News

Appetite: Dreaming of the islands …

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: Dreaming of the islands …

This weekend affords the last of a series of Hawaiian escapes here in San Francisco, especially Aloha Fridays at Gordon Biersch, which would be especially idyllic in the Spring gorgeousness we’ve been experiencing. 

 

But it’s also a time to dream of stealing away to the islands not just for drinks but for food. A recent event at Burlingame’s striking Sub-Zero & Wolf Showroom highlighted the locavore, farm-fresh movements infusing Hawaii’s culinary scene with new life.

 

It was a February night of island breezes and mai tais with three of Hawaii’s biggest chefs, Roy Yamaguchi (yes, that Roy of Roy’s restaurants), Alan Wong and D.K. Kodama, plus a mixologist, winemaker, Hawaiian products (like sweet and spicy Kilauea hot sauce), transforming Sub Zero’s kitchens into a Hawaiian luau.

 

 

Roy Yamaguchi serves us his latest

 

Fresh-flower leis were draped over our necks as we were handed shiso, ginger, and elderflower soju-based cocktails, then escorted to a three-course tasting in a back room before other guests joined us in the main areas. The table was laden with flowers and artistic fish dishes from all three chefs. I was pleasantly surprised at the range and quality of tastes. Proud of Hawaii’s recent resurgence in locally grown produce and sustainable, local seafood and animals (they’re even raising Maine lobsters on the islands), everyone from chefs to farm owners (brought together by Hawaii’s Visitors Bureau) talked of Hawaiian grass-fed cows and a new iPhone app, What Chefs Eat, which gives Hawaiian chefs’ recommends for the best in non-touristy food joints. Keep up with Hawaiian food news at Share Your Table, and head to Gordon Biersch this Saturday, transported to Hawaii via the Bay. 

 

La guerra de los Jarritos

Andrew Lam
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La guerra de los Jarritos

In the mid-Pacific Mexican state of Jalisco, jarritos, small earthenware pots, are used for many things– drinking and decoration of homes, primarily. But multi national corporation Novamex has claimed the word for itself — and is forcing small businesses, like Los Jarritos Restaurant on South Van Ness Avenue, to change their longheld names to accommodate that fact.

Dolores Reyes opened her family run Mission District restaurant in 1988, about the same year that Novamex began importing their popular fruit sodas into the United States. Though the Reyes initially stocked the drink, the decision to name their restaurant ‘Los Jarritos’ was based on their family’s heritage down south. Los Jarritos became a neighborhood fixture, famous for their breakfast chilaquiles.

“Jarritos are an important cultural item in Jalisco,” says Roy Gordet, the Reyes’ attorney. “By naming her restaurant after them, Dolores felt more connected to her family back in Mexico.” 

She could have hardly expected that, 15 years later, she’d be fighting her soda supplier over use of this cultural invocation. And they weren’t the only ones. Novamex targeted restaurants and taquerias with the name all over the country with legal action — approximately 30 by Gordet’s count.

“In my situation, I think they brought the lawyer because they move by money, not by anything else,” says Edith Marisol-Rivera. Marisol-Rivera’s own Los Jarritos taqueria in Eugene, Oregon, had been open for seven years when she received news from Novamex that she would have to change her businesses’ name- or else.

No one’s drinking soda with their late afternoon lunch at Los Jarritos Restaurant

“They were suing us for more than $50,000 if we didn’t change our name,” she says. “We are a small business, and we don’t have a lot of money, so I didn’t think there was a good reason to fight them.” Edith, whose mother had brought hundreds of jarritos when she moved from El Salvador, still decorates her taqueria with the jars- but the sign over the door now read El Jarro Azul. “We thought if they’re located in Texas, they should let people have their own name. But I guess not,” she gives a rueful laugh. “They’re thinking we’re going to steal their name and start making sodas or something like that.”

In contrast, Reyes decided to stand her ground. “We claimed some of their trademark registrations were invalid,” says Gordet. Reyes filed counter claims against Novamex’s, hoping to show that the restaurant had committed no legal infringement on the name Jarritos. The corporation’s case was thrown out by federal judge Jeffery White, but then reinstated by the Ninth Circuit Court. It had been a lengthy legal battle.

Dolores’ struggle resonated with other small business owners. “I talked to Dolores and she said she had the business for 18 years. I told her if she has the money she should fight,” says Marisol-Rivera. “It’s hard to fight these big companies, they’re everywhere now. I gave up because it was a lot of stress for me, but I was glad Senora Dolores kept doing it.”

But eventually, the wearing court battle was too much for Reyes. “The case has now been dismissed by the court,” says Gordet. According to the dismissal filed with the court, all claims have been dropped and the restaurant will change its name. “They didn’t expect Dolores Reyes to fight as valiantly as she did,” says Gordet. “But now everybody is going to move on. Generally, that’s considered a good thing.” Novamex refused to comment on the case for this article, saying they were under a confidentiality agreement to remain silent.

Times va cambiando for Los Jarritos Restaurant

On a recent sunny afternoon, a diverse crowd sat in Los Jarritos, enjoying a late lunch. Construction workers, Latino and White, sat at the lunch counter with plates of food and a beer (not surprising, the restaurant stopped carrying the Jarritos soda five or six years ago- around the time the legal battle began). Families lounged at tables, enjoying the sunny atmosphere imparted by the dining room’s colorful decorations- shelves upon shelves of traditional pottery, and strings of small jarritos looped around pillars.

But stuck to the front door, there is a bilingual sign that invokes Novamex’s legal challenge. “Los Jarritos restaurant will be changing its name… but we will be run by the same family members and owners. Thank you for understanding.”

Los Jarritos Restaurant (for now)

901 South Van Ness, SF

(415) 648-8383

www.losjarritos.com

 

When do we get to vote on PG&E’s latest rate hike?

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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When do we get to vote on PG&E’s latest rate hike?

The Chronicle’s David Baker reported today that Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has proposed a new fee structure that would raise the average residential customer bill by $10.73 more each month, bringing it to a total of $88.13.

This new rate-hike proposal comes as the utility prepares to spend $35 million on Proposition 16, a ballot initiative that would essentially lock in its monopoly against competition by requiring a two-thirds vote before local governments could set up alternative power providers. John Geesman, former executive director of the California Energy Commission, called PG&E’s current rates “excessive” when he blasted Prop 16 before a joint hearing of the California Legislature. Geesman commented that the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) doesn’t set rates “at a level calculated to provide a $35 million slush fund for sole-sponsored political adventurism.”

“PG&E says it will spend up to $35 million, and insists all of that money will come from its shareholders,” he noted. “You and I know that every nickel that passes through PG&E’s books comes from its captive customers — its regulated utility is the only business PG&E has!  It ought to be illegal to take ratepayer money and use it politically against ratepayer interests.  If PG&E’s making an excessive return, it ought to give the money back.”

PG&E has sent out mailers claiming that San Francisco’s own community choice aggregation effort would drive up the cost of monthly utility bills. Yet the track record for existing municipal utilities shows that historically, PG&E rates have been higher.

Dan Berman, an energy expert who has worked as an analyst for the CPUC, highlighted this point when speaking before the CPUC March 17. In 2008, PG&E charged an average of 13.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, while the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) charged 10.7 cents, he noted. “That means PG&E charged 27.3 percent more than SMUD, the largest publicly owned utility in Northern California,” Berman said.

On March 20, the San Jose Mercury News published an editorial shooting down Prop 16. Here’s an excerpt:

“If [PG&E CEO Peter Darbee] is looking for a cheaper way to hold onto his customers, here’s a suggestion: Instead of spending tens of millions of ratepayer dollars on political campaigns, PG&E could use that money to lower rates and find more sources of renewable energy — the main reasons cities consider breaking away in the first place.

“But don’t hold your breath. And don’t miss the opportunity to send PG&E an unequivocal message by ignoring the barrage of misleading advertising and voting no on Proposition 16. The constitution of the state of California should not be for sale.”

Hank Plante’s exit interview

Sasha Cuttler
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2

Hank Plante ends a three-decade run as a political journalist with tonight’s (March 24) broadcast of the CBS 5 Eyewitness News, where he has worked since 1986 after starting his career with newspapers in Washington DC. So we took the occasion to talk politics with him, learning that his loyalties lie downtown.

Plante agreed that politics has become ugly these days. “It’s just so much more acrimonious, that’s one thing that’s changed. The other is just the money that’s involved,” Plante told us, marveling at Meg Whitman’s plans to spend $40 million of her own money to run for governor and the $1 million per day that corporations spent lobbying against the health reform bill signed by President Obama.

But the changes haven’t gotten Plante down, as they have many political junkies, who decry the crippling of government’s ability to combat corporate power and address real social and economic problems. “I’ve never become a cynic, and I think that’s one thing that sets me apart from many political journalists,” he said, adding, “I still think politicians can make a difference.”

Yet like many political journalists, when I ask who his favorite politicians have been, he rates them based on whether they’ve made good stories, not whether they good for the people. For journalists, bad is often good, whether it be natural disasters or disgraceful politicians.

“Arnold is a great story. Willie Brown was a great story. Gray Davis was a dull story until he got recalled, then he was a good story,” Plante said.

What about Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has often given Plante exclusive access (including Newsom’s first extended interview after his 2007 sex scandal), but who has also angrily walked out in the middle of an interview with Plante. 

“Personally, I like the mayor. But I have to ask him tough questions, so he can be mercurial. Right now, he’s running for office again, so he’s charming,” Plante said.

In fact, for a journalist, Plante makes clear his preference for Newsom over the progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors, joking, “If I had a month to live, I’d spend it with the Board of Supervisors because it would seem like five years.”

Plante also said that he opposes district elections — which he said have prevented the emergence of big-stature political figures like Dianne Feinstein and Quintin Kopp — and Plante said he doesn’t see the value of district elections in counteracting the political power of downtown corporations. “I’m a capitalist and I have no problem with people making money,” he said.

Yet Plante acknowledges the divide between downtown and progressives is San Francisco’s dominant political dynamic, noting, “You see how afraid downtown is of the Board of Supervisors appointing the new mayor.”

While Plante said he believes in the importance of politics, he does decry how political science and public relations have been manipulated in recent years.

“They’re taken a page out of the Karl Rove playbook to talk over the journalists right at the public,” Plante said, noting how many politicians no longer feel the need to be accessible to journalists or honestly and directly answer their questions. “They really want to control the message, so the accessibility is diminished.”

Nonetheless, Plante said he regularly emphasizes the importance of political engagement: “In a place like the Bay Area, where people are inundated with lots of information sources, you have to keep saying it over and over again.” 

Plante, 63, is retiring and moving to his home in Palm Springs with his partner, Roger. Among the many awards and accolades he earned during his career are several Emmys and a prestigious Peabody Award. His station sent out a press release praising Plante, including this comment by anchor Dana King: “There is an entire population of politicians breathing a sigh of relief at the news of Hank’s retirement. Hank was the consummate professional, never combative but he did his homework and asked tough, pointed questions. Politicians, love him or hate him, respected and answered them, every single time. Our newsroom will suffer a huge intellectual void when he leaves.”

