obama

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
-
0

tredmond@sfbg.com

So the people who advise President Obama have finally figured out that he was on the road to becoming a one-term president — and the United States was on the road to ruin under President Perry. Whatever combination of self-preservation and fear was at work, it worked, at least for the moment.

Obama is now on record as refusing to accept any cuts in entitlements for poor people unless the rich people give a little, too. It’s a pretty good political statement — in every single major poll taken in the past year, an overwhelming majority of Americans agreed that higher taxes on the wealthy should be part of any deficit-reduction package. And it’s a no-brainer economic statement — the fundamental problem with the U.S. economy is a lack of consumer demand, which is tied directly to the fact that all of the wealth over the past 20 years has gone to the top and the middle class doesn’t have enough money to spend.

But what’s it’s really done is kicked the proverbial tax can — and thus, unfortunately, economic recovery — down the proverbial road another 13 months. Because the Republicans won’t accept higher taxes, and if Obama keeps his newfound spine, he won’t accept any cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, and nobody is talking about cutting the military, so nothing is going to happen.

Instead, this is the launch of Campaign 2012. Obama’s got a tough sell — the number on issue for most voters is jobs, and while I personally believe that the first stimulus plan kept the recession from getting worse, that’s not enough. Things are supposed to get better, and when they don’t, the guy at the top gets the blame.

So Obama has a problem: It’s all his fault, but he can’t do anything about it, and that’s what the Republicans are counting on. His only choice is to come roaring out like Harry Truman, and blame the “do-nothing” Republican Congress for blocking economic growth (and, if he has any sense, will say that the GOP is holding a jobs program hostage to protect the interests of the millionaires), and the Democrats will try to use that message to take back the House — and if it works, we might just possibly get things back on track in 2013. If it doesn’t, it’s going to be a very ugly decade.

The Chron’s bizarre tax logic

Zelda Bronstein
-
32
The Chron’s bizarre tax logic

Chronicle Washington columnist Carolyn Lochhead doesn’t typically show her political beliefs in such a clear and direct way, but her attack on the Obama tax plan is just … bizarre. Check it out:

Rather than pursue long-run tax and entitlement reform, the new Obama plan, his sixth by some counts, litters up the tax code even more and does nothing significant on debt drivers Medicare and Medicaid.

Actually, the big “debt drivers” over the past two decades haven’t been Medicare and Medicaid, or even social security — the debt and deficit problem comes from (1) tax cuts on the rich and (2) wars. Remember, Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus (even including entitlements, and even including projections for the baby boomers retiring and all the other panic buttons the GOP likes to push). Bush turned that into a staggering deficit by cutting taxes at the same time he went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And “litter up the tax code?” That’s crazy talk. Obama wants to get rid of tax breaks that litter up the code.

More:

He re-iterated his call to end the Bush tax cuts on high earners, but keeps the rest of the Bush tax cuts which are a bushel of special tax breaks for the middle class.

What? The middle class has been slammed by the recession (and by 20 years of income moving almost entirely to the top 5% of the population). The only way out of this recession is to give the middle class more spending power.

I’m not defending everything Obama’s done (his willingness to extend the Bush tax cuts was part of the problem), but seriously: This is economics 101.

 

 

SFBG Radio: Johnny wants a coup

Zelda Bronstein
-
35
SFBG Radio: Johnny wants a coup

Today, Johnny articulates his vision of the future: Obama gets re-elected, the right wing tries a coup — and finally, the west coast can secede. Has he gone off his rocker? Has he gone off his meds? Check it out after the jump.

sfbgradio9152011 by endorsements2011

Harsh times

Andrew Lam
-
0
Harsh times

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE It’s what you would call a recession novel.

The lead character of Tony D’Souza’s Mule: A Novel of Moving Weight (292 pp, Mariner Books, $14.95)has nearly navigated the entirety of the upward-downward spiral to drug kingpin-dom we know so well from Scarface. This is how his story ends, in part:

“And there was the recession and there was not the recession and there was fear from the recession and there was not the fear from the recession. And there was America and there was not America and there was me and there was not me.”

The moment comes after hundreds of pages of violence and paranoia. D’Souza’s James is a successful freelance journalist rendered financially obsolete in the Crash Which Dare Not Speak It’s Name. Reduced from an A-list Austin lifestyle, he decides to drive a pound of marijuana across the country, literally to make ends meet for himself and his young family. His surprising ambition leads to mansions in Florida and reliance on the money-sick and power-mad for business.

Mule reads like an episode of The Wire, drawing from Weeds for some background material. And like those two series, what it has to say about the times we’re living in is worth hearing.

James is a deal-shoot-angst protagonist, a thoroughly middle class character. He wears Lacoste. He can’t get a byline to save his life, hence the drug running. His white skin is an advantage as a mule because it keeps him from being profiled by highway cops.

But if the Obama job plan passes, if unemployment was no longer at 9.1 percent, would James still be hustling? This is where Mule succeeds, its sheer ambiguity making it so much a product of this rightnow. In 2011, it’s not clear if we should be taking deep breathes and job hunting through the madness or straight up losing our shit in the face of economic meltdown, environmental heart attack, and vitriolic culture war.

And yes, Mule is also about marijuana itself. This too is important. How many Cali children have saved their skins by trimming in Mendo?

This is the same substance that supports the professional photographers and glamour shots we profiled in last week’s column. Only in Mule, double murders are performed over the stuff, people lose their minds to transport it. These are the same things that are happening across the hemisphere, despite our privileged Bay Arean cradle where we smoke in the streets and get prescriptions to stoke our appetites. Medicine, felony: marijuana is ambivalence itself these days.

If you’re looking for a novel-length iteration of why cannabis should be legalized, you could do worse than Mule. But you could also do better. That’s because of the book’s omnipresent ghoul, the generation-derailing R-word.

Sure, if selling pot wasn’t grounds for a felony or worse in most of the country, James would never have to smack around that snotty college dealer with the kid’s own textbooks, or been rendered paralyzed by fear in a grotty hotel room in San Angelo, Tex. — but would his world morph to emerald green good vibes? If weed were legal, wouldn’t it be assimilated into that other source of our brave protagonist’s dread? Would it be just one more job field described by our dismal unemployment levels?

Mule is a drug novel. But it’s also a recession novel and it’s not a recession novel and the novel’s about fear from the recession and the novel is not about fear from the recession.

In other words, read it.

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
-
0

tredmond@sfbg.com

If you want to put more money in the pockets of working people, cutting the federal payroll tax — which, for many, is a larger tax burden than the income tax — makes perfect sense.

If you want to create jobs, cutting the payroll tax for businesses is a risky proposition.

Most new jobs in the United States are created by small businesses — and the payroll tax, while significant, isn’t a dramatic hindrance to job growth.

I work for a small business, and I ran the numbers with our controller, and if the Obama stimulus bill passes, the Bay Guardian will probably have enough extra money to hire one part-time employee — as long as we don’t pay that person much more than the city’s minimum wage. That’s something, I suppose. But even multiplied by the millions of small businesses in the country, there’s no guarantee it will lead to millions of jobs — particularly since so many small businesses in this country are deeply in debt, scraping for profits and likely to use the extra money for something other than hiring.

And a lot of big businesses already have the cash on hand to hire new workers, but they aren’t doing it.

That’s because businesses don’t make hiring decisions based just on taxes and cash — they hire people when they need workers to fill demand for their products and services. And the fundamental problem with the American economy today is that the very rich, who don’t spend most of their money, keep getting more of it, and the middle class doesn’t have enough to stimulate demand.

Here’s what makes me crazy: The government knows how to create jobs. If that’s what Obama wants to do, why not just .. do it?

Let’s say you want to create a million new jobs that pay a living wage (say, $50,000). If, instead of hoping that the private sector will be the middleman, Obama directed federal, state, and local governments to hire people to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, teach in public schools etc, that would cost …. oh, about $500 billion.

So for $447 billion, you might only get 800,000 jobs. But that increased economic activity, and the demand it would create, would almost certainly lead to more jobs, probably at least another 400,000 jobs. That’s more than a million; the unemployment rate just dropped a full percentage point, and the recovery is well under way.

Why is nobody even talking about this?

Heroes who did their jobs on 9/11

Gen Fujioka
-
1

By Dick Meister

You know those public employees who are under seemingly constant attack? Who are being blamed for all sorts of governmental problems, financial and otherwise? Well, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center is a good time to make clear how very important to the nation those unfairly maligned public employees have been for a long, long time.

