can’t try to cover breaking news the way the Chronicle, Examiner, or even Bay City News Service do. So the publication will be different from a traditional daily, with more enterprise reporting and less of the types of features dailies typically offer.

There will, for example, be no daily sportswriter. “There won’t be stories on every game, every day,” Weber told me. “We’ll pick our spots with enterprise reporting.” The Bay Citizen won’t try to compete with the Chronicle on national or international stories, either: “It’s a Bay Area focused site,” Weber said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t cover national stories when they impact the Bay Area. But that’s not part of our beats.”

The reporters will cover land use and environmental issues; health and science; education and social issues; business and finance; crime; and government and politics. The politics reporter won’t be able to cover San Francisco City Hall every day, either — he or she (that’s the one slot still open) will have to stay on top of local and statewide issues.

But what could make the Bay Citizen truly unusual is the extent to which Weber plans to partner with existing local bloggers and nontraditional news outlets. “We hope we can be a supporter of the local media ecosystem,” he said.

That could eventually set The Bay Citizen apart — and provide a new model for daily journalism. The publication has pending agreements with a dozen local Web sites and bloggers, some of them well-established and funded, and some more homegrown efforts. It’s also working with New American Media, which for many years has represented and encouraged ethnic news outlets.

Yet this isn’t exactly a new idea. SF Gate, the Chronicle’s Web site, has been running content from local blogs, including SF Streetsblog, for more than a year. But it doesn’t pay for that content and so far there have been few discernible benefits for either side of the equation.

“That’s been an experiment for us, but I’m not sure we see much of a return,” Streetsblog SF Editor Bryan Goebel told us. “The question is how you make these partnerships sustainable.”

That’s a question he’ll continue to explore with his newest partner, The Bay Citizen, which is promising to pay bloggers $25 for each post they run and to partner with them on larger projects. Although he’s still waiting to see a contract from Weber, Goebel said, “The model Bay Citizen is using could potentially work.”

Goebel needs something that will work. After 16 months in business, he said SF Streetsblog has 14,000 weekly readers and a loyal following among those interested in transportation and urbanism, but it’s funding (primarily from two rich individuals) has dried up to the point where he’s worried about the site’s future.

“I was hired to be the editor, but now the onus is on me to also keep it going,” Goebel said. “If the community likes this valuable resource … then the community needs to step up and support it.”

The Bay Citizen is also relying on that community-supported paradigm, using a four-part plan to pay the bills. At first The Bay Citizen will be heavily dependent on big donations. But Weber wants to see the operation transition to a more independent program that will rely on public broadcasting-style memberships (small donations), sponsorships (read: ad sales), and the sale of original content (syndication).

There’s already been some grumbling in the local blogosphere about Bay Citizen, from noting the outsized salary of the project’s president and CEO Lisa Frazier (a media consultant who led the search and then took the job at a reported $400,000 per year) to concerns about this big venture exploiting small local partners.

Frazier answered the salary question by noting that she has been working on the project for 14 months and emphasizing her business development experience. “This is a difficult problem we’re taking on and we need to put together a sustainable business model,” she told us. “It’s about results and our fundraising response has been fantastic.”

Another eyebrow-raiser is the background of The Bay Citizen’s Chief Technology Officer Brian Kelley, founder of the Web site ReputationDefender, which promises to remove negative items from the Internet searches of its paying clients — an antithetical mission for news organizations that expose the misdeeds of powerful figures.

Kelley downplayed his former company’s role in countering good journalism, telling us, “I do intend to take that knowledge here to promote our online content.”

Weber said the new venture won’t use its considerable initial resources to try to steal the show, and they’re bringing something truly valuable to the local media scene: a paid staff of journalists to counter the steep declines in local news-gathering.

“Listen,” Weber told us, “I was there for five years. I was running a little start-up with no resources. The last thing I want to do is hurt the smaller outfits. We think we can work together in ways that benefit everyone.”

SF Public Press has pursued a model like Bay Citizen’s for two years. But without millions of dollars in seed money, it’s still hobbling along as basically a volunteer newsroom despite getting around $35,000 from San Francisco Foundation, another Hellman-funded enterprise. “It’s an uncertain model. It’s a leap of faith for the writers to get involved with this,” said project manager Michael Stoll.

Yet Public Press is still moving forward with a newspaper (due out June 15) featuring content culled from a wide variety of local partners ranging from the Commonwealth Club and World Affairs Council to local public radio stations, local blogs, and The Bay Citizen. “We’re calling it both a pilot and a prototype,” Stoll said. “We want to get people’s reactions.”

Weber says he’s also eager to see how people react to The Bay Citizen when it launches May 26, because it will need to quickly establish itself. At the rate The Bay Citizen is spending, Hellman’s money won’t last more than a couple of years, and the financier told us he may be willing to put in a bit more, but he’s going to want to see a plan for financial stability that doesn’t involve him underwriting operations forever. It’s an experiment, but one most observers say is worth trying.

“We need to keep experimenting,” Goebel said, “because not every experiment is going to work.”

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