Street view

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Street view

By Skyler Swezy

news@sfbg.com

The Haight-Ashbury is out-of-control, according to some recent news reports and testimony by cops and other backers of the proposed sit-lie ordinance. They report street toughs brazenly smoking crack, blocking sidewalks, spitting on babies, and intimidating citizens with pit bulls.

As this story goes, dangerous thugs have replaced harmless beggars. They’ve gone from annoying to menacing, a change police say they’re helpless to address without legislation banning sitting or lying on sidewalks, which Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief George Gascón introduced March 1.

Proponents and opponents have attended City Hall meetings and voiced their arguments in the media. The police, homeless rights advocates, Haight Street business owners, residents, Newsom, and columnists have spoken their piece. But what do the street kids, who haven’t been heard from in this debate, have to say for themselves?

So on March 19, I spent the day walking the Haight to get the perspective from the street, asking kids what they think is going on?

It’s 3 p.m. and I’m standing on the southwest corner of Central and Haight streets next to a Bob Marley mural painted on the side of a liquor store. A cop car cruises by. With no thugs or panhandlers in sight, I head toward Golden Gate Park along the south side of the street.

On the corner of Masonic and Haight, there are some well-kept teens perched against the wall of X-Generation. Clutching shopping bags, they are not panhandlers, but they sit on the ground because Haight Street doesn’t have benches, except for one on Stanyan facing the park.

These kids clearly aren’t the targets of this ordinance, so I move on to the notorious Haight-Asbury intersection, which is also devoid of vagabonds. An old woman and young boy, both well-dressed, squat in front of Haight Asbury Vintage, watching shoppers pass by.

Almost at the end of the block, outside a closed storefront, a scruffy young man is perched on a back pack holding a battered piece of cardboard that reads “SMILES/HAVE A NICE DAY!? OR NIGHT.”

“You have a beautiful smile,” he croons to passersby. Most stare straight ahead, some smile without making eye contact; a woman in her 30s asks to take his picture. Jay is 18, has a scarce beard and crust in the corners of his sleepy pale blue eyes. He is from Ohio and says he has been bumming on Haight and sleeping in the park for about three months. He hitchhiked to San Francisco because his sister is “a back-stabbing crack head, so I left.”

He doesn’t think panhandling has become more aggressive recently, but that business owners “just want to be asses.” He’s not much of a talker and more interested in smiles, so I leave Jay to his work.

On the next block I meet Kevin Geoppo, 31, cupping a handful of coinage, sitting on the window ledge of a storefront under renovation. Kevin says he’s a heroin addict who grew up in Orlando, Fla., and made his way to San Francisco years ago. He’s obtained an SRO and primary care doctor, but can’t get a job.

He sees both sides of the sit/lie law debate. “Those who sit and lie do cause a lot trouble, stir up energy that isn’t needed to [hurt] tourism, and [threaten] violence, so I can understand why this is being talked about,” he says.

At the same time, he is wary of how the police would use the law and at whom it would be directed. He doesn’t think things are getting worse, but he says the panhandling and menacing attitudes of some kids ebb and flow as different groups pass through the city.

“A lot of these yuppie, rich, bureaucrat people are trying to clean up everything because if you take a left or a right anywhere off Haight Street, it’s rich people living in those houses,” he says. I let him get back to business and proceed down the street.

I decide to drop into Aub Zam Zam cocktail lounge for a veteran bartender’s opinion. Owner Bob Harpe is behind the horseshoe bar, slicing limes and chatting with long-time Haight resident Paul Zmudzinski.

Harpe doesn’t have problems with aggressive or congregating street kids. “If you ask them to move and treat them with a general level of respect, they go on their way.”

He believes the rising number of homeowners in the neighborhood and businesses catering to a more affluent clientele are behind the recent uproar. “The rents on Haight Street have escalated dramatically, so boutique owners have to pump up their prices. Then you get more affluent shoppers who are turned off by the skuzzy-looking street kids coming through,” Harpe says. “The whole thing is kind of disgusting.”

Back outside, I head to the next block and come across Kasper who is “flying a sign” that reads “SEX!!! NOW THAT I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, SPARE ANY $$$?”

He is a 33-year-old traveler who just landed back on Haight, having spent the last three weeks in Berkeley. He’s headed north to a 420 Rainbow gathering and then to Idaho for work. With combat boots, Army pants, and a neck tattoo, he’s a tough-looking guy with a soft-spoken voice.

“They don’t understand all the money they’ll lose. We panhandle money in the street and then spend it in the stores here,” Kasper says. “Those liquor stores rely on street people.”

He says many tourists come to the Haight to see people playing guitars, banging drums, and selling their hemp trinkets. And when it comes to instances of violence or aggressiveness, those are limited to a few of the community and could happen anywhere, regardless of a sit-lie law.

“These things are heavy,” he says nodding to his backpack. “To have to stand, hold your straps, and fly a sign to get something to eat is just ridiculous.”

McDonalds is the last establishment before Golden Gate Park, which serves as a three-mile squatter haven stretching to the Pacific Ocean. Beneath the golden arches, three guys are singing an improvised McDonalds song, but two busted guitar strings kills their burger ballad hustle.

The three agree to an interview and form a semicircle on the sidewalk. Stoney, 19, the guitar player, is wearing sunglasses, a backwards cap, and is heavily scarred on his arms and neck. “Are you against weed?” he asks, before hitting a pipe carved from a deer antler.

Angelo, 23, is a self-dubbed vagabond originally from Virginia. He just got out of jail for selling weed to a cop in the Tenderloin. Nick, 18, wears a mighty Afro and says almost nothing.

Two bike cops zip up and tell us to move it. “You’re blocking the sidewalk,” one cop says. Everyone stands up. “It’s not illegal yet, dude!” Stoney yells back toward the cops as we cross Stanyan to enter the park.

Stoney and Angelo agree with each other that lawmakers are focusing on the bad actions of a few to push all street kids off Haight. “We have the right to use the sidewalk just like anyone else,” Angelo says. “It’s crazy, man. We’re all just fuckin’ a bunch of cells put together, floating around a ball of fire in space.”

The sit-lie ordinance could be considered by the Board of Supervisors next month. For details on a March 27 citywide protest of the measure, visit www.standagainstsitlie.org.

Shit show

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Shit show

By Brady Welch

 

news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Food safety groups complain that the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has until recently been dumping its crap in the backyards and gardens of any residents who unwittingly asked for it.

The city calls this crap “biosolids compost,” and for Mayor Gavin Newsom and the SFPUC, it seemed like a green dream come true. But it turns out that putting processed human excrement into people’s vegetable gardens might not be the elegant — if somewhat gross — reuse strategy it once seemed to be.

The vexing sewage sludge left over after treatment and separation of the city’s wastewater was being treated, combined with woodchips and paper waste, and labeled compost so it could, according to the SFPUC’s Web site, “provide essential plant nutrients, improve soil structure, enhance moisture retention, and reduce soil erosion.” Not bad for the ultimate human waste product.

The problem, say groups including the Center for Food Safety and Organic Consumers Association, is that the SFPUC’s compost contains a host of other toxins and hazardous materials not necessarily originating with what the city’s granola-munching denizens flush down the toilet. In fact, a January 2009 Environmental Protection Agency study of sewage sludge from 74 treatment plants found, in nearly every sample, “28 metals, four polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, two semi-volatiles, 11 flame retardants, 72 pharmaceuticals, and 25 steroids and hormones.” Yikes.

“You name it, it’s in there,” John Mayer, said spokesperson for the Organic Consumers Association. The compost “is hazardous waste, and it’s absurd to claim that it’s safe to consume. No matter what the sludge processing industry claims, it is by definition dangerous.” The EPA report would certainly seem to support Mayer’s claim, except that it expressly stops short of doing just that, stating that the results “do not imply that the concentrations for any [substance] are of particular concern to EPA.”

Then again, it was the EPA that started promoting the use of biosolid compost in the first place, back in 1978. The only safety thresholds the agency sets for biosolids compost concern nine heavy metals and the elimination of pathogens — none of the flame retardants, steroids, semi-volatiles, and carcinogens found in their study — a standard that has remained largely unchanged for a decade.

But that’s only part of the story, because as it turns out, San Francisco’s sewage sludge isn’t that contaminated compared to the shit generated in other regions. “We found in our tests that it’s really low for all the emerging pollutants,” SFPUC spokesperson Tyron Jue told us, citing data listed on its Web site indicating that testing goes beyond what the EPA requires, and even beyond more stringent European Union standards. Jue even said that the SFPUC’s biosolids compost has “metal limits lower than in a daily vitamin, and lower or comparable to store-bought compost.”

Yet Paige Tomaselli of the Center for Food Safety understands the data differently. “San Francisco may test above and beyond the national standards. They may think their testing is green. But the truth of the matter is that that the compost they’re giving away is not generated here in San Francisco.”

Indeed, the sewage sludge the SFPUC tested is not the same stuff it was handing out for three years as “organic biosolids compost.” After the organic food industry complained, the utility recently dropped the “organic” designation, offering the admittedly sheepish defense that the label was meant to imply “carbon-rich,” a definition that would make, among nearly everything else, the Guardian you hold in your hands organic.

Jue told us that the utility spends over $3 million annually on its biosolids program, $500,000 of which last year went to contracts with Synagro, “the largest recycler of organic residuals in the United States,” according to its Web site. The compost in the SFPUC’s giveaways came from the corporation’s Central Valley Composting Facility in Merced County, where it was mixed with sludge from at least eight other counties, including municipalities whose safety requirements are nowhere near as stringent as San Francisco’s.

“The vast majority [of sludge] comes from Fresno,” Tomaselli said, adding that the SFPUC continues to cite its own numbers, “completely ignoring the fact that this sewage sludge comes from a city with agricultural and industrial toxins that may be going into the waste stream.”

Many of those toxins remain in the “compost” San Franciscans have been applying to their tomato plants. “You can cook it all day,” Mayer told us. “Those things aren’t going anywhere.”

Both OCA and CFS say that, given such a broad avenue by which toxic material could enter the SFPUC’s compost, the SFPUC is violating San Francisco’s environmental standards. For example, the opening chapter of the Environment Code for the City and County of San Francisco explicitly states that all members of the city’s government should employ the “precautionary principle” in conducting its affairs, requiring the city to err on the side of caution in environmental policy.

One sentence in particular would seem to address biosolids and the 2009 EPA study specifically: “Any gaps in scientific data uncovered by the examination of alternatives will provide a guidepost for future research, but will not prevent the city from taking protective action.” And in the case of so-called biosolids, protective action would seem to call for keeping this shit away from food.

Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the EPA and founder of the Superfund program, flatly stated to us over the phone that “there’s no scientific consensus that this stuff is safe. They test less than 1 percent of the stuff that has been tested to be in it.”

The health effects of even that 1 percent can be alarming. Of the nine heavy metals the EPA tests for, chromium is a known carcinogen and mercury can cause permanent nervous system and kidney damage. But if that stuff doesn’t kill you, prolonged exposure to low levels of arsenic, another heavy metal, “can cause a discoloration of the skin and the appearance of small corns or warts,” according to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration Web site.