I should think it would be very hard to argue against the pay and pensions negotiated by firefighters and police, for instance, given their often heroic and usually helpful acts in behalf of the people they serve.

Yes, they make demands for pay and benefit increases and better working conditions– and they should.  Just as they should be able to bargain collectively through their unions to try to realize their demands. That’s called workplace democracy, and it should be their absolute right.

But anti-labor political leaders are looking for someone else to blame for the poor state of the economy that’s at least in part due to their own ineptness. And who do they blame? Public employees, who are characterized as greedy, overpaid and underworked members of much too economically and politically powerful unions.   The employees are the cause of it all.  Certainly it’s not the failed leadership and poor bargaining skills of the political leaders that’s at fault. Or their refusal to adequately tax the wealthy. Of course not.

We should know better. And the anniversary of the 911 attacks should remind us of the essential and sometimes courageous work done by the public employees who are so frequently used as political scapegoats.  Don’t blame us, say too many politicians. Blame the firefighters, police, teachers and others who do so much of the actual work of government.

Consider what public employees did after that horrific day of September 11, 2001 in New York City when a hijacked plane crashed into the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center.  More than 135,000 of the truly heroic firefighters, police and others who rushed to the crash scene were injured, some quite seriously. They rescued as many victims as they could find and cleared as much of the debris as they could at Ground Zero. Some had rushed to the scene from as far away as California and Oregon.

They were exposed to an extremely toxic mix of chemicals, jet fuel, asbestos, lead, glass fragments and other debris that caused a wide range of respiratory, intestinal and mental health problems, including lung diseases, rare cancers and other ailments.

An AFL-CIO report at the time focused on Vito Friscia, a Brooklyn homicide detective who was only a block away when the second of the Twin Towers fell. He rushed to the site through a dense cloud of toxins to seek – and to rescue – survivors.  Friscia spent a week helping with the rescue and cleanup efforts, coming away with chronic sinus problems, shortness of breath and other lasting ailments.

“But I’m no hero,” Friscia insisted. “I was just doing my job.” Many others said pretty much the same thing – that they were just doing their jobs as police officers, firefighters or as other public service employees. Thousands of them are still suffering from their exposure at Ground Zero.  Some are permanently disabled.

As one of those treating them noted, “Our patients are sick, and they will need ongoing care for the rest of their lives.”

More than 10,000 of those injured won settlements from New York and its contractors after filing lawsuits against the city.  But most of the settlements were far short of providing adequate compensation to the injured, and came long after their injuries.

Sufficient federal aid has been a long time coming, in large part because of Republican opposition to the cost.  It took nine years for Congress to finally pass an aid bill over the strong opposition of GOP House members. The measure, signed by President Obama just last January, will provide $7.4 billion in aid over the next 10 years. In a compromise that satisfied the GOP, it will be financed by a fee on foreign companies awarded procurement contracts from the federal government.

What we need now is a bill designating September 11, not only as a day to recall the horrors of 9/11 and its great impact on our lives, but also as a day to express our gratitude to the public employees who risked their lives to help victims of the terrorist attack and whose day-to-day work benefits us all in so many important ways.

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 350 of his columns.

How to create jobs

Zelda Bronstein
-
15
How to create jobs

I listened to the Obama speech, and at least he showed some energy (although this bipartisan shit clearly doesn’t work and I don’t know when he’s going to give it up). But here’s what makes me crazy: The whole point of this $447 billion stimulus is to create jobs. Why not just, you know, create jobs?

I agree that a cut in the payroll tax (which, for a lot of working Americans, amounts to more money than the income tax) will put money in the pockets of people who are likely to spend it, and will stimulate, to some extent, consumer demand. That, of course, is the crux of the issue — unless there’s demand for goods and services, the economy’s not going to turn around.

Of course, some of that money will go to replenish savings and pay down debt — not a bad thing, but not what we need right now.

Cutting the payroll tax for businesses will also be a direct stimulus, particularly for smaller employers, who create most of the new jobs. But again, let’s be real: I just ran the numbers, and a company the size of the Guardian would get enough of a tax break to hire one part-time person at not much more than the city’s minimum wage. Sure, you spread that across millions of small businesses, and you’ll get some new job creation. But I wonder: Is this the most efficent way to achieve the objective?

Let’s see. An economist at Moody’s says the plan could create 1.9 million jobs. That, of course, includes not just the jobs created by the tax cuts, but the multiplier effect (you hire someone to dig a ditch, that person buys shoes so the shoestore needs more help, etc.) And the prediction is just that — a prediction. It assumes, for example, that most of the employers who get the tax break will use the extra money to hire more people. I’m not so sure about that. Businesses tend to hire not because they have spare cash (which might just as well end up in the owner’s pocket) but because they need more workers to meet growing demand for goods and services. If that demand isn’t there, the jobs won’t magically appear just because employers have more cash on hand. (In fact, some of the biggest employers in this country have plenty of cash on hand; they aren’t using it to hire anyone.)

How about we try it another way? Let’s assume that $50,000 a year is a decent wage in most parts of the country. (You want to make it $60,000? Whatever. It just changes the calculus a little bit).

For $1 million, you can hire 20 people at $50K. For $1billion, you can hire 20,000 people. For $400 billion, you can hire 800,000 people.

Why not just do that? Why not take that stimulus money and hire public employees — to teach in schools, to build roads and bridges, to repair the nation’s electricity infrastructure, to construct high-speed rail lines, to rebuild crumbling housing in inner cities …. there’s plenty to do.

Yeah, some of the money would go to the dreaded “bureacrats” who would oversee the hiring programs and fill out the forms. But the world needs accountants and managers, too — and the ranks of the unemployed include quite a few people with those skills.

Now: There’s lots of debate about the size of the multiplier; when it comes to job creations, I’ve heard numbers from 1.4 to 5.0, depending on the circumstances. But there’s no doubt that direct federal hiring — 800,000 new living-wage jobs — would have a direct impact on consumer demand and create a guaranteed need for more private-sector workers. I’d bet it’s about one for one — the 800,000 federal jobs would lead to another 800,000 private-sector jobs. That’s 1.6 million jobs — and unlike the current plan, those are jobs that are not dependent on what employers decide to do with their tax breaks.

Hell, we want to cut unemployment in half? For, say, $1.5 trillion, you could create 7 million jobs pretty easily. That’s just about the annual cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The government knows how to create jobs. Federal, state and local agencies hire people every day. The whole thing seems so silly; why give money to private employers and hope for the best when you can use the same money to hire people directly? Why waste time and money on the middleman?

 

 

An American blindness

Andrew Lam
-
8
An American blindness

After the first jetliner crashed into the Twin Towers on that September 11 morning, a friend of mine and his 11-year old daughter climbed up to the roof of their Manhattan home to look around. Just then the second plane struck, the young girl fell backward, and went blind from shock.

It took more than a year of examinations and therapies before this girl came out of her blindness to look around.

That’s what happened to America itself ten years ago this Sunday on 9/11, though it might be claimed many of us were blinded by privilege and hubris long before. But 9/11 produced a spasm of blind rage, arising from a pre-existing blindness as to the way much of the world sees us. That in turn led to the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and, in all, a dozen “shadow wars” according to The New York Times.

Bob Woodward’s crucial book, Obama’s Wars, points out that there were already secret and lethal counterterrorism operations active in more than 60 countries as of 2009. From Pentagon think tanks came a new military doctrine of the “Long War,” a counter-insurgency vision arising from the failed Phoenix program of the Vietnam era, projecting U.S. open combat and secret wars over a span of 50 to 80 years, or 20 future presidential terms. The taxpayer costs of this Long War, also shadowy, would be in the many trillions of dollars — and paid for not from current budgets, but by generations born after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. The deficit spending on the Long War would invisibly force the budgetary crisis now squeezing our states, cities and most Americans.

Besides the future being mortgaged, civil liberties were thought to require a shrinking proper to a state of permanent and secretive war, so the Patriot Act was promulgated. All this happened after 9/11 through Democratic default and denial. Who knows what future might have followed if Al Gore, with a half-million popular vote margin over George Bush, had prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court instead of losing by the vote of a single justice? In any event, only a single member of Congress, Barbara Lee of Berkeley-Oakland, voted against the war authorization, and only a single senator, Russ Feingold, voted against the Patriot Act.

Were we not blinded by what happened on 9/11? Are we still? Let’s look at the numbers we almost never see.

 

CASUALTIES OF WAR

As to American casualties, the figure now is beyond twice those who died in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. on 9/11. The casualties are rarely totaled, but are broken down into three categories by the Pentagon and Congressional Research Service. There is Operation Enduring Freedom, which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan but, in keeping with the Long War definition, also covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Second, there is Operation Iraqi Freedom and its successor Operation New Dawn, the name adopted after September 2010 for the 47,000 US advisers, trainers and counterterrorism units still in Iraq. The scope of these latter operations includes Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. These territories include not only Muslim majorities but, according to former Centcom commander Tommy Franks, 68 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and the passageway for 43 percent of petroleum exports, another American geo-interest which was heavily denied in official explanations.

A combined 6,197 Americans were killed in these wars as of August 16, 2011, in the name of avenging 9/11, a day when 2, 996 Americans died. The total number of American wounded has been 45,338, and rising at a rapid rate. The total number rushed by military Medivac out of these violent zones was 56, 432. That’s a total of 107,996 Americans. And the active-duty military suicide rate for the decade is at a record high of 2, 276, not counting veterans or those who have tried unsuccessfully to take their own lives. In fact, the suicide rate for last year was greater than the American death toll in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has long played a numbers game with these body counts. In addition to being painfully difficult and extremely complicated to access, there was a time when the Pentagon refused to count as Iraq war casualties any soldier who died from their wounds outside of Iraq’s airspace. Similar controversies have surrounded examples such as soldiers killed in non-combat accidents.

The fog around Iraq or Afghanistan civilian casualties will be seen in the future as one of the great scandals of the era. Briefly, the United States and its allies in Baghdad and Kabul have relied on eyewitness, media or hospital numbers instead of the more common cluster-sampling interview techniques used in conflict zones like the first Gulf War, Kosovo or the Congo. The United Nations has a conflict of interest as a party to the military conflict, and acknowledged in a July 2009 U.N. human rights report footnote that “there is a significant possibility that UNAMA is underreporting civilian casualties.”

In August, even the mainstream media derided a claim by the White House counter-terrorism adviser that there hasn’t been a single “collateral,” or innocent, death during an entire year of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, a period in which 600 people were killed, all of them alleged “militants.” As an a specific explanation for the blindness, the Los Angeles Times reported April 9 that “Special Forces account for a disproportionate share of civilian casualties caused by western troops, military officials and human rights groups say, though there are no precise figures because many of their missions are deemed secret.”

 

STICKER SHOCK OF WAR

Among the most bizarre symptoms of the blindness is the tendency of most deficit hawks to become big spenders on Iraq and Afghanistan, at least until lately. The direct costs of the war, which is to say those unfunded costs in each year’s budget, now come to $1.23 trillion, or $444.6 billion for Afghanistan and $791.4 billion for Iraq, according to the National Priorities Project.

But that’s another sleight-of-hand, when one considers the so-called indirect costs like long-term veteran care. Leading economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes recently testified to Congress that their previous estimate of $4 to $6 trillion in ultimate costs was conservative. Nancy Youssef of McClatchy Newspapers in D.C. — in my opinion, the best war reporter of the decade — wrote recently that “it’s almost impossible to pin down just what the United States spends on war.” The president himself expressed “sticker shock,” according to Woodward’s book, when presented cost projections during his internal review of 2009.

The Long War casts a shadow not only over our economy and future budgets but our innocent and unborn children’s future as well. This is no accident, but the result of deliberate lies, obfuscations and scandalous accounting techniques. We are victims of an information warfare strategy waged deliberately by the Pentagon. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal said much too candidly in a February 2010, “This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants.” David Kilcullen, once the top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, defines “international information operations as part of counterinsurgency.” Quoted in Counterinsurgency in 2010, Kilcullen said this military officer’s goal is to achieve a “unity of perception management measures targeting the increasingly influential spectators’ gallery of the international community.”

This new war of perceptions, relying on naked media manipulation such as the treatment of media commentators as “message amplifiers” but also high-technology information warfare, only highlights the vast importance of the ongoing WikiLeaks whistle-blowing campaign against the global secrecy establishment. Consider just what we have learned about Iraq and Afghanistan because of WikiLeaks: Tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq, never before disclosed; instructions to U.S. troops to not investigate torture when conducted by U.S. allies; the existence of Task Force 373, carrying out night raids in Afghanistan; the CIA’s secret army of 3,000 mercenaries; private parties by DynCorp featuring trafficked boys as entertainment, and an Afghan vice president carrying $52 million in a suitcase.

The efforts of the White House to prosecute Julian Assange and persecute Pfc. Bradley Manning in military prison should be of deep concern to anyone believing in the public’s right to know.

The news that this is not a physical war but mainly one of perceptions will not be received well among American military families or Afghan children, which is why a responsible citizen must rebel first and foremost against The Official Story. That simple act of resistance necessarily leads to study as part of critical practice, which is as essential to the recovery of a democratic self and democratic society. Read, for example, this early martial line of Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the white man’s burden: “When you’re left wounded on Afghanistan’s plains/ And the women come out to cut up what remains/ Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/And go to your God like a soldier.” Years later, after Kipling’s beloved son was killed in World War I and his remains never recovered, the poet wrote: “If any question why we died / Tell them because our fathers lied.”

 

A HOPE FOR PEACE

An important part of the story of the peace movement, and the hope for peace itself, is the process by which hawks come to see their own mistakes. A brilliant history/autobiography in this regard is Dan Ellsberg’s Secrets, about his evolution from defense hawk to historic whistleblower during the Vietnam War. Ellsberg writes movingly about how he was influenced on his journey by meeting contact with young men on their way to prison for draft resistance.

The military occupation of our minds will continue until many more Americans become familiar with the strategies and doctrines in play during the Long War. Not enough Americans in the peace movement are literate about counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and the debates about the “clash of civilizations”, the West versus the Muslim world.

The more we know about the Long War doctrine, the more we understand the need for a long peace movement. The pillars of the peace movement, in my experience and reading, are the networks of local progressives in hundreds of communities across the United States. Most of them are voluntary, citizen volunteers, always and immersed in the crises of the moment, nowadays the economic recession and unemployment.

This peace bloc deserves more. It won’t happen overnight, but gradually we are wearing down the pillars of the war. It’s painfully slow, because the president is threatened by Pentagon officials, private military contractors and an entire Republican Party (except the Ron Paul contingent) who benefit from the politics and economics of the Long War.

But consider the progress, however slow. In February of this year, Rep. Barbara Lee passed a unanimous resolution at the Democratic National Committee calling for a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan and transfer of funds to job creation. The White House approved of the resolution. Then 205 House members, including a majority of Democrats, voted for a resolution that almost passed, calling for the same rapid withdrawal. Even the AFL-CIO executive board, despite a long history of militarism, adopted a policy opposing Afghanistan. The president himself is quoted in Obama’s Wars as opposing his military advisors, demanding an exit strategy and musing that he “can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.” At every step of the way, it must be emphasized, public opinion in Congressional districts was a key factor in changing establishment behavior.

As for Al Qaeda, there is always the threat of another attack, like those attempted by militants aiming at Detroit during Christmas 2009 or Times Square in May 2010. In the event of another such terrorist assault originating from Pakistan, all bets are off: According to Woodward, the U.S. has a “retribution” plan to bomb 150 separate sites in that country alone there, and no apparent plan for The Day After. Assuming that nightmare doesn’t happen, today’s al Qaeda is not the al Qaeda of a decade ago. Osama bin Laden is dead, its organization is damaged, and its strategy of conspiratorial terrorism has been displaced significantly by the people-power democratic uprisings across the Arab world.

It is clear that shadow wars lie ahead, but not expanding ground wars involving greater numbers of American troops. The emerging argument will be over the question of whether special operations and drone attacks are effective, moral and consistent with the standards of a constitutional democracy. And it is clear that the economic crisis finally is enabling more politicians to question the trillion dollar war spending.

Meanwhile, the 2012 national elections present an historic opportunity to awaken from the blindness inflicted by 9/11.

After more than 50 years of activism, politics and writing, Tom Hayden is a leading voice for ending the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and reforming politics through a more participatory democracy.

The Fillmore’s facelift: Independent Artists Week fills the street

Andrew Lam
-
1

Bayview native Meaghan Mitchell first started working in the neighborhood as a hostess at 1300 on Fillmore. Not anymore – now she co-owns a pop-up neighborhood art gallery across the street from the restaurant and is organizing an entire week of events geared towards filling the historic neighborhood’s streets again (Independent Artists Week, now through Sun/11).