Considering that Kaufman works in the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (as apposed to the Office of Water that oversees biosolids), we asked him how and why his own employer is encouraging the land application of something so potentially hazardous.

“I think it’s very similar to the reason why the government doesn’t ban naked credit-default swaps. You’ve got a situation here where the cheapest way to dispose of the sludge is land application,” he said. By giving away the sludge as compost, as San Francisco has been doing, “you can transfer liability from the government to the public where the stuff is ultimately dumped. There is tremendous economic pressure to keep the ball rolling in the same direction.”

A February 2008 ruling of 11th Circuit Court of Appeals would seem to bear this out. The case involved the McElmurrays, a family of farmers that allowed the city of Augusta, Ga., to apply biosolids on their land from 1979 to 1990. The sludge eventually poisoned their crops and even the cows who fed on them.

Citing Augusta’s lack of disclosure about the noxious effects of the sludge, the McElmurrays sought compensation subsidies under a 2002 Farm Bill, going first to the county, then the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency, a state-level agency. After a number of back-and-forth denials and delays, the matter was appealed to the national USDA, which then sought the EPA’s advice for their ruling.

The court found that the series of opinions the EPA subsequently issued were unrelated to the case before the USDA and were nevertheless based on Augusta’s faulty land application data. “In short,” the ruling’s conclusion states, “it appears that the only persons to consider [the McElmurrays’] applications ended up ruling in their favor…. The USDA’s decision to accept a contrary decision, based on no review of the applications by the EPA, was arbitrary and capricious. The conclusions of the EPA were not based on substantial evidence.”

As for SFPUC’s biosolids giveaway, “They wanted a program that would green-wash this dangerous substance,” Mayer told us. “And they participated in this ruse for the benefit of Synagro. Even the mayor got pulled in.”

Tony Winnicker, the spokesperson for the SFPUC before becoming Newsom’s press secretary in January, told us the idea behind the program was a good one. “The spirit behind this is right, in terms of reuse and sustainability,” he said. “This was one of the PUC’s environmental initiatives from the beginning, and the mayor supports the agency’s efforts at environmental sustainability.”

But Winnicker said he was not aware that San Francisco’s well-tested biosolids were being mixed with those of other areas, and that Newsom would defer to SFPUC experts on how to handle the situation.

“I have no doubt that they tell people it’s biosolids compost,” CFS’s Paige Tomaselli told us. But she echoed the 11th Circuit court’s findings when she added, “On the other hand, I don’t think people know what that entails.”

This could be why SFPUC recently suspended the compost giveaways. “We’re reevaluating,” Jue told us. “What we’re trying to do is take a step back. We’re always looking at all the new information presented in front of us.” As for the utility’s record of disclosure, “We’ve always been very transparent with everyone coming to pick up compost. This is bringing awareness to an issue people don’t want to think about. [Sewage] doesn’t disappear. We have to think about it.”

So what’s to be done? Newsom has pushed San Francisco to the national forefront in sustainability and generating zero waste. Unfortunately, “they’re part of the wrong side of the sludge game,” said EPA’s Kaufman. “Is it possible to manage it better? Yes. Is there a black box to spin gold out of hay? No. Can one be invented in the future? Maybe.”

Kaufman found quite a bit of potential in the city’s successful green-bin composting. “San Francisco collects biodegradable waste material, good waste material, that can make very good compost,” he noted. “It’s not made from industrial waste; it’s made from real organic material. That’s not what the giveaway compost is made from. If San Francisco had taken what homeowners had put in for recycling and composted that and given that away, that would be fantastic.”

It would certainly have been better than the shit it has been giving away.

The new War on Fun

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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46
The new War on Fun

news@sfbg.com

For several years, the Guardian has been running regular stories chronicling what we’ve dubbed the Death of Fun, a trend of official crackdowns and shakedowns on people who throw parties and festivals in San Francisco. In the last year, that trend has started to morph into an often brutal War on Fun, with a growing list of atrocities and casualties associated with this overzealous new approach to killing the city’s entertainment industry.

Why this is happening is baffling to those most affected: nightclub owners and workers, party promoters, DJs and VJs, fundraising activists, and people just out to have a good time without being harassed by a cop. But in recent months, we’ve learned much more about what’s happening and who the main perpetrators are.

Two undercover enforcers have been at the center of just about every recent case of nightclubs or private parties being raided without warrants and aggressively shut down, their patrons roughed up (see “Fun under siege,” 4/21/09) and their money, booze, and equipment punitively seized “as evidence” (see “Police seize DJs laptops,” 11/24/09) even though few of these raids result in charges being filed in court.

Officer Larry Bertrand of the San Francisco Police Department’s Southern Station and Michelle Ott, an agent with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, are plainclothes partners who spend their weekends undercover, crashing parties, harassing disfavored nightclubs, brutalizing party-goers, and trying to send the unmistakable message that they’re in charge of San Francisco nightlife. Neither responded to our interview requests.

Isolated incidents of intolerant cops and NIMBY citizens who repeatedly complain about certain clubs or festivals has been a problem for years (see “Death of fun,” 5/24/06 and “Death of fun, the sequel,” 4/24/07). Top city officials have opted to cancel events such as Halloween in the Castro District rather than try to manage them better, and the nightlife community has tried to organize in defense of its interests (see “Fighting for the right to party,” 7/1/08) with mixed results.

But the personal War of Fun by Bertrand and Ott seems to have galvanized and united the nightlife and festival community like never before, leading to the creation of a new California Music and Culture Association and prompting threats of a federal lawsuit alleging the ABC-SFPD collaboration is a racketeering scheme designed to harass, disrupt, and extort people engaged in otherwise lawful activity.

The myriad horror stories associated with Bertrand and Ott have also finally begun to draw attention from the Mayor’s Office, which has quietly pushed the SFPD to rein in Bertrand and change its policies on raiding parties and seizing property. State Sen. Mark Leno also has gotten involved, brokering a March 12 meeting between club owners and Steve Hardy, director of ABC (which, in addition to cracking down on nightclubs — see “Busting bars,” 6/23/09 — has recently announced a campaign against fruit-infused liquor).

“They were going to see how they could unwind this a bit,” Leno told us, adding that he was “infuriated” by stories of abusive treatment of the public. “The fear that it spreads through the community is unacceptable.”

The question now is what Hardy, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Police Chief George Gascón — who has ordered some crackdowns and wants greater authority to discipline problem officers — is going to do about it.

 

CHAOS AT A STUDENT PARTY

It was after midnight on Jan. 31 when Krystal Peak, a journalist with San Francisco State University’s Golden Gate Xpress, received a call from her managing editor. There was a commotion and a swarm of police cars outside a student party at Seventh and Minna streets near her home, and she was asked to investigate.

She came upon the aftermath of a melee between police and partygoers that had taken place after a fundraising event at a SoMa warehouse art space was upended. The benefit was organized to raise legal funds for students who staged a building occupation at the University of California at Berkeley, in defiance of budget cuts.

The event was clearly chaotic, and it’s hard to sort out exactly what happened and when. City officials say the partiers were throwing bottles and firecrackers at the police; people at the event say the cops started it all.

But the tales partygoers tell about the behavior of Bertrand and Ott, the undercover enforcers, are similar to a series of other stories involving the pair, stories published in the Guardian and elsewhere.

There had been multiple arrests by the time Peak arrived on the scene. Numerous witnesses asserted that things were going along without incident until a fire marshal arrived in response to a complaint, and in short order, two officers who’d been there in plainclothes for hours — Bertrand and Ott — began shouting, tackling people, and kicking in doors.

Police Chief George Gascón acknowledged that the department has been targeting underground parties. “We get a lot of resident complaints about it,” he said in a recent Guardian interview. “We’re talking about a lot of the underground parties, or the parties where the promoters are exceeding their authorities to a number of people.”

Several hundred attended this particular party. Of the 11 people arrested, eight were either detained or cited and released. None faced underage drinking or drug charges. At least five were charged with resisting arrest. One individual was charged with vandalism, two were charged with battery on an officer, and two detained for being drunk in public.

Peak began photographing the scene: busted-up chairs, uniformed officers guarding the entrance, police cars everywhere. She zoomed her lens to capture the wreckage inside. None of the uniformed officers seemed to have a problem with her — but when she spotted the undercover officers with exposed badges, that changed.

The cops broke through the door, yelling. “They said, ‘This is an investigation, you’re not allowed to be here.'<0x2009> she said. “We told them we were with the press.” They threatened to arrest her.

Shortly after, the plainclothes officers crossed in front of her to an unmarked car. She took another picture. Bertrand, a tall guy with a shaved head, allegedly turned and grabbed her arm, and both officers shouted at her. “[Ott] said to me, ‘Your flash has impeded my investigation,'” Peak recounted. She was cuffed and arrested on the spot, and her camera was confiscated.

She was cited for obstruction of justice, but the charges were dropped. And she got her camera back — but says the SD memory card, where all the photos were stored — was missing.

“I flipped [the camera] open … and found the SD card was missing,” she said. She asked Bertrand where it was. “He said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,'” Peak recalled. Bertrand, she recalled, then looked around at a group of officers watching the exchange, and announced, “This woman is refusing to leave. I’m going to have to re-arrest her.” Ott appeared, according to Peak, and insisted that there was no evidence the memory card had been in the camera in the first place.

“My camera will not ignite a flash unless there’s a memory card in there,” Peak explained. In the end, she left empty-handed — without photos of the undercover officers.

 

BUSTING DOORS

Earlier, when the party was in full swing, a 24-year-old California State University, Fullerton student visiting from Los Angeles says when the fire marshal entered, Bertrand flashed his badge, yelling at everybody to get out. “It was really aggressive from the get-go,” said the Fullerton student, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he had a pending legal case. “It’s very hard for me to describe the intensity to which this guy was busting down doors.”

Later, the young man from L.A. said, he was following people who left in a rush, and ran to catch up. “Shortly after, I felt a blow to the back right of my head,” he said. “My glasses flew off, and I was tackled to the ground. My forehead was being pushed straight into the ground and they were holding my hair. I kept repeating … please, I can’t see — I’m legally blind. I thought three or four officers were on top of me, and they were saying, ‘Fuck you, you little anarchist punk.'<0x2009>”

That’s when he said he felt a sensation like “a bunch of really intense bee stings on my left side, just above my hipbone.” He thought he was Tasered — and photos he showed us depict a skin burn. SFPD officers are not authorized to carry Tasers.

“It sounds like a stun gun, not a Taser gun,” Ken Cooper, a firearms and Taser instructor based in New York, noted when the incident was described to him.

When we shared the photos with SFPD’s media relations department, Lt. Lyn Tomioka noted, “I can tell you that we do not have any tool that would produce the type of wounds shown in the picture that you attached, or produce a stinging sensation.”

The L.A. visitor said he was delivered this explanation from an officer while in the holding cell: “One of your anarchist buddies must’ve had a Taser, ran over to you trying to get one of our officers, got you instead, and ran away.”

Cooper Brislain, a Web developer from Santa Cruz, told us his iMac was destroyed that night. A friend of the owners of the art space, he was there doing video mixing for the party, he explained. After the trouble started, he began carrying his computer and mixing equipment toward the door. “The uniformed officers were going to let me go. I told them, ‘I just came here to perform.’ They seemed OK,” he said. Then he encountered Bertrand.