The Fillmore’s the kind of neighborhood that inspires creative growth, famous for its days as a cultural hub where African Americans celebrated the arts, succeeded in the business arena, and solidified community. This week’s lineup of IAW events hopes to highlight that legacy, with speed networking for creative types, free art walks, and more. 

Because right now, the area definitely needs some shine.

“We’re struggling with the identity of the Fillmore right now,” says Mitchell, who sits in her small gallery space surrounded by paintings and sculptures done by local artists during her interview with the Guardian. Sisters Melorra and Melonie Green co-own the space, and Mitchell gives us a tour of the neighborhood art the three have filled their gallery with, from elaborate metal wall sculptures to small drawings by local grade-schoolers. The Greens are the other two lead organizers of Independent Artists Week. 

Mitchell gestures to the towering condo and apartment buildings visible through the gallery’s front windows. “Look at all those apartment buildings. Where do those people go?”

Despite its history of locally-owned businesses, Fillmore is far from bustling during the daytime, when the street’s renowned jazz clubs are closed. There’s a handful of black-owned businesses (including New Chicago Barbershop, which we profiled earlier this summer) that are still standing, but you see a lot of empty storefronts when you walk down the sidewalk. 

Mitchell and her partners would like to reverse that trend. “There’s so much potential for African American people to take back our neighborhood,” she says. “Facilitating our own events is a part of that.”

She should know – she learned from an event-planner extraordinaire. Mitchell says she owes her organizing skills to Ave Montague, the woman who was in charge of public relations at 1300 when Mitchell was first hired on. 

“She made this neighborhood poppin’,” remembers Mitchell. Montague organized the Black Film Festival, and took Mitchell under her wing, training her to help coordinate a slew of other events that were important to the Fillmore community – and the country. Montague passed away shortly after she threw the official West Coast inauguration party for Barack Obama in 2008. 

“When she died, this neighborhood was in a different place,” says Mitchell. “It was grey.”

There was some question about who would take up Montague’s crusade to make Fillmore Street a vibrant center of black Bay Area culture once again. But not for long – soon Mitchell and the other neighborhood business-owners and advocates from the Fillmore Community Benefit District were back in talks with the Mayor’s Office, which is now once again subsidizing their event-planning efforts. 

Of course, Mitchell says, there are challenges to this kind of city government-funded community organizing in a neighborhood that was gutted by “redevelopment” campaigns in the past. Long-time residents are less than thrilled to put the future of the neighborhood in the hands of organizations responsible for driving out black families in the first place. She’s attended CBD meetings that ended in shouting and finger-pointing over who did and didn’t deserve a piece of the $800,000 the Mayor’s Office had contributed to their work. 

“You’ve got to check in with folks.” Mitchell says that even though she is a San Francisco native, she’s still a newcomer to the Fillmore scene – and that a big part of her work is involving the long-time movers and shakers in the area. She now holds monthly merchant meetings that started out with three and now generally attract 11 participants. 

But it’s worth it to become a part of a neighborhood this unique. “[Working in] the Fillmore, it was the first time I worked in a place where I really felt appreciated,” she says. “I met all these prestigious African American people who helped me and who I could look up to.” 

Hopefully this week’s events will provide similar opportunities for other up-and-comers – check out the schedule below to see what’s on offer for artists, art lovers, wannabe yogis, and anyone who is into the idea of a new, brighter Fillmore. 

Photo above right: Mitchell has joined Fillmore’s entrepreneurs with a gallery space of her own on the strip. Photo by Caitlin Donohue

 

“Opportunity Knocks” speed-networking event

Local music scenesters, public relations experts, and other sources of knowledge on making a living off of art in the Bay Area will be available to chat with artists on those topics and more. 

Tues/6 7-9 p.m., $15. Yoshi’s, 1330 Fillmore, SF. 


Sustainable fashion fair-clothing swap

Trade in your clothes for other people’s hand-me-downs – style on a budget (and with a low carbon profile, hell yeah). 

Wed/7 7-10 p.m. African American Cultural Arts Center, 762 Fulton, SF. 


Thank You Awards

Honorees will include filmmaker Kevin Epps, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, and other supporters of the local arts community. 

Thu/8 7-9 p.m., $15. African American Cultural Arts Center. 


Fillmore Art Walk

Art in the streets! Tour the neighborhood’s galleries and businesses (including Mitchell’s space at 

Fri/9 6 p.m.-midnight, free. Fillmore between Post and McAllister, SF. 


Healing arts demonstration

The perfect, low-commitment intro to tai chi, yoga, acupuncture, meditation, and more. Swing through to ask about body and soul woes with experienced practitioners in the sunshine. 

Sat/10 9 a.m.-1 p.m., free. Fillmore Center Plaza, Fillmore and O’Farrell, SF. 


Western Addition Sunday Streets

A huge swath of Fillmore, Divisadero, and the Panhandle will be blessed with a free roller disco, break dancing lessons, free bike repair and rental, and of course lots of car-free asphalt for walking, biking, boarding, and blading community members. 

Sun/11 11 a.m.-4 p.m., free. Various streets in Western Addition, SF. www.sundaystreetssf.com

 

 

Dick Meister: Busting the union busters, a labor day lament

-
2

By Dick Meister

This is not a very happy Labor Day for labor, considering the continued heavy attacks on public employee unions, which have become the vanguard of organized labor. More than one-third of public employees are now in unions, while only about 7 percent of private sector workers are unionized.

Probably nothing could be more damaging to the labor movement in general than the attempts by anti-union forces to weaken unions at all levels of government by trying to limit– if not withdraw – their collective bargaining rights and right to strike, in addition to unilaterally cutting the pay and pensions, health care and other benefits their unions have won in bargaining.

Although that’s all been done in the name of budget balancing, it’s more accurately described as union busting, spurred on by the steady increase in public employee union members, even as the number of private sector unionists has been declining.

It hasn’t helped unions, either, that President Obama has turned out to be far less friendly to labor than he’d promised while securing lots of union money and lots of union supporters to help him win the presidency. Ironically, the key role unions played in Obama’s election has led to moves by anti-union forces to try to also weaken unions’ political rights.

The best example of the heavy pressures public employees and their unions are feeling is in Wisconsin, where the movement to strip public employees of their union rights began, under notoriously anti-labor Gov. Scott Walker.

Republican Walker is not only seeking to deny unionization to most state, county and municipal employees. He’s also been pushing measures that would increase the employees’ contributions to pension and health care funds by up to 50 percent, require their contracts to be re-negotiated yearly, and no longer allow unions to deduct dues from employee paychecks. It’s hard to imagine a union surviving under such restraints. Certainly Gov. Walker and his political friends don’t imagine it.

Wisconsin is but one of at least 18 states, including several once considered union friendly, where public employees are under heavy attack. On the federal level, supposedly labor-friendly Obama has imposed a federal pay freeze.

Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, is trying to outdo Walker. He’s proposing, among other anti-union measures, to eliminate the bargaining rights of more than 35,000 of Ohio’s public employees, to outlaw teacher strikes, prevent child care and home care workers from unionizing and repeal a rule that requires paying union wages to non-union workers on public construction projects.

Gov. Walker, however, remains the poster boy for anti-labor stalwarts. His most outrageous act has been to back a new state law that requires about two-thirds of Wisconsin’s school districts to use employee handbooks to replace collective bargaining agreements that for decades outlined the teachers’ pay and duties.

Substituting the handbooks for negotiated contracts gives school administrators the authority to dictate broad changes in the teachers’ working conditions without so much as consulting the teachers. In some school districts, even the administrators were not consulted before the handbooks with their stringent new conditions were issued.

Teachers are probably our most important public employees. Yet despite their great importance – or maybe because of it – Gov. Walker is eagerly supporting, not only a withdrawal of teachers’ collective bargaining rights, but also an end to teacher tenure, which protects them from unwarranted attacks by union foes such as Walker.

Walker also wants a substantial increase in the already high contributions to their health insurance by teachers and teacher retirees and changes that curtail the teachers’ basic rights and security by allowing them to be hired on a year-to-year basis. The new rules also mandate that in times of financial constraint, seniority can no longer be a basis for deciding which teachers to lay off.

Some Wisconsin school districts are even trying to reduce the number of sick days allowed teachers, however unwise it may seem to have teachers with possible communicative illnesses remain in the classroom because they can’t afford to take days off.

Other districts are doing away with at least some paid holidays or changing extra days used for professional development into workdays and cutting paid lesson preparation periods in half. The Wisconsin Journal Sentinel’s Erin Richards quotes one of Wisconsin’s major teacher union leaders as noting that teachers across the state have been most concerned with losing prep time, which can have a direct effect on the quality of lessons and student performance.

Gov. Walker and other leading Republicans don’t seem to be much concerned about that. What’s more important to them is cutting Wisconsin’s education budget, the influence of teachers on education policy and, of course, all but eliminating the union rights of teachers and all other public employees.

But Walker may very well have gone too far. The negative reaction has been strong and growing in Wisconsin and elsewhere. It’s widely realized that if the public employee union busters are successful, private sector unions throughout the country will feel even stronger opposition. And it’s clear that if anti-union forces can weaken the public employee unions that are the strongest segments of today’s labor movement, it’s more than likely that private sector unions will be the next target.

The good news is that recently, Wisconsin voters easily turned back a GOP attempt to recall two strong pro-worker state senators who had helped lead the fight against Walker’s anti-worker legislation. The fight began in the spring when Republicans targeted eight Democratic senators for recall – and lost. There have been nine recall elections since then and labor has won five of them.

Labor and the Democrats had hoped to wrest control of the State Senate from the GOP. But though failing to do so, they did narrow the Republicans Senate majority to a razor-thin 17-16.

Democrats and union leaders are rightly celebrating the pro-labor election victories as a possible opening shot against anti-labor extremism nationwide, which could in turn lead to an attempt to recall Gov. Walker or at least force him to back off.

Actually, Walker has done his labor enemies a great favor by provoking public outrage that has brought important new strength and solidarity to the cause of working people and their unions everywhere.

So it may be a happy Labor Day after all, thanks to a labor opponent.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Central Subway gravy train shows how City Hall works

Sasha Cuttler
-
69
Central Subway gravy train shows how City Hall works

Despite its skyrocketing cost, inefficient design, and a growing chorus of criticism – ranging from a Wall Street Journal editorial today to an op-ed in the SF Chronicle last week – the Central Subway project continues to move forward for one simple reason: rich and powerful people want it to happen, whether it makes sense or not, because it benefits them directly.

“The subway is a case study in government incompetence and wasted taxpayer money,” the Wall Street Journal wrote in a “Review & Outlook” piece today (full text below), but it was only partially correct. The Central Subway is actually a case study in how things get done at City Hall, and how connected contractors and their political patrons make off with that taxpayer money.

“San Francisco is embarking on a Big Dig of the West, and unless our local leadership applies the brakes soon, the damage to our transit systems will be all but guaranteed. I urge local and national leaders to recognize what is obvious and stop this train to nowhere,” former San Francisco Transportation Agency Chair Jake McGoldrick wrote in his Aug. 18 op-ed.

But that isn’t likely to happen, given the political dynamics that have taken root at City Hall this year. Remember, this project was the result of a mutually beneficial deal that then-Mayor Willie Brown cut with Chinatown power broker Rose Pak back in 2003 (when the project was estimated at $648 million, before it ballooned to its current price tag of $1.6 billion).

This was the same duo that engineered the appointment of Ed Lee as interim mayor earlier this year and then pushed him to break his word and run to retain control of Room 200, as well as pressuring David Chiu into being the swing vote to give Lee that job and secretly backing Jane Kim’s run for the Board of Supervisors. All are big supporters of the Central Subway project, despite all the experts calling it an wasteful boondoggle that will be the most expensive 1.7-mile piece of track ever built in this country.

But the opinion of fiscal and transportation policy experts matters little in a town that is once again being governed by shameless power brokers. Hell, Brown even uses his weekly column in the Chronicle to confirm his weekly breakfast date (every Monday at the St. Regis Hotel) with his “friend” and client Jack Baylis, a top executive at AECOM, the main contractor for the Central Subway, as well as the America’s Cup, Transbay Terminal, the rebuild of the city’s sewer system, and all the other most lucrative city contracts.

In turn, AECOM kicks down contracts and payouts to a network of political supporters that will ensure that the project gets built, such as Chinatown Community Development Center, which signed an $810,000 contract in December to support the Central Subway in unspecified ways right before CCDC and its director Gordon Chin provided crucial support for getting Lee into the Mayor’s Office, where he can ensure the Central Subway project remains on track.

Yes, it’s just that crass and obvious. And it isn’t even about politics. Hell, Baylis is a Republican from Los Angeles, despite his meddling in San Francisco’s political affairs by sponsoring the Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth and other groups that will be doing independent expenditures on behalf of Lee this fall, trying to tell us that “it’s all about civility.”

No, it’s about money and it’s about power, straight up. The Central Subway is really more of a gravy train than a sensible transit project, but that’s just how business is being done at City Hall these days.

One of the people who has long criticized the project – noting how Chinatown would be served far better with surface transit options, at a fraction of the cost – is Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and an elected BART board member. He was heartened to see so many more voices – from the editorials to a recent Civil Grand Jury report to internal audits in the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which will lose money operating the new system – echoing his concerns.

“There are more people who seem to be sharing my thoughts,” Radulovich said. “It would be good to have a civic debate on this.”

But he’s not confident that will happen, despite the fresh wave of concerns. “There’s a lot of stuff that looks like planning that has gone into justifying this,” he said. “When the political culture of City Hall and the planning culture come together, this is what you get.”

 

Full text of WSJ article:

Off the San Francisco Rails

Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but the politicians who contrived the city’s Chinatown subway project must have left their brains somewhere else. The subway is a case study in government incompetence and wasted taxpayer money.

P.S. The Obama Administration is all for it.

Former Mayor Willie Brown sold a half-cent sales tax hike to voters in 2003 to pay for the 1.7-mile line on the pretext that the subway would ease congestion on Chinatown’s crowded buses, but he was more interested in obtaining the political support of Chinatown’s power brokers. In 2003, the city estimated the line would cost $647 million, but the latest prediction is $1.6 billion, or nearly $100 million for each tenth of a mile.

Transportation experts say the subway’s design is seriously flawed and that improving the existing bus and light-rail service would make more sense. The subway misses connections with 25 of the 30 light-rail and bus lines that it crosses, and there’s no direct connection to the 104-mile Bay Area Rapid Transit line or to the ferry.

Commuters will have to travel eight stories underground to catch the train and walk nearly a quarter of a mile to connect to the Market Street light-rail lines—after riding the subway for only a half mile. Tom Rubin, the former treasurer-controller of Southern California Rapid Transit District, calculates that taking the bus would be five to 10 minutes faster along every segment.

The city’s metro system, which is already running $150 million operating deficits, isn’t likely to have the money to keep the subway running in any case. Last month the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury, a watchdog group, warned that the subway’s costs “could stretch the existing maintenance environment [of the metro system] to the breaking point” and will defer the purchase of a new communications system.

Alas, San Francisco will likely drag national taxpayer money into the bay too. The city has applied for a multiyear $942 million “full funding grant agreement” from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to cover 60% of its capital costs. In 1964 Congress created a back-door earmark program called “New Starts” to subsidize local transportation projects. The FTA rates and recommends projects for grants, and Congress usually rubber-stamps its recommendations.

In January 2010, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood modified the grant criteria by adding environmental and communal benefits and minimizing cost-effectiveness. The change effectively means that any project can get federal funding as long as its sponsors claim they’re moving cars off the road.

“Measuring only cost and how fast a project can move the most people the greatest distance simply misses the boat,” Mr. LaHood wrote in January 2010 on his Fast Lane blog. “Look, everywhere I go, people tell me they want better transportation in their communities. They want the opportunity to leave their cars behind . . . And to enjoy clean, green neighborhoods. The old way of doing things just doesn’t value what people want.” We’re told Mr. LaHood is smarter than he sounds.

The FTA has given the Chinatown subway one of its highest project ratings, which virtually assures a full funding grant agreement. Once the city receives such an agreement, the feds are obligated to provide whatever funds they promise. The FTA won’t approve the agreements until the fall, so there’s still hope that someone wises up and nixes the project. Oh, and if Congress is looking for discretionary programs to cut, New Starts would be a good start.

Imprisoned hikers’ families react to sentencing

Sasha Cuttler
-
12
Imprisoned hikers’ families react to sentencing

The families of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal issued a statement yesterday (Sun/21) after receiving confirmation that the two men, both 29, had been sentenced to eight years in prison after an Iranian court found them guilty of illegal entry into Iran and espionage on behalf of the United States.

“Of the 751 days of Shane and Josh’s imprisonment, yesterday and today have been the most difficult for our families,” the statement notes. “Shane and Josh are innocent and have never posed any threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran, its government or its people.