“He … grabbed me by the collar, led me over toward the wall, and sat me down,” Brislain told us. He says Bertrand and Ott seized his computer. Brislain says no charges were filed against him.

The morning after, he found that his computer had been smashed up. His friends found it in pieces at the bottom of the stairs. To this day, he says he has not been able to retrieve his ID, which was seized that night. “I tried calling [Bertrand] on his extension to leave a message and never heard back,” he says. “They told me he probably wouldn’t return voicemails.” The District Attorney’s Office has a different perspective. D.A. spokesperson Brian Buckelew said the partygoers were drunk and “going nuts on police.” People were throwing firecrackers, he said. “It obviously got out of hand, and people were throwing bottles at police,” he said.

The student from L.A. allegedly shoved a female officer, Buckelew said. According to the report, he said, police officers were taking someone into custody, and he tried to pull them free.

Nevertheless, even Chief Gascón agrees that it’s not okay to destroy someone’s personal property. “If in fact the allegations were proven to be the case that an officer took somebody’s laptop and threw it down the stairs,” Gascón told us, “that would be inappropriate, and that officer would be sanctioned accordingly.” He noted that he met with an attorney from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about a recurring trend of officers — Bertrand in particular — seizing DJ laptops at underground parties. “We’ve met with them and we’ve agreed to actually tighten up the protocols in how this would be handled,” Gascón noted.

 

A RICO SUIT

The list of local nightclub clubs that have been recently targeted by Bertrand and Ott or subjected to ABC sanctions is long. It includes Great American Music Hall, Slim’s, DNA Lounge, Mist, Whisper, the Room, Vessel, Azul, Butter, and Club Caliente (which closed down after its mostly Latino customers were scared away by repeated raids).

“Using the now familiar pattern and ruse of ABC authority, these raids have been without warrant and without probable cause, under the pretext of finding liquor violations,” attorney Mark Webb wrote in a claim against the city, describing the harassment of Caliente owner Maurice Salinas and later adding, “Despite numerous raids, the invading officers [Bertrand and Ott] managed to ‘uncover’ a single infraction: one customer used his brother’s ID card, claiming he was over 21 to gain entry. For this reason, Mr. Salinas was cited and fined, bullied, intimidated, and yelled at on the spot.”

Webb said such behavior isn’t legitimate police work, but unlawful harassment. In fact, this experienced litigator said it’s far closer to the shakedowns and extortion rackets familiar to him from the start of his legal career in the late 1970s prosecuting organized crime cases in New York City.

That’s why he’s threatening to bring a novel lawsuit against the city and ABC under federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act, a law designed go after the mob, but which has since been adapted to target entities ranging from the tobacco industry to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Webb told us that interference with legitimate business operations, such as running a nightclub, is the essence of RICO suits. As part of the case, Webb plans to submit a surveillance video that shows Bertrand kneeling on the neck of bartender Javier Magallon from The Room and twisting his arm. Webb gave us a copy of the video.

Another element of making a RICO case is the use of intimidation and retaliation against those who complain — which was central to a March 17 SF Weekly story about promoter Arash Ghanadan being inappropriately singled out for arrest by Bertrand as retaliation for filing a complaint against the officer with the Office of Citizen Complaints.

Webb says he has a strong case that he intends to file soon, but that most of his clients just want the SFPD to rein in Bertrand and stop facilitating ABC actions. “I want to have a sit-down with Gavin Newsom,” Webb said. “I am calling on Mayor Newsom to come in and mediate what would be an expensive, divisive fight that will generate national interest … I think this thing can go way quickly without litigation.”

Newsom press secretary Tony Winnicker, who said Newsom has brought concerns about Bertrand to the chief’s attention, didn’t immediately embrace Webb’s offer. “The mayor would rather leave it to the chief,” Winnicker said.

So the question for Gascón is whether he’s willing to take on the cowboy cops within the SFPD’s ranks. After all, Bertrand is also on the San Francisco Police Officers Association Board of Directors.

The nightlife community is organized like never before and plotting its next move in fighting a war it didn’t initiate and barely understands. Whether that war continues now seems to be a question for the party crashers and their supervisors.

In the wake of March 4, education battles continue

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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1

Two weeks after protests against cuts to education filled Bay Area streets (and one freeway) on March 4, employees in the public-education sector are still engaged in a fight against budgetary rollbacks. But it’s an uphill battle, as was made clear at a briefing organized by United Educators of San Francisco at City College of San Francisco March 18.

At El Dorado Elementary School in the Bayview, 11 of 15 teachers were issued pink slips, according to elementary school teacher Megan Caluza (featured in the video above). While this doesn’t mean all 11 teachers are on their way out the door, it does mean that none of them knows for sure whether there’s a guaranteed job in the school district in the coming year. Since the budget cuts hit, Caluza says she’s been spending just as much time “fighting to teach” as she has in the actual classroom.

Elementary schools aren’t the only places being hit hard. Statewide, more than 23,000 layoff notices were sent to K-12 teachers recently, with no one knowing for sure which recipients will stay or face job losses.

“What is more important to you, corporate tax loopholes, or teachers in your daughter’s classroom?” asked Dennis Kelly, president of United Educators of San Francisco. “A college education for your son to get ahead, or tax breaks for the wealthiest Californians?”

Meanwhile, community colleges throughout the state face fee hikes even as classes are being cancelled, summer programs are being scaled back or eliminated altogether, and staff faces layoffs and furloughs. According to AgainstCuts.org, a group that was instrumental in organizing March 4 activities, the student population at California community colleges is comprised of more than 50 percent women and people of color, with around 80 percent of students working while taking classes. Blows to this educational system impedes opportunities for career advancement for the nearly 3 million community college students, which is bad news not just for students with lifelong dreams and high hopes, but California’s economy as a whole.

On Monday, March 22, more than 3,000 students, faculty members and others from City College of San Francisco plan to hold a march and rally in Sacramento to highlight the impact of cuts to community colleges. Around 62 buses will be leaving SF early in the morning to arrive in Sacramento for a 10 a.m. rally on the steps of the State Capitol Building.

Joining students and teachers at CCSF yesterday was a representative from Californians for Democracy, an organization that is pushing a November ballot initiative, authored by University of California Berkeley Professor George Lakoff, that would change the two-thirds majority vote requirement for the state Legislature to pass a budget or raise taxes to a simple majority vote. While the initiative is still circulating petitions to gather signatures, it seems to have found allies in the growing movement against cuts to education.  

March 4 represented “the first time we’ve ever done an all-education action,” Joan Berezin, a faculty member at Berkeley City College for 20 years, told the Guardian. “We’re trying to build the broadest coalition possible.”

Yee asks DA to drop charges against reporters

Zelda Bronstein
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Yee asks DA to drop charges against reporters

State Sen. Leland Yee has asked the Alameda County district attorney to drop all charges against reporters who were arrested while covering the protests over education cuts. In a March 8 letter to D.A. Nancy O’Malley, Yee noted that “at least two of the individuals arrested were journalists covering a legitimate news story.”


That adds to the pressure on O’Malley not to press charges against reporters. But we’re still waiting to hear from the D.A.’s office.


You can read the letter here.

Banks declare SF Weekly and parent company in loan default

Zelda Bronstein
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Banks declare SF Weekly and parent company in loan default

The Bay Guardian’s lawsuit against SF Weekly and its parent company took a dramatic turn this week when a banking syndicate announced that Village Voice Media has defaulted on its $77 million loan.


San Francisco Superior Court Commissioner Everett A. Hewlett, Jr. also ordered that all of the Weekly’s advertising income be sequestered in an account designated by the Guardian and held there until April 5, when the Guardian will ask the court to appoint a receiver to take control of the Weekly’s assets.


The Weekly and its parent owe the Guardian more than $21 million as the result of a 2008 lawsuit verdict. A San Francisco jury found that the Weekly had sold ads below cost in an effort to damage the Guardian.


The case is on appeal, but the Weekly and Village Voice Media haven’t posted an appeal bond — essentially an insurance policy that would guarantee payment of the judgment. So the Guardian has the legal right to collect the money.
VVM has been hiding its money behind a complex corporate structure, but in recent weeks the Guardian has won a series of court decisions that have allowed us to seize two Weekly vehicles, all of the income that the newspaper’s subtenants pay for leasing office space, and 50 percent of the Weekly’s ad revenue (and 100 percent of the revenue from credit card payments).


In an effort to block us from collecting that revenue, the Weekly filed a motion March 16 seeking a restraining order that would have stopped the Guardian from contacting Weekly advertisers. The court refused to issue the order – but as part of its application, VVM disclosed some rather dramatic facts.


Among the exhibits filed in court: A March 12 letter from the Bank of Montreal, which leads a banking syndicate that has helped VVM expand and advance its alternative newspaper empire. The letter, signed by Managing Director Thomas McGraw, states that because of the “recent economic downturn and the resulting financial difficulties,” VVM had been “unable to meet its amortization payments” and had been forced to renegotiate the loan in June, 2009. That new agreement had required that VVM send all of its profits — that is, “all revenue above its costs, plus a minimal operating cushion” — directly to the bank.


And now that the Guardian has been awarded a lien on all of the Village Voice papers and the right to half the Weekly’s income, the bank had declared VVM in default on the entire loan, which now stands at $77 million.


The default allows the bank to claim that it has the first right to any Weekly ad revenue, and VVM lawyer Randall Farrimond tried to make that argument to Commissioner Hewlett. But Hewlett was skeptical: “The Court never determined that the Bank of Montreal had any rights that had been adjudicated yet,” Hewlett said at a March 16 hearing. In fact, after hearing that the bank had sent its own letters to Weekly advertisers ordering them to send payments directly to the bank, Hewlett noted:


“Now, I’m not terribly sympathetic with Bank of Montreal doing what they did. “I mean it is possible that, absent some adjudication of their interests, that they are in contempt of court by interfering with the Court’s order.”


Hewlett said he had no intention of granting the restraining order or changing the essence of his earlier ruling — that the Guardian had the right to half SF Weekly’s income stream. But to save the advertisers from confusion over who to pay, he ordered that all money collected from advertisers be placed in a bank account chosen by the Guardian, in a bank that was not part of Bank of Montreal’s syndicate.


The Guardian will be back in court April 5 to ask for the appointment of a receiver, who would take control of the Weekly’s business operations and, under court guidance, divide any revenue between the Guardian and any other creditors.
In the meantime, VVM and the Bank of Montreal have asked a judge in Delaware – where SF Weekly is formally incorporated – to block collection efforts in California.


At a surprise hearing where the Guardian’s lawyers were given only five minutes warning and had no opportunity to present any evidence, the Delaware Chancery Court was nonetheless very skeptical of Bank of Montreal’s claims, and essentially ruled only to maintain the status quo until the Court could make a more informed decision.


The case continues to draw extensive news media interest; the Stranger, a Seattle alternative paper, ran a lengthy, detailed story on the case March 17.