“We are encouraged that the Iranian Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, has said he hopes the case will proceed in a manner that will result in Shane and Josh’s freedom. We appeal to the authorities in Iran to show compassion and allow them to return home to our families without delay.

“We also ask everyone around the world who trusts in the benevolence of the Iranian people and their leaders to join us in praying that Shane and Josh will now be released.”

Bauer and Fattal were arrested with Bauer’s fiancée, Sarah Shourd, on July 31, 2009 on the unmarked border between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan where the three had been hiking during a vacation. Shourd, 32, was released on humanitarian grounds last September after spending 410 days in solitary confinement. Bauer and Fattal were sentenced after more than two years of detainment awaiting trial.

“We have repeatedly called for the release of Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal,” U.S. State Department Spokesperson Victoria Nuland told the Guardian. “Shane and Josh have been imprisoned too long, and it is time to reunite them with their families.”

The United States maintains the two men have no connection to the United States government. Speaking earlier on the issue, President Barack Obama said, “I want to be perfectly clear: Sarah, Shane and Josh have never worked for the United States government. They are simply open-minded and adventurous young people who represent the best of America, and of the human spirit.”

Iraqi Kurdistan, the region where the three had been hiking, is a semi-autonomous region of northern Iraq that has been notably more stable then other areas of Iraq since the 2003 U.S. lead invasion. The U.S. State department had affirmed the relative safety of travel in the Kurdistan region of Iraq just weeks before their ill-fated trip.

Bauer, a freelance writer and photojournalist who has written for the Guardian and other Bay Area news outlets, and Fattal, an environmental advocate, are both graduates of UC Berkeley had both traveled extensively abroad pursuing their vocations and interests.

Shourd has indicated that she does not plan to return to Iran to stand trial, but has been a constant advocate for the release of her traveling companions. Supporters have organized several events in the Bay Area, including an art auction and film screening, to assist in the efforts calling for the hikers’ release from Iran.

Bauer and Fattal appeared in court only once on February 6 this year when they testified to their innocence verbally and in writing. Their Iranian lawyer, Masoud Shafiee, has said he will appeal the verdict. It remains unclear if the time they have served thus far will apply to the court sentence.

Speaking about the case, Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton said, “We continue to express our hope that the Iranian authorities will exercise the humanitarian option of releasing these two young men.”

The Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations has not yet returned the Guardian’s request for comment.

Rebecca Bowe contributed to this report.

The Keynes vs. Hayek rematch

-
42

By Robert Skidelsky

Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University.

LONDON – The Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who died in 1992 at the age of 93, once remarked that to have the last word requires only outliving your opponents. His great good fortune was to outlive Keynes by almost 50 years, and thus to claim a posthumous victory over a rival who had savaged him intellectually while he was alive.

Hayek’s apotheosis came in the 1980’s, when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took to quoting from The Road to Serfdom (1944), his classic attack on central planning. But in economics there are never any final verdicts. While Hayek’s defense of the market system against the gross inefficiency of central planning won increasing assent, Keynes’s view that market systems require continuous stabilization lingered on in finance ministries and central banks.

Both traditions, though, were eclipsed by the Chicago school of “rational expectations,” which has dominated mainstream economics for the last twenty-five years. With economic agents supposedly possessing perfect information about all possible contingencies, systemic crises could never happen except as a result of accidents and surprises beyond the reach of economic theory.

The global economic collapse of 2007-2008 discredited “rational expectations” economics (though its high priests have yet to recognize this) and brought both Keynes and Hayek back into posthumous contention. The issues have not changed much since their argument began in the Great Depression of the 1930’s. What causes market economies to collapse? What is the right response to a collapse? What is the best way to prevent future collapses?

For Hayek in the early 1930’s, and for Hayek’s followers today, the “crisis” results from over-investment relative to the supply of savings, made possible by excessive credit expansion. Banks lend at lower interest rates than genuine savers would have demanded, making all kinds of investment projects temporarily profitable.

But, because these investments do not reflect the real preferences of agents for future over current consumption, the savings necessary to complete them are not available. They can be kept going for a time by monetary injections from the central bank. But market participants eventually realize that there are not enough savings to complete all the investment projects. At that point, boom turns to bust.

Every artificial boom thus carries the seeds of its own destruction. Recovery consists of liquidating the misallocations, reducing consumption, and increasing saving.

Keynes (and Keynesians today) would think of the crisis as resulting from the opposite cause:  under-investment relative to the supply of saving – that is, too little consumption or aggregate demand to maintain a full-employment level of investment – which is bound to lead to a collapse of profit expectations.

Again, the situation can be kept going for a time by resorting to consumer-debt finance, but eventually consumers become over-leveraged and curtail their purchases. Indeed, the Keynesian and Hayekian explanations of the origins of the crisis are actually not very different, with over-indebtedness playing the key role in both accounts. But the conclusions to which the two theories point are very different.

Whereas for Hayek recovery requires the liquidation of excessive investments and an increase in consumer saving, for Keynes it consists in reducing the propensity to save and increasing consumption in order to sustain companies’ profit expectations. Hayek demands more austerity, Keynes more spending.

We have here a clue as to why Hayek lost his great battle with Keynes in the 1930’s. It was not just that the policy of liquidating excesses was politically catastrophic: in Germany, it brought Hitler to power. As Keynes pointed out, if everyone – households, firms, and governments – all started trying to increase their saving simultaneously, there would be no way to stop the economy from running down until people became too poor to save.

It was this flaw in Hayek’s reasoning that caused most economists to desert the Hayekian camp and embrace Keynesian “stimulus” policies. As the economist Lionel Robbins recalled:  “Confronted with the freezing deflation of those days, the idea that the prime essential was the writing down of mistaken investments and…fostering the disposition to save was…as unsuitable as denying blankets and stimulus to a drunk who has fallen into an icy pond, on the ground that his original trouble was overheating.”

Except to Hayekian fanatics, it seems obvious that the coordinated global stimulus of 2009 stopped the slide into another Great Depression. To be sure, the cost to many governments of rescuing their banks and keeping their economies afloat in the face of business collapse damaged or destroyed their creditworthiness. But it is increasingly recognized that public-sector austerity at a time of weak private-sector spending guarantees years of stagnation, if not further collapse.

So policy will have to change. Little can be hoped for in Europe; the real question is whether President Barack Obama has it in him to don the mantle of President Franklin Roosevelt.

To prevent further crises of equal severity in the future, Keynesians would argue for strengthening the tools of macroeconomic management. Hayekians have nothing sensible to contribute. It is far too late for one of their favorite remedies – abolition of central banks, supposedly the source of excessive credit creation. Even an economy without central banks will be subject to errors of optimism and pessimism. And an attitude of indifference to the fallout of these mistakes is bad politics and bad morals.

So, for all his distinction as a philosopher of freedom, Hayek deserved to lose his battle with Keynes in the 1930’s. He deserves to lose today’s rematch as well.

Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.

www.project-syndicate.org

Obama, Lee, Avalos, and the arc of history

Sasha Cuttler
-
84
Obama, Lee, Avalos, and the arc of history

People need to hear compelling stories, particularly from those who aspire to lead them, a point that author and psychologist Drew Westen nailed in his incisive think-piece in Sunday’s New York Times, “What Happened to Obama?” His conclusions also apply in San Francisco, where progressives have lost control of the narrative to the tax-cutting centrists, who are telling stories that serve mainly to enfeeble the people and prop up powerful interests.

“The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to ‘expect’ stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought,” Westen writes.

Contrast that with the guiding narrative in San Francisco politics right now, put forth by Mayor Ed Lee, his supporters, and the crew of mostly bland centrists who aspire to replace him, all of whom cast conflict itself as the villain. Much like Obama, they all style themselves as the administrators-in-chief, conflict-averse protagonists content to compromise away what little wealth and power the average citizen still possesses. Not only does that narrative guarantee that Lee will be elected, but it’s a false and short-sighted narrative that does a profound disservice to this city.

The one candidate in the mayor’s race who understands that class matters, that conflict is a necessary part of politics, and that we’re all getting screwed over by the rich and powerful is John Avalos. But despite some flashes of progressive populism on the stump, he hasn’t really been consistently and boldly telling San Francisco the story of itself that it really needs to hear right now, which is the same story that Obama should be telling the American people.

“I know you’re scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn’t work out,” begins the story that Westen said Obama should have told during his inaugural address.

And that’s the story that Avalos should be telling right now, combating the myths that have been put out there by Lee, David Chiu, Bevan Dufty, Dennis Herrera, and the other centrists in the race, that if we just give Twitter, Zynga, Oracle, Sutter Health, Willie Brown’s clients, and every other corporation and developer who promises to create jobs everything they want, then we’ll all be okay.

But on some level, we all know that just isn’t true, and it hasn’t been true for a long time. Only a fool would trust them to take care of us at this point. The greed and self-interest of rich individuals and corporations – which has gone unchecked for far too long, at least partly because of the political corruption they’ve sponsored – is reaching epidemic proportions. It is the villain that needs to be fought, it is the hill that needs to be climbed.

“When faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far,” Westen wrote.

He was riffing off Obama’s penchant for quoting the MLK line, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” which he returned to again with his devastating conclusion: “But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks.”

That is the moment we find ourselves in, both as a country and as a city. And it is a story that we’re still waiting for a future leader to tell us with enough power and passion that we all begin to believe it.

Al Gore calls for an “American spring”

-
4

 

In an interview with Keith Olberman Tuesday night  on his Current TV show,   Al Gore called for “an American spring” to counter the assault of the teaparty Republicans

and to go on the offensive from the grassroots and on the internet.  Gore was eloquent in his Goreish way and made many of the right points.

Olberman asked him, quite diplomatically, if a Democrat ought to run against  Obama and if Gore would support a Democratic primary fight.

Gore said no, he supported Obama and would continue to support him, and that the history of primary fights meant that the President and his challenger would both

lose.  He said Obama needed lots of help and pressure from the grassroots. Here’s the interview:  The Keith Olberman show is at 8 p.m. weekdays at Channel 107 in San Francisco.

I think Olberman is even better in this  format than he was when he pioneered the progressive tv show on MSNBC.  B3

http://current.com/shows/countdown/videos/al-gore-on-why-america-needs-a-non-violent-tahrir-square-part-one

 

 

Stop the right-wing revolutionaries

Sasha Cuttler
-
59
Stop the right-wing revolutionaries

The revolution has begun, but we aren’t the revolutionaries. That was the disturbing thought that occurred to me this morning as I listened to Fresh Air on KALW and its interview with Robert Draper, the New York Times Magazine journalist who is writing a book about the House of Representatives, where Tea Party backed members almost just succeeded in bringing down government as we know it.

That wasn’t how Draper cast the situation, although he did paint a vivid picture of the right-wing true believers who manufactured this debt ceiling “crisis” and their monomaniacal goals of slashing government to the bone, no matter what the consequences to the U.S. economy and way of life. Instead, the discussion triggered a memory of the powerful and prescient premise from economist Paul Krugman’s 2003 book The Great Unraveling.

In its opening pages, under the heading of “A Revolutionary Power,” Krugman cites an unlikely source for how to identify and oppose those bent on destroying a country’s institutions: Henry Kissinger. In 1957, as he was completing his doctorate at Harvard University, Kissinger wrote his dissertation, “A World Restored,” on Napoleon and the French reconstruction period after Waterloo, with some obvious parallels to the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s.

Kissinger argued for the importance of understanding the nature of a revolutionary force, and Krugman saw the inflexible right-wing movement in the U.S. as another example of that. “That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system,” Krugman wrote, citing the oft-stated belief of modern Republicans that “long-established American political and social institutions should not, in principle, exist – and [they] do not accept the rules that the rest of us have taken for granted.”

At the time, Krugman cited the efforts of right-wing politicians and institutions to undo such New Deal era programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, and Medicare, as well as their rejection of international treaties and cooperation in favor of empire and unilateralism. But since then, the right-wing has gone even further, willing to force the government into default in order to accomplish its ideological goal of destroying the federal government’s ability to ask anything of capital.

Kissinger made clear that such forces can’t be reasoned or compromised with, all you can do it try to defeat them before they destroy the country. The longer everyone delays arriving at that conclusion, the more difficult that task becomes, and that’s an important lesson for President Obama and the Democrats to learn right now.

“Lulled by a period of stability, which had seemed permanent, they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework. The defenders of the status quo therefore tend to begin by treating the revolutionary power as if protestation were merely tactical; as if it really accepted the existing legitimacy but overstated the case for bargaining purposes; as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited concession. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstances are considered balanced and sane…But it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion,” Kissinger wrote.

The Tea Party may have a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles and events surrounding the American Revolution, but make no mistakes that they do see themselves as revolutionaries, people who want to turn back the clock on the gains made in workers’ rights, environmental protection, tax equity, the creation of social safety net, and all the other hallmarks of civil society.

They’ve already taken over one of our two political parties, and succeeding in forcing the other one to do their bidding. Call me an “alarmist,” but if we don’t challenge the notion that Obama is “balanced and sane” and convince them that the American way of life is at stake, then we just might end up with another revolutionary war on our soil.

The crucial question: why didn’t Obama invoke the 14th amendment and seize the day?

-
7

For me, the crucial question for President Obama is why he didn’t take the advice of former President Bill Clinton, Rep. John Garamendi, and others who urged him to invoke  the 14th Amendment and its “validity of the public debt” point and then unilaterally raise the debt ceiling.

The Tea Party Republicans had manufactured a phony crisis with the debt ceiling, linked it to their wrongway issue of tax reduction, and then held the nation hostage to their  maniacal demands for trillions of  cuts to domestic programs.
Armageddon was nigh.

Yet Obama, after caving on single payer health care, the public option,  restoring the Bush tax cuts, on and on, and after negotiating  the debt crisis on Republican turf with many of their arguments and much of their language, refused to take the one crucial  step that could have saved the day for him  and the country that will suffer further under Teapartyism.
 
Sure, Republicans would have screamed bloody murder. Tough.  They  forced Obama to the brink,  and public opinion would have supported him fighting it out for once and  taking this understandable position of executive authority under these draconian circumstances.

The legal experts I read and heard on television said that they didn’t think that Congress could have  been able to subvert this decision.  And consider the campaign issue: Obama took on the Teaparty Republicans and beat them at their own game. Instead, he allowed them to win the battle and allowed Speaker of the House John Boehner to claim that he had gotten 98 per cent of what he wanted.

And what did Obama and the Democrats get?  The prospect of  a Republican tax-cutting disaster moving in agonizing stages that will most likely deepen the recession, stunt job growth even further,  keep unemployment rising, and give the Republicans an armory full of ammunition to knock him out.

Shakespeare has a phrase for this in his sonnet 73:  Obama and his adminstration were  “consumed by that with which it was nourished by.”  B3

P.S. Paul Krugman was right. The MSNBC lineup has done a wonderful job of covering the crisis and laying out the issues with passion and not Beltway “objectivity.”  Cbris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and the guy who started it all, Keith Olberman now on Current TV on Channel 170 in San Francisco. Thomm Hartmann and Randi Rhodes did good work on Green 960.

Dick Meister: Workers gaining in fight for union rights

Maria Poblet
-
0

This year marks the 76th anniversary of the National Labor Relations Act, the Depression-era law that was essential in building an American middle class – and which remains essential to the well-being of all working Americans. 

But you know what? Powerful corporate interests and their Republican buddies in Congress are nevertheless trying mightily to cripple what has so long been one of the most important U.S. laws of any kind.

Their main target currently is the National Labor Relations Board – the NLRB –which administers the National Labor Relations Act and takes seriously the act’s stated purpose of encouraging collective bargaining between workers and their employers.

The five-member labor board did very little to carry out its task of encouraging unionization during the notoriously anti-union Bush administration. But under President Obama, the NLRB has been doing its job – or has been trying to do its job — in the face of stiff Republican opposition.

The Republican opponents claim – what else? – that under Obama, the NLRB has become a tool of organized labor, Big Labor, as they like to call it.

It’s impossible to take those charges seriously. The labor board obviously has not been acting as an agent of unions, big or small. It’s merely been enforcing the law. But that, of course, means anti-labor forces no longer have the firm cooperation of the NLRB in their attempts to weaken unions as much as possible. They no longer have an ally in the White House. Bush is gone.

Imagine that. The National Labor Relations Board is actually doing what the law says it should do. And unions are actually getting a more or less even break vis-à-vis the corporate interests with whom they collectively bargain – or with whom they try to bargain.

What’s really got the anti-labor crowd sputtering lately is a ruling by the NLRB’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon,  against the Boeing Aircraft Company. Boeing was charged with breaking the labor law by moving a major assembly line from a unionized plant in Washington State to South Carolina, a notably anti-union state, in response to a machinist strike at the Washington plant. 

Moving the assembly line was done in violation of a provision in the National Labor Relations Act that bans companies from punishing striking unions by withholding or transferring jobs. Thus, said the NLRB’s Solomon, the assembly line should be moved back to Washington State.