You can read the key documents (including a declaration from Weekly publisher Josh Fromson and the bank letters) in the recent filing here. (PDF)

Peace-out

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Peace-out

kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Who would have thunk that Sonic Reducer would rattle on for so long — unreduced, unredacted, Sonic even while covering Mr. Winkle or Mundane Journeys. It’s been more than seven years since Cheetah Chrome gave me the casual A-OK to borrow the name of his song, and now the end is nigh: this is the final SR in the Guardian, but what a deliciously lengthy, rich, overwhelming run it has had.

Scanning the first Jan. 7, 2003, column — chock-full of New Year’s Eve tidbits concerning one of Dengue Fever’s first shows in SF, Bud E. Luv’s turn as the Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne’s NYE attraction (playing big band versions of “Iron Man,” natch, amid strippers and absurdly outsized sex toys), and an evening out to the Coachwhips/Pink and Brown-reunion house party in a South Van Ness basement, trapped by a moat of mud, buffeted by revelers, and besieged by circuit-breaking blackouts. Lo, there was also scandalous news of rumored onstage fellatio at a Tigerbeat6 showcase and an update on Kimo’s efforts to halt the sonic seepage at its ear-bleed noise shows.

The early ’00s in SF were a giddy, madly experimental, and hyperfertile period for local music — a delirious convergence of imaginations cocked and loaded by the dot-com gold rush, exploded with the blizzard of pink slips and the onset of plentiful time and energy, and the excitement of so many ripe minds coming together — oof — at once, if from widely divergent corners of the cultural landscape: how else to explain the peaceful coexistence of Joanna Newsom and Caroliner, Deerhoof and Comets on Fire, Soft Pink Truth and Hunx and His Punx, Vetiver and Turf Talk, the Morning Benders and the Lovemakers, the Oh Sees and every other band John Dwyer has been involved in, in this fair citay?

Perhaps one day I’ll boil down these 350-plus columns — snipes, jests, always-in-good-fun jabs, and all — and come up with a rough sketch of this equally rough and rewarding zero-hour decade’s blurry contours. In the meantime, glancing hazily back over past columns, I unearthed a few highlights — from lowlifes or bright lights:

•Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories on not performing in Europe, 2003: “We were good enough to cause national alerts and bad international events, so we never got asked back. Again, good work.”

•eXtreme Elvis on SF, 2003: “Too much of culture that surrounds San Francisco has to do with that idea of no spectators. No spectators means everyone’s a DJ, everyone plays didgeridoo, everyone has a band, everyone is a spoken-word artist. There’s a kind of culture of narcissism — guilty as charged, right?”

•Inca Ore’s Eva Saelens on touring, 2006: “When you break through, it’s like being in another world. Sometimes I’ll try to push an explosion or try to lose my mind, and if you do that on a nightly basis, it’s unreliable and it’s also abusive. You’re pushing your emotions in an athletic way, almost.”

•Nick Cave on Grinderman, 2007: “An overriding theme of mine is, I guess, a man and a woman against the world. But for this record, the woman seems to be down in the street, engaged in life, and the man is kind of left on his own, with, um, y’know, a tube of complimentary shampoo and a sock.”

•The Cure’s Robert Smith on dumb pop, 2007: “I’m saying that most good pop singles are stupid — otherwise they’re not good pop singles. I’m from an age when disposable wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

•Joe Boyd on music book signings, 2007: “I can tell you what the queue looks like. There’s a lot of beards. There’s a lot of bald pates. There’s a lot of gray hair, and every once in a while there’s a 20-something woman in the queue, and then you kind of make sure your hair is combed straight. Then she comes up to the head of the queue and says, ‘Will you please sign it “To Peter”? It’s for my father for his 60th birthday.'”

•Lady Gaga on pop perfection, 2008: ” If it isn’t flawless, I gotta work myself up to where it is — otherwise I’m just another pop chick with blonde hair.”

•Will Oldham on music, 2008: “You can find in music just about any ideal emotional landscape you crave, whether it’s angst or rebellion or celebration or union or dissolution. It’s all there, and none of it’s going to call you back or text you at four o’clock in the morning or blame you for anything you did or didn’t do or slap you with a paternity suit.”

•Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny on “Ewok Song,” 2009: “I know it by heart, and it’s the precursor to all these kids with wizard hats. It all comes down to the Ewoks singing around the fire. Akron/Family ain’t got nothing on the Ewoks, man.”

•Laurent Brancowitz of Phoenix on his old Daft Punk bandmates, 2009: “They decided to go to a lot of rave parties, and I didn’t, because I didn’t like the nightclub life. I’m a bit of a snob about it — I find it very vulgar.”

•Jarvis Cocker on his song “Caucasian Blues,” 2009: “I was interested in how blues music has gone from the music of protest, of the oppressed, to the blandest, safest music for white people to listen to in bars.”

Oh, but that was then — and I loathe nostalgia, if that isn’t already clear from the past seven years of cranky natterings and screams at the sky against boring, snorey Sha Na Na-style regurgitations. And this is now. Look for more from me in these and other pages, but never look back in regret.

Appetite: Fill your Irish self to the gills at the Liberties

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Appetite: Fill your Irish self to the gills at the Liberties

St. Patty’s Day draws near — for more wild Irish events, check out our rundown in the current Guardian.

The Liberties Bar & Restaurant has always been a welcome respite from some Irish bars: a place where you can kick it up with friends but not so rowdy that you can’t have conversation or a reflective pint. (I particularly like the room tucked to the side with quotes painted on the walls.) It celebrates St. Patty’s all week long with a special Irish menu and long pours of Guinness, Kilkenny, Smithwick’s and Harp. Oh, there’s also plenty of Irish whiskey, like Midleton Rare 21 year, Red Breast 12 year and Black Bush. Irish brunch, beer and whiskey flights round out the week, along with live music on St. Patrick’s Day.

The menu offers crowd-pleasing corned beef and cabbage ($14), cottage pie ($10 – with grass-fed beef, naturally), and bangers and mash ($15). Or go straight to fish and chips ($15) or an Irish potato pancake ($11) sporting smoked salmon. Irish whiskey flights explore various parts of the island, from Fightin’ Irish ($12), a flight highlighting family-owned distilleries, to King of the Emerald Isle ($8), an affordable jaunt through three Irish powerhouses: John Powers, Old Bushmills, Jamesons.

There’s no need to be fighting Irish when St. Patty’s is this raucously delectable.

March 13-19
998 Guerrero Street
415-282-6789
www.theliberties.com

Check out Virginia Miller’s personal dining itinerary site www.theperfectspotsf.com for more food deals and news.

Informing the public

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Informing the public

news@sfbg.com

Information is power. But too often, those with political power guard public documents and information from the journalists, activists, lawyers, and others who seek it on the people’s behalf. So every year, we at the Guardian honor those who fight for a freer and more open society by highlighting the annual winners of the James Madison Freedom of Information Awards, which are given by the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

This year’s winners are:

Beverly Kees Educator Award

Rachele Kanigel

Rachele Kanigel, an associate professor of journalism and advisor to Golden Gate Xpress publications at San Francisco State University, has been highly involved in student press rights work on a national level. She wrote The Student Newspaper Survival Guide (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), a book designed to empower budding campus reporters. A champion of the free speech rights of her students, Kanigel has gone to bat on several occasions on behalf of student journalists whose work was challenged by interests that didn’t believe students should be afforded the same protections as professional reporters. Kanigel sees part of her job as educating the world about the importance of student journalists and standing up for their rights. “A lot of people won’t talk to student journalists, but they’re doing some really important work,” she said. “A lot of what we have to do is to assure the student journalists and tell the world outside that these are journalists.” The educator award is named in honor of Beverly Kees, who was the SPJ NorCal chapter president at the time of her death in 2004.

Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award

Mark Fricker

Mary Fricker is the kind of investigative reporter many of us would like to be.

She started out in the 1980s investigating complaints of irregularities at her local savings and loan when she was reporting for the old Russian River News community paper. Her dogged research and hard-hitting stories produced the first major investigation into the toxic problems of financial deregulation in S&Ls. Her work won numerous awards, including the Gerald Loeb Award given out by UCLA and the prestigious George Polk Award, and ultimately led to the book, Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loan. The book won Best Book of the Year award from the Investigative Reporters and Editors association.

Fricker did business reporting and major investigative work for 20 years with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. She retired and joined the Chauncey Bailey Project as a volunteer investigative reporter, researcher, Web site maestro, and general good spirit. Her work included several key investigations that determined that the Oakland Police Department was virtually alone in not taping interviews with suspects in investigations. Her stories changed that practice. She is a most worthy recipient of the Norwin S.<0x2009>Yoffie award, which honors the memory of the former publisher of the Marin Independent Journal, a founder of the SPJ/FOI committee, and a splendid warrior in the cause of Freedom of Information.

Professional Journalist

G.W. Schulz

G.W. Schulz was busy when we got him on the phone. “I’m sending out about eight or nine new freedom of information requests a day,” he said. “I fired off a few to the governor of Texas this morning.”

The relentless reporter is working on the Center for Investigative Reporting’s program exposing homeland security spending. It hasn’t been easy. Since the federal government began making big grants to local agencies for supposed antiterrorism and civil emergency equipment and programs, following the money has required unusual persistence. Homeland Security officials don’t even know where their grants are going, so Schulz has been forced to dig deeper.

“I think this is the biggest open government campaign I’ll ever do in my career,” he said. “We’re juggling dozens of requests, state by state. And it’s breathtaking what some people will ignore in their own public records laws.”

He’s found widespread abuse. “These agencies are getting all this expensive equipment and they don’t even maintain it or train their staff how to use it,” he said. CIR is not only doing its own stories, it’s working with local papers that don’t have the resources to do this kind of work. “Lots of great stories in the pipeline,” he said before signing off to get back to the battle. “I’m really excited.”

Legal Counsel

Ann Brick/ACLU

On the heels of a now-infamous Supreme Court ruling on so-called First Amendment rights for corporate political speech, SPJ is honoring an individual who has made a career devoted to protecting real, individual free speech rights for almost 20 years. Ann Brick, staff attorney for the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, has litigated in defense of privacy rights, free speech, government accountability, and student rights in cases ranging from book burning to Internet speech to illegal government wiretapping. “I can’t tell you how much of an honor it is to have worked with the ACLU,” she says, adding, “I can’t think of another award I’d rather get than this one — an award from journalists.” But the public’s gratitude goes to Brick, whose years of service are a shining example of speaking truth to power.

Computer Assisted Reporting

Phillip Reese

Phillip Reese of The Sacramento Bee is being honored for his unrelenting pursuit of public records and for producing interactive databases. Reese was the architect of the Bee‘s data center, providing readers readily accessible information about legislative voting records, neighborhood election results, state employee salaries, and other important information. At one point, the city of Sacramento demanded several thousand dollars in exchange for employee salary data. Reese gathered the city’s IT workers and a city attorney for a meeting, where he argued that organizing records in an analyzable format would insure the system wasn’t being abused, so they chose to provide the records for free. The online databases provide public access to records that are often disorganized and cryptic. “Sometimes these databases go well with a story, and sometimes they can stand on the Internet alone. People can view them in a way that is important to themselves,” Reese said.

Public Official

Leland Yee

State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) has been an open government advocate since his days on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and one of his favorite targets is the administration of the University of California. He has fought to protect UC students from administrators who want to curtail their free-speech right and to get documents from university officials.

In 2008, he authored and passed SB 1696, which blocked the university from hiding audit information behind a private contractor. UCSF was refusing to release the information in an audit the school paid a private contractor to conduct. “I read about this in the newspaper and I was just scratching my head. How can public officials do this stuff?” Yee said. He had to overcome resistance from university officials and public agencies arguing that the state shouldn’t be sticking its nose into their business. “But it’s public money, and they’re public entities, and the people have a right to know where that money is going.”

Computer Assisted Reporting

Thomas Peele and Daniel Willis

This duo with the Bay Area News Group, which includes 15 daily and 14 community newspapers around the Bay Area, performed monumental multitasking when they decided to crunch the salaries of more than 194,000 public employees from 97 government agencies into a database. Honored with the Computer Assisted Reporting Award, the duo provided the public with a database that translated a gargantuan amount of records into understandable information. They had to submit dozens of California Public Records Act requests to access the records of salaries that account for more than $1.8 billion in taxpayer money. “It is important that the public know how its money is spent. This data base, built rather painstakingly one public records act request at a time by Danny Willis and myself as a public service, goes a long way in helping people follow the money,” Peele said.

Nonprofit

Californians Aware: The Center for Public Forum Rights

California’s sunshine laws, including the Brown Act open meeting law and California Public Records Act, aren’t bad. Unfortunately, they are routinely flouted by public officials, often making it necessary to go to court to enforce them. That’s why we need groups like CalAware, and individuals like its president, Rick McKee, and its counsel, longtime media attorney Terry Francke. Last year, while defending an Orange County school board member’s free speech rights and trying to restore a censored public meeting transcript, CalAware not only found itself losing the case on an anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) motion, but being ordered to pay more than $80,000 in school district legal fees. “It’s never been easy, but that was going to be the end of private enforcement of the Brown Act,” Francke said. Luckily, Sen. Leland Yee intervened with legislation that prevents awarding attorney fees in such sunshine cases, leaving CalAware bruised but unbowed. “We’ve become active in court like never before.”

News Media

SF Public Press/McSweeney’s

Last year, when author Dave Eggers and his McSweeney’s magazine staff decided to put out a single newspaper issue (because “it’s a form we love,” Eggers told us), they filled San Francisco Panorama with the unusual mix of writers, topics, and graphics one might expect from a literary enterprise. But they wanted a hard-hitting investigation on the cover, so they turned to the nonprofit SF Public Press and reporters Robert Porterfield and Patricia Decker. Together, they worked full-time for four months to gather information on cost overruns on the Bay Bridge rebuild, fighting for public records and information from obscure agencies and an intransigent CalTrans. “We’re still dealing with this. I’ve been trying to secure documents for a follow-up and I keep getting the runaround,” said Decker, a new journalist with a master’s degree in engineering, a nice complement to Porterfield, an award-winning old pro. “He’s a great mentor, just such a fount of knowledge.”

Professional Journalist

Sean Webby

San Jose Mercury News reporter Sean Webby won for a series spotlighting the San Jose Police Department’s use of force and how difficult it is for the public or the press to track.

The department and the San Jose City Council refused to release use-of-force reports, so Webby obtained them through public court files. He zeroed in on incidents that involved “resisting arrest” charges, and even uncovered a cell phone video in which officers Tasered and battered suspects who did not appear to be resisting.

Webby has won numerous awards in the past, but says he is particularly proud of this one. “Freedom of information is basically our mission statement, our bible, our motto,” he said. “We feel like the less resistance the average person has to getting information, the better the system works.”

Webby said that despite causing some tension between his paper and the San Jose Police Department, the project was well worth it. “We are never going to back off the hard questions. It’s our job as a watchdog organization.”

Public Service

Rita Williams

KTVU’s Rita Williams is being honored for her tireless efforts to establish a media room in the San Francisco Federal Building that provides broadcasters the same access to interviews as print reporters.

Television and radio equipment was banned from the federal pressroom following 9/11, but Williams solicited support from television stations, security agencies, the courts, and the National Bar Association. After a six-year push, they were able to restore access.

Williams and her supporters converted a storage unit in the federal building into a full-blown media center, which was well-used during the Proposition 8 trial. “I only did two days of the trials, but every time I walked into the room, I would just be swarmed with camera folks saying thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said. “I’m getting close to retirement and I was in the first wave of women in broadcasting, and I’m proud that almost 40 years later, I can leave this legacy.”

Citizen

Melissa Nix

With her Betty Page looks, dogged sense of justice, and journalistic training, Melissa Nix became a charismatic and relentless force in the quest to find out how her ex-boyfriend Hugues de la Plaza really died in 2007. Nix began her efforts after the San Francisco medical examiner declared it was unable to determine how de la Plaza died and the San Francisco Police Department seemed to be leaning toward categorizing the case as a suicide. Using personal knowledge of de la Plaza and experience as a reporter with The Sacramento Bee, Nix got the French police involved, who ruled the death a homicide, and unearthed the existence of an independent medical examiner report that concluded that de la Plaza was murdered.

Editorial/Commentary

Daniel Borenstein

Contra Costa Times reporter Daniel Borenstein wasn’t out to deprive public worker retirees of yachting, country club golf, and rum-y cocktails at tropical resorts. The columnist was only trying to figure out how, for example, the chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District turned a $185,000 salary into a $241,000 annual pension. Borenstein’s effort to unearth and make public, in easily readable spreadsheets, the records of all Contra Costa County public employee pensioners led the Contra Costa Times to a court victory stipulating just that: all records would be released promptly on request without allowing retirees time to go to court to block access. The effects have been noticeable: “I get scores of e-mails most weeks in reaction to the columns I’m writing on pensions, [and] public officials are much more sensitive to the issue,” Borenstein says. It is a precedent that has carried into the Modesto Bee‘s similar pension-disclosure efforts in Stanislaus County.

Student Name Withheld After a photojournalism student at San Francisco State University snapped photographs at the scene of a fatal shooting in Bayview-Hunters Point, police skipped the usual process of using a subpoena to seek evidence, and went straight into his home with a search warrant to seize this student’s work. But with the help of his attorney, the student quashed the warrant, arguing California’s shield law prevents law enforcement from compelling journalists to disclose unpublished information. He won, and the case served to demonstrate that the shield law should apply to nontraditional journalists.

The student is being recognized because he resisted the warrant rather than caving into the demands of law enforcement. Invoking the shield law in such cases prevents reporters from being perceived as extensions of law enforcement by the communities they report on, enabling a free exchange of information. The student remained anonymous in the aftermath of the shooting because he feared for his life. Based on his ongoing concerns, NorCal SPJ and the Guardian have agreed to honor his wish to have his name withheld.

Guardian reporter’s inside story on arrested protesters

Sasha Cuttler
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17

Story and photos by Jobert Poblete

I thought I was keeping a safe distance, observing Day of Action protesters as they went onto Interstate 880 to block traffic rather than participating, until a line of riot cops came barreling towards where I stood by the side of a freeway offramp. But my flight instinct took over, and I found myself running along northbound 880 with my notebook and pen still in my hands. What had been an impressive but otherwise peaceful protest was taking a surreal turn. But maybe I should start from the beginning.

As a recent UC Berkeley grad, I had been on campus many times in the last few months, invited by friends to support the occupations and protests that were fueling an extraordinary movement to defend public education. So I was excited to go out on March 4th to cover the Day of Action in the East Bay. This was a new experience for me. Like any good Berkeley grad, I’ve participated in my share of protests, but now I was a Bay Guardian news intern and this was the first time I was going out as a reporter.

There was a lot to be impressed with that day. In Berkeley, activists had succeeded in creating a broad coalition made up of graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, union members, lecturers, and campus workers and staff. These constituencies were well-represented Thursday morning.

Berkeley organizers were also working to expand their movement beyond the university. Callie Maidhof, a graduate student in anthropology, told me that March 4th is the “first attempt to organize beyond a single system, to organize across California, across the public education systems, and across the nation.”

On the four and a half mile march from Berkeley to downtown Oakland, there was plenty of evidence that they were succeeding. As the Berkeley contingent marched down Telegraph Ave., it was joined by middle school and high school students who brought their own concerns about teacher layoffs and program cuts.

At the rally in Oakland, I spoke to high school students who had walked out of their schools to participate. Sophomore Sienee Dakina from Oakland’s Envision Academy told me that her school lost three teachers because of budget cuts. “We feel like it’s not right,” Dakina said. “We’re losing our teachers.” Ninth graders Victoria Romero and Andrea Barba from Life Academy told me that they were protesting so that the school district would “not take our dreams away.”

When the rally ended, some people were headed to San Francisco to take part in the big rally at Civic Center. I knew that there would already be Guardian reporters there, so I decided to stay in Oakland for what was being billed as an after-protest dance party and “snake march.”

The dance party started around 4:30 with a couple hundred people taking Broadway accompanied by a mobile sound system, black flags, and large banners that declared “We Have Decided Not to Die” and “Occupy Everything.” For the first time that day, I saw riot cops in full force. I read these as signs that something dramatic was probably in store. The dance party wound its way through downtown Oakland, stopping in front of the UC Office of the President before heading towards West Oakland.

I was at the back of the march, talking to an Oakland teacher who was telling me about layoffs at his school, when the police started warning the crowd that they could face arrest. I fell behind and was playing catch-up as a group of around 150 people took to the freeway. I decided to stick by the offramp and watched as a bicyclist, who appeared to be riding on the freeway away from the march, got violently tackled by a fast-moving line of cops.

It was at this point that another line of cops started up the offramp and I fled up the freeway. An officer on a motorcycle yelled at me to continue and join the protesters or face arrest. I ran to catch up with the crowd, which was in chaos as the police approached. (I later learned that, in the chaos, a local high school student fell off the elevated highway and was taken to Highland Hospital with serious injuries.) I saw two kids – perhaps as young as 12 or 13 – trying to get away on skateboards. I was with a cluster of journalists as a line of cops and a blur of batons fell upon a group on the far side of the southbound lanes. We retreated to the dividing wall, me still clutching my pen and notebook, holding my hands in the air.

We were ordered to lay on the ground. My pen was still out so I continued taking notes. An officer noticed me and ordered me up. I explained that I was a reporter and offered to show him proof of my affiliation with the Guardian. “But you’re on a freeway,” he said. “You’re under arrest.” He did help me secure my notes and camera.

I was handcuffed and ordered to kneel on the side of the highway with the protesters, next to a friend from Berkeley, a graduate student at the journalism school. We knelt for hours waiting for the buses that would take us to Glenn Dyer jail in Oakland and Santa Rita jail in Dublin. A handful of stranded motorists cheered, presumably for the protesters, and in one of the lofts next to the freeway, a resident had posted a sign that said “FUCK U Protesters.”