Oh, boy, those union-hating Republicans in Congress didn’t like that at all. They threatened to defund the NLRB if it doesn’t withdraw its order to Boeing, trotting out their usual tired response to just about anything done in favor of unions these days. You’ve undoubtedly heard it – thousands of  times, maybe. Yes, that’s right. A ruling in favor of labor and labor law would be . . . Ah, yes, a job killer. Sure.

GOP House members have actually introduced something called – really – “The Protecting Jobs From Government Interference  Act.” that would void the NLRB order against Boeing  and prohibit future such orders. The proposed law undoubtedly has the approval of the union-hating U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has led the right-wing charge against the NLRB. It complains that the labor board is “out of control.”

Actually, the NLRB is out of control  – out of control of the right-wingers who had  their way throughout Bush’s two terms and are miffed that, unlike Bush, Obama doesn’t think their way is the only way to handle labor-management relations.

Much to the chagrin of the right-wingers, the labor board has come back strong under Obama. One of the board’s most important steps has been to develop rules to streamline the workplace elections that are held to determine if workers want to unionize. 

The board has cut short the pre-election periods that employers have used to harass workers into voting against unionization, approaching them individually and in mass meetings, frequently threatening to fire or otherwise penalize workers who vote for union representation. Obama’s NLRB also has cut back the time for management to appeal the outcome of a vote for unionization.

The changes, as one union attorney noted, are “common sense changes that drag labor law into the 21st century.” 

Common sense often doesn’t mean much to anti-labor Republicans. Sensible or not, they plunge onward on the anti-labor path that’s always been theirs. According to a count by Politico.com’s Joseph Williams, House Republicans have convened oversight hearings on the NLRB or summoned board members to Capitol Hill 14 times since the midterm elections to answer harassing questions and have threatened to severely cut the NLRB’s budget to “bring the board to heel.”

So, it’s still not easy for unions and workers who want to join unions, despite the progressive change in the NLRB’s attitude and operations. 

But the situation is looking much better since the change has come, since the law that promises American workers the right of unionization – and the important benefits that come from it – -is now being enforced by people who believe that their mission is not to hamper unions, but to encourage their growth for the benefit of all Americans.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

“Contrary to common sense”

Sasha Cuttler
-
16
“Contrary to common sense”

It’s been my observation over 20 years in journalism that the politicians who most often refer to “common sense” tend not to possess it. And that was reinforced this morning when I got an email for Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachman plugging a new television commercial opposing raising the nation debt ceiling.

“Dear Fellow Conservative,” it began, misreading her audience by a big way in my case, “I will not vote to increase the debt limit. Period.” And in the commercial, she follows this opening line with, “It goes completely contrary to common sense.”

With six words, she tortures not just grammar, but also the very notion of common sense. Because it make not one iota of sense to let the U.S. default on its debts, lower its credit rating and artificially jack up interest rates, simply because these ignorant Tea Party fools don’t like the size and scope of the federal government.

If the people really agreed with the right-wingers’ plans to gut government, Bachman would have the votes in Congress and the White House to make deep cuts during the normal budget process, which common sense should indicate is the proper time to make budget cuts. But instead, she and other conservatives are pandering to ignorant yahoos who think greatly reducing government will somehow help the economy, when actually it would kill economic growth.

“When times are tight for your family or mine, we know that’s not the time to call the credit card company and ask for a higher credit limit. But that’s what many elected officials in Washington are suggesting we do for our nation, right in the midst of an economic crisis!” Bachman argues.

Clearly, Bachman has never actually been in the position of having to make the tough decisions between buying groceries for your kids and refusing to take on more debt, because many families often do choose the former. And no matter what cash-strapped families decide, they also usually look at ways to increase their revenue, something Bachman and the conservative refuse to do, for ideological reasons that make no sense.

But that’s really beside the point, because there is no equivalency between family and federal budgets. While it is certainly true that Congress and President Obama should take steps to reduce the budget deficit – hopefully addressing the ridiculously high and growing wage and wealth gaps in the process, problems directly connected to the ballooning federal debt – no reputable economist would support the deep cuts Bachman advocates while the unemployment rates are as high as they are.

And when the time comes to start making deep cuts in government spending, we should start with the military budget, because it’s the lion’s share of the budget and ultimately an investment that harms our species. It’s just common sense.

Obama 2012 raises $86 million in small donations

Mary Magee
-
3
Obama 2012 raises $86 million in small donations

The Obama 2012 campaign files its first financial report with the Federal Election Commission on Friday July 15. In an email to Obama supporters, the campaign noted that, “the Washington chatter around the report we’re releasing has focused on one number: the sum total we’ve raised.”

That number, as it turns out,  is more than $86 million, with 98 percent of the contributions coming in at $250 or less, with the average donation being $69, according to the Obama campaign.

”But other numbers that the pundits often ignore — like how many field offices we and the DNC have open, how many one-on-one conversations we’ve had with potential supporters, and how many people have already decided to own a piece of this campaign — tell the real story of our campaign,” Jim Messina, campaign manager for Obama for America, observed in an emailed statement.

According to a video the Obama campaign released today, they’ve had 31, 000 face-to-face conversations and 290,000 phone conversations with supporters. And they have already held 650 grassroots planning meetings and signed up 1,500 full-time volunteers.

”All those numbers are in the video, and they’re the ones you should be proud of today. Watch it now,” the Obama campaign suggests.

The campaign concludes by noting that, “our opponents won’t have hundreds of thousands of people giving whatever they can afford — so they’ll be relying heavily on money from two sources to fund an unprecedented barrage.”

These two sources, the campaign claims, are “Washington lobbyists and special interests whose explicit aim is to influence the federal government in any way they can,” and, “outside groups that don’t have to disclose a word about what they’ve raised or who they’ve raised it from, like one of Karl Rove’s political organizations. His groups have set an astounding $120 million fundraising goal in their campaign to tear down President Obama.”

The specter of Rove (aka the “boy genius” or “Turd Blossom” depending on your point of view) rising from the ashes like Harry Potter’s nemesis Voldemort isn’t exactly comforting (unless you believe that American politics are on a parallel track to the outcome of the Harry Potter 7: Part 2 movie, which opens this Friday.)

As the Obama campaign notes, “The threat to our success from these determined groups — acting solely in their own interest, not the public interest — is real, and it’s growing. And it’s going to take serious commitment and vigilance from all of us to withstand their attacks while still building the grassroots campaign we’ll need to win.”

Now I know plenty of people who are pissed off at Obama, because, yes we did kill Osama, and yes we didn’t withdraw all the troops from Afghanistan, etc. etc. But it feels as if the moment is already here in which regular folks need to remind themselves what life under a Republican administration with Rove’s hands on the wheel  was truly like. Unless, of course, you truly believe that life under Obama is just as bad. In which case, let’s hear about the realistic alternatives…

our Weekly Picks, July 13-19, 2011

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

THURSDAY 14

EVENT

Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara

Here’s your spiritual riddle of the week, young grasshopper. Say you’re a Buddhist monk. Two thousand fires are sprinting across California’s tinderous golden landscape. The wind shifts. One blaze streams down a single unpaved road, the sole portal to your monastery. The conundrum expressed best by the Clash alights in your ever-mindful mind: should I stay or should I go now? In June 2008, five monks chose to stay when the Big Sur fires threatened Tassajara, the country’s oldest Zen monastery. Author Colleen Morton Busch shares their story in her new book Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara. Hear her read selections, plus stories from the monks and wild land firefighters, on how they successfully fought the fire with the fire within. (Kat Renz)

7:30 p.m., free

San Francisco Zen Center

300 Page, SF

(415) 863-3136

www.sfzc.org

 

EVENT

“Cabaret Bastille”

LitQuake revives the ghosts of Left Bank bohemia for its cabaret and fundraiser Cabaret Bastille. Everyone’s favorite modernists will be in the house — Anais Nin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, H.D. and of course, the salon dom herself Gertrude Stein — as local writers impersonate these legends and read selections from their work. Other merriments include songs by accordion-accompanied chanteuse Gabrielle Ekedal, a make-your-own-Matisse station, exquisite corpses, and much genius-inducing imbibing. (Matt Sussman)

8 p.m.–midnight, $15

Cellspace

2050 Bryant, SF

www.brownpapertickets.com

 

EVENT

“Crimes Against Horticulture: When Bad Taste Meets Power Tools”

I earn most of my money on my knees, initiating a rampage of genocidal