I was sent to Santa Rita with around 100 of those arrested on the freeway. We were informed that we would be charged with misdemeanors and released, but it was clear that our numbers had overwhelmed the jail’s systems. Deputies told us that we would be in there for 10 hours. Ten hours turned into 20, most of that time spent in a cold concrete cell, seven feet long and seven feet wide, with 14 other inmates. There wasn’t room for all of us to lie down at the same time. The fluorescent lights were kept on all night, and I was disoriented, groggy.

The sheriff’s deputies joked about IEDs and half-heartedly threatened us with prison clichés. An agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement visited my cell and questioned me and another person of color, asking us for our names and where we were born. My cell mates, worried about the possibility that an undocumented student had been arrested, discussed whether we should refuse to answer their questions. An inmate in a nearby cell hurled obscenities at the “protesters.” But most of the other inmates were merely curious. A few held up their fists in solidarity as they were led past our cell.

I shared cells with a diverse group of people, some I had known for years: a teacher’s aid, a Berkeley freshman computer science major, a veteran, an older man who called himself a communist, and a handful of community college students from Modesto. There were a number of other journalists: two stringers working for Democracy Now!, a reporter from the Daily Californian, and a friend who was covering the protest for Indybay.org. I had seen other journalists with big video rigs on the freeway, but one of the other arrestees told me that they had been allowed to leave.

We passed the time as best we could. The Berkeley computer science major taught us how to fold origami cranes. One of the other reporters gave an impromptu teach-in about some Bay Area residents imprisoned in Iran. We took advantage of the concrete cell’s unique acoustic properties by humming harmonies. A few cells over, the women agitated for food and we got bologna sandwiches and a strange powdered juice that tasted like the color yellow. Mostly, we tried to sleep, in fetal positions, sitting up, or curled around the toilet using our arms, shoes, and rolls of TP for pillows.

There were also discussions about the movement: how to make it broader, how best to organize and make decisions, and what should come next. It was clear to me that many of the people I was with did not know that they would end up on a freeway, but if there were any regrets, no one in my cell let that on. One man commented that the movement was getting bigger – earlier protests had resulted in dozens of arrests, but this one had 150 people taking a freeway. Another said that only the movement “intellectuals” were taking militant action. A community college student objected to that point. Earlier, he had joked about the $6 increase in his fees, but now he spoke bitterly and passionately about how he considered himself working class and not an intellectual. The budget cuts had made him feel that a quality education at a UC was getting further from his grasp.

I was not released until around 4 p.m. on Friday, charged with two misdemeanors – unlawful assembly and obstructing a public place – and ordered to appear in court April 5. Outside the jail, a small crowd of supporters had been gathered all day and it did not take long to find a familiar face and a ride back home.

A friend who had worked through the night to rally support and secure attorneys told me that a lot of students were upset about what had happened. They were critical about what they called a lack of planning and angry that protesters had been led into an action they did not fully understand and did not fully prepare for.

But the freeway action also showed how far the movement has come. Resistance to the budget cuts has spilled out of the universities and gotten bigger, broader, and, yes, perhaps more foolhardy. From my vantage point on that elevated highway, the movement has definitely upped the ante and more and more people are calling the bet.

Chelsea Handler bang bangs

Andrew Lam
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Witness, if you will, the cast of the Jersey Shore‘s interview with Chelsea Handler. “I was excited to see what your body looked like in person, and I must admit I’m pleased,” Handler greeted Snookie, MTV’s bowling-ball-shaped Guidette. The host immediately progressed to feeling the neo Italian clan’s gel heavy coifs and commenting on Snookie’s famous roundhouse to the face made famous by the show.

It was an inspired conversation. The Jersey Shore cabal is blessed with a singular sense of humor about the deprecating whirlwind of fame that surrounds them these days, and Handler has built a career on being frank with her party girl lifestyle. After all, one of her three books was titled Are you there Vodka? It’s me, Chelsea. As the only female in the late night television game, lady’s got to be tough. And her show Chelsea Lately, a cross between the standard interview format and entertainment news hash-out, has carved a niche for itself based largely on Handler’s biting wit, self awareness and willingness to take it there. It continues to soar in ratings and ad revenue, even from its non traditional nest on the E! network. She’s bringing the noise to Davies Symphony Hall this weekend (Fri/12), so raise your glass to the lady of sass. 

San Francisco Bay Guardian: It’s already been quite the year. Which celebrity news story of 2010 have you had the best time covering on “Chelsea Lately”?

Chelsea Handler: I guess Tiger Woods. That story officially started in 2009, but it’s carried over into this year. He made my job easy for weeks. I didn’t need to think, I just needed to go on line and there would be a new VIP hostess telling yet another humiliating story about him giving her an extra big tip.

SFBG: Your upcoming stand up show sold out real fast in SF- so fast you scheduled a second. The gays just love them some Chelsea, don’t they?

CH: I think they all assume deep down I’m a lesbian. Which I’m not…unless you count college, which I didn’t even go to.

 

SFBG: Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up?

CH: I just knew I wanted to leave New Jersey. I couldn’t handle my father humiliating me anymore. I figured I’d either do something in the entertainment industry or take over for Julie McCoy on the Love Boat. I just always wanted to sit on the Captain at the Captain’s table. Once that dream died, I went for plan B…not the morning after pill; my actual plan B.

 

SFBG: I just got done reading “Memoirs of a Beatnik” by Diane di Prima and the author was sharing her sex life in explicit detail even back then in the 1960s. Will the kind of sexually up front, unapologetic humor that you do ever NOT be considered shocking, coming from a woman?

CH: I don’t think so. For some people, sure…but there will always be a large percentage of people who think a woman shouldn’t talk so openly about those things. I just disagree. Once I figured out what I could pull off in a room by myself, I knew finding a boy to do it with could only make my discovery that much better. Why wouldn’t I want to talk about it? If talking about sex saves at least one virgin in her late twenties from carrying out that whole “not before marriage” thing, then my work is done.

 

SFBG: I read an online review of “My Horizontal Life” that suggested the book might “inspire bad girls to more bad behavior”- but what is a ‘bad girl,’ nowadays?

CH: The only “Bad Girls” I know are the one from that Oxygen show, and they seem really annoying.

 

SFBG: Your show devotes a large amount of time to celebrity news, or rather, to mocking our obsession with celebrity news. Has there ever been a time when you’ve felt the brunt of paparazzi or had a ridiculous story about you hit the news?

CH: Perez Hilton once reported that I had vaginal rejuvenation surgery. So, there’s that.

 

SFBG: How do you get the celebrity guests on your show to get off the talking points they walked in with?

CH: The person that prepares the interview usually lets the guest know that I like to talk about things that wouldn’t normally be talked about on other late night shows. I think they’re usually prepared for my sense of humor. I don’t necessarily want to know about somebody’s new role in a movie, but I would like to know how they got their body or who they porked on set. So I just ask.

 

SFBG: You’re not exactly tip-toeing around a lot of your guests’ egos on the show- has anyone ever had an adverse reaction to your brand of humor?

CH: Probably, but that’s why I don’t read my e-mails.

 

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang Tour

Fri/12 10:30 p.m., $49.50- 75.50

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness, SF

(415) 864-6000

www.livenation.com

Stiglitz: The Dangers of Deficit Reduction

David Talbot
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0

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

Here is our monthly installment of Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Unconventional Economic Wisdom column from the Project Syndicate news series. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics. His forthcoming book Freefall will be published this winter.

NEW YORK – A wave of fiscal austerity is rushing over Europe and America. The magnitude of budget deficits – like the magnitude of the downturn – has taken many by surprise. But despite protests by the yesterday’s proponents of deregulation, who would like the government to remain passive, most economists believe that government spending has made a difference, helping to avert another Great Depression.

Most economists also agree that it is a mistake to look at only one side of a balance sheet (whether for the public or private sector). One has to look not only at what a country or firm owes, but also at its assets. This should help answer those financial sector hawks who are raising alarms about government spending. After all, even deficit hawks acknowledge that we should be focusing not on today’s deficit, but on the long-term national debt. Spending, especially on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure, can actually lead to lower long-term deficits. Banks’ short-sightedness helped create the crisis; we cannot let government short-sightedness – prodded by the financial sector – prolong it.

Faster growth and returns on public investment yield higher tax revenues, and a 5 to 6% return is more than enough to offset temporary increases in the national debt. A social cost-benefit analysis (taking into account impacts other than on the budget) makes such expenditures, even when debt-financed, even more attractive.

Finally, most economists agree that, apart from these considerations, the appropriate size of a deficit depends in part on the state of the economy. A weaker economy calls for a larger deficit, and the appropriate size of the deficit in the face of a recession depends on the precise circumstances.

It is here that economists disagree. Forecasting is always difficult, but especially so in troubled times. What has happened is (fortunately) not an everyday occurrence; it would be foolish to look at past recoveries to predict this one.

In America, for instance, bad debt and foreclosures are at levels not seen for three-quarters of a century; the decline in credit in 2009 was the largest since 1942. Comparisons to the Great Depression are also deceptive, because the economy today is so different in so many ways. And nearly all so-called experts have proven highly fallible – witness the United States Federal Reserve’s dismal forecasting record before the crisis.

Yet, even with large deficits, economic growth in the US and Europe is anemic, and forecasts of private-sector growth suggest that in the absence of continued government support, there is risk of continued stagnation – of growth too weak to return unemployment to normal levels anytime soon.

The risks are asymmetric: if these forecasts are wrong, and there is a more robust recovery, then, of course, expenditures can be cut back and/or taxes increased. But if these forecasts are right, then a premature “exit” from deficit spending risks pushing the economy back into recession. This is one of the lessons we should have learned from America’s experience in the Great Depression; it is also one of the lessons to emerge from Japan’s experience in the late 1990’s.

These points are particularly germane for the hardest-hit economies. The United Kingdom, for example, has had a harder time than other countries for an obvious reason: it had a real-estate bubble (though of less consequence than in Spain), and finance, which was at the epicenter of the crisis, played a more important role in its economy than it does in other countries.

The UK’s weaker performance is not the result of worse policies; indeed, compared to the US, its bank bailouts and labor-market policies were, in many ways, far better. It avoided the massive waste of human resources associated with high unemployment in America, where almost one out of five people who would like a full-time job cannot find one.

As the global economy returns to growth, governments should, of course, have plans on the drawing board to raise taxes and cut expenditures. The right balance will inevitably be a subject of dispute. Principles like “it is better to tax bad things than good things” might suggest imposing environmental taxes.

The financial sector has imposed huge externalities on the rest of society. America’s financial industry polluted the world with toxic mortgages, and, in line with the well established “polluter pays” principle, taxes should be imposed on it. Besides, well-designed taxes on the financial sector might help alleviate problems caused by excessive leverage and banks that are too big to fail. Taxes on speculative activity might encourage banks to focus greater attention on performing their key societal role of providing credit.

Over the longer term, most economists agree that governments, especially in advanced industrial countries with aging populations, should be concerned about the sustainability of their policies. But we must be wary of deficit fetishism. Deficits to finance wars or give-aways to the financial sector (as happened on a massive scale in the US) lead to liabilities without corresponding assets, imposing a burden on future generations. But high-return public investments that more than pay for themselves can actually improve the well-being of future generations, and it would be doubly foolish to burden them with debts from unproductive spending and then cut back on productive investments.

These are questions for a later day – at least in many countries, prospects of a robust recovery are, at best, a year or two away. For now, the economics is clear: reducing government spending is a risk not worth taking. 

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. His most recent book Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy is available in French (Le Triomphe De La Cupidité, Liens Qui Liberent) and will be available shortly in Japanese, Spanish, German, and Italian.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Obits for sale

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 website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Like most daily newspapers these days, the San Francisco Chronicle is hustling to increase declining profit margins.  But let me offer some advice to my former employer: Quit gouging grieving readers as part of your profit chasing. I mean those who pay the Chronicle for running their loved ones’ death notices on the paper’s obituary pages.

Sure, the paper’s not making anywhere near as much as it once did from other classified ads, but don’t try to make up for it by outrageously exploiting the saddened friends and families of the recently deceased.

The basic price for death notices is $16 per printed line per day – $112 per column inch (about seven lines of type).  Those 1×1½ inch photos that sit atop many obits cost about $135 more. If you also want the obit on the Chronicle’s website, that will be another $25, please. And if you want the obit to run for a longer period, for say a week, that can get quite pricey – as much as  $784 per inch.

On a typical day this week, 40 notices ran on the Chronicle’s three pages of paid obits, 21 with photos. They ranged from two to 14 inches each and cost from about $225 to about $1570 to run for that one day. That’s right – $1570, plus the $135 charge for those with photos.

Like all papers, the Chronicle also runs unpaid news obituaries of particularly prominent people that are researched and written by the newspaper’s staffers or by an outside news agency that serves the paper. The paid obits are usually written by members of the deceased’s family or by employees of the mortuary that’s involved.

So, it’s like this: If you’re well known, it probably won’t cost your family or friends a dime to notify the public and remind people of your life story. But if you’re just plain folks, it’ll cost family or friends – and probably cost them dearly.  But at least your story will be told by friendly observers, eager to stress the good over the bad, eager to give you a proper send-off – if they can afford the Chronicle’s price for doing so.

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.

ICE postpones deporting SF MUNI worker’s family

Mary Magee
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2
ICE postpones deporting SF MUNI worker’s family

I just got a call from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement advising me that ICE has decided to postpone deporting the wife and son of MUNI bus driver Charles Washington for 60 days.

“We’re hoping that postponing their removal will afford them the opportunity to get their affairs in order and address outstanding legal issues,” ICE spokesperson VIrginia Kice told me. Kice said this extension should give the family time to deal with their “pending adjustment application,” and determine “whether they have the opportunity to gain legal status.”

That’s great news for the Washingtons and another sign that may be hope, after all. (Angela Chan, staff attorney for the Asian Law Caucus, is now trying to get ICE to give the family 6 months, since this is how long US Citizenship and Immigration Service (US CIS) has told her it would take for them to process the Washingtons’ green card applications, and hopefully all the federal agencies involved are going to coordinate their efforts on this case.)

Meanwhile, Sup. David Campos is still trying to get the Juvenile Probation Department to implement his amendment to the sanctuary ordinance to stop nightmares like this from happening. Campos has scheduled a hearing at 10 a.m., Thursday March 4. So, stay tuned.

DC’s Newseum is a real headliner

Andrew Lam
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0
DC’s Newseum is a real headliner

It’s a lot to take in for a cub reporter. Seven stories of news. 250,000 square feet of news. Just down the street from our country’s Capitol Building, the Newseum is probably the most comprehensive, evocative look at the power and responsibility of the journalist under one roof that our country has yet produced.

What’s so impressive about the museum? Put simply, breadth and depth. Today’s front pages from around the US and world greet you to the museum. Inside, you journey through a carefully sculpted continuum of information and artifacts.

First up, media coverage of events that changed the course of our country- beginning with the manhunt for Lincoln’s killer and continuing through instances of incisive reporting (the role that news played in broadcasting the civil rights movement) to dark moments (a memorial to reporters who’ve died in the line of duty, threats to our Bill of Rights over the years).

There were even shades of grey- best embodied in the interactive “What Would You Do?” ethics game, which lets you weigh in on real world moral dilemmas that professional journalists face. I’m totally one of those, so I thought it would be a snap. But there were no easy answers. When it came to the iconic photo of an emaciated Sudanese baby crawling away from a vulture, a heartbreaking image that nonetheless has raised awareness of the plight of refugees the world over, I had to admit I would have swooped in to help, scattered the scavenger, before setting up the shot. So would 72 percent of the general public- but only 28 percent of the professional journalists surveyed agreed with me. The photographer who snapped the shot, Kevin Carter, won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts- but committed suicide soon after.

Again, the responsibility of the press, a lot to take in for the young pup. But a great museum, and one that, regardless of your profession, will make you feel something.

Graffiti covered pieces of the Berlin Wall are another of the Newseum’s highlights. This was the easiest museum ever to take photos in- freedom of the press, baby!

Sections of the lunch counter that figured in the Greensboro, North Carolina civil rights sit-ins are accompanied by a news reel on the movement

Daniel Pearl’s passport and laptop, testament to the risk journalists run to inform the world of it’s most dangerous conflicts

Not the place where you want to be right before closing, when the Newseum has all but emptied out… Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber cabin is part of the “G-Men and Spies” temporary exhibit


555 Pennsylvania, Washington D.C.

Open: 9 a.m.- 5 p.m., $19.95

(888) 639-7386

www.newseum.org

Riff evangelists

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0
Riff evangelists

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC "I felt pretty much the day Wino called me up that it was a really important, really essential thing." Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, Shrinebuilder bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros makes the founding of his new band seem inevitable, like some sort of astronomical event. "Wino" is the nom de rock preferred by legendary guitarist/vocalist Scott Weinrich, cofounder of a new collaboration between musical luminaries that also includes guitarist/vocalist Scott Kelly and drummer/vocalist Dale Crover.

For fans of a certain kind of slow, heavier-than-lead music called "doom metal," these are all household names. Cisneros played bass in the mythical South Bay trio Sleep (with High on Fire’s Matt Pike) before founding drone metallers Om. Wino’s is the most impressive pedigree, one defined by stints with Washington, D.C.-area doom pioneers the Obsessed and L.A. cult heroes St. Vitus. Kelly is well-known in the Bay Area for his work with Oakland experimental titans Neurosis. Crover cut his teeth in Seattle, drumming for the Melvins.

The towering reputations and wide-ranging commitments of the musicians involved made creating the first Shrinebuilder album a scheduling nightmare. Rehearsals took place in multiple locations, often with only two members present — those absent participated by swapping riffs over the Internet. Despite these logistical difficulties, Cisneros insists, the process couldn’t have been more natural. "The in-person rehearsals really just confirmed the songs that we had going." Confined to only three days of studio time, they nevertheless crafted a self-titled album that exudes a confident coherence across its five lengthy tracks.

Even the lyrics, often a point of contention in other, lesser bands, benefited from this uncanny natural understanding: "Without explaining anything about the song, or the vibe, we just all knew what went next — how to proceed," Cisneros recalls. "We had a common understanding of the lyrical theme between all of us. I’m not sure that’s common in bands. We didn’t really need to say anything, we just all finished the lyrics as each other would have."

As can be guessed from the band’s name, the lyrical theme is one of religion, and construction, and the marriage of the two. Song titles like "Solar Benediction," "Pyramid of the Moon," and "The Architect" exemplify this fascination. More than just singing about worshipers, however, the members of Shrinebuilder are worshipers themselves, crafting a temple of their own design. As Kelly explains in an interview with Decibel magazine, "I think we’re just laying more bricks on the foundation that has been laid previously … it’s really an homage to sound, to music, and to its infinite wisdom, you know? The power of it. The religion that is sound. The electric church. All of that. I think that that’s been our lives."

The members of Shrinebuilder, then, are the four riff evangelists, and the album, like the New Testament, is a coherent whole that allows significant leeway for the individual tendencies of its creators. Each of the album’s five songs is a concatenation of different parts, many of which bear the tell-tale fingerprints of their authors. Wino’s bluesy howl makes his sections easy to identify; so too Kelly’s muscular, mammoth riffs and Cisneros’ syrupy bass lines. The album’s most liturgical passage occurs halfway through "Pyramid of the Moon," when an epic, reverberant riff suddenly culminates in haunting, euphonic chanting, which Kelly insists was entirely improvised by Crover and Cisneros in the studio.

Preparations have already begun for another, longer album, one that will involve more rehearsal and more studio time. But even if conflicts arise, the members of Shrinebuilder can rely on the natural affinity that results from their canonization as doom metal apostles. Have you heard the good news?

SHRINEBUILDER

with Harvestman, A Storm of Light

Sun/7, 8 p.m., $17

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

My son, my son, what have ye done

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My son, my son, what have ye done

FILM Some of the best documentaries in recent years have been hijacked by their subject — or even by another subject the filmmaker wasn’t planning on. Prodigal Sons was supposed to be Kimberly Reed’s story about a high-school quarterback, basketball captain, class president, and valedictorian born to a family of Montana farmers, returning for a reunion 20 years later — albeit as a fully transitioned male-to-female transgender person attending with her female lover. This will definitely be news to most of Helena, Mont., especially those former classmates who once swooned with puppy love or envy over the jock prince who is no more.

That would have made for an interesting movie. What makes Sons a fascinating one is that Reed finds the camera focus — as director/producer/coeditor, her own camera — stolen almost right away by a crisis in progress. Its name is Marc, adopted “problem child” of the McKerrow family (Kimberly changed her surname post-op). It’s not so much that Marc grabs the spotlight out of a jealous need for attention, though that may be a factor. It’s that he’s still trapped in a sibling relationship that for her ceased to exist — at least in its original form — decades ago, and Kimberly’s presence stirs up all kinds of buried shit.

Marc’s living in the past isn’t mere self-pity or indulgence. Already stamped as a bit of a fuckup (held back in grade school, a high school dropout), he suffered a head injury at 21. That commenced an ordeal of seizures, brain surgeries, and complicated med cocktails. He’s married with a daughter, but emits toxic clouds of social awkwardness and discontent that sometimes erupt in violent mood swings, which here result in at least one police intervention.

“It’s not the real me” is his usual refrain afterward each such “episode.” While Kimberly looks to reconcile her successful new identity with a community she’d ago severed most ties to, Marc struggles to assert any cogent post-accident identity at all.

Running a gamut from harrowing to miraculous (not necessarily in that order), the remarkable Prodigal Sons grows stranger than fiction when abandoned-at-birth Marc discovers something jaw-dropping about his ancestry. Suffice it to say, this results in a trip to Croatia and biological link to some of Hollywood’s starriest legends.

If Kimberly’s story is about repression forcing a mentally healthy transformation, Marc wrests us away from that inspirational self-portrait. He renders Sons a challenging, head-on glimpse of mental illness with no easy answers in sight. Christianity, a well-adjusted gay third brother, conservative yet surprisingly adaptable parents, jail time, savant piano mastery, and other elements also factor into this wild ride of a documentary. Its narrative progress might be dismissed as over-the-top if it didn’t happen to be true. 

PRODIGAL SONS opens Fri/5.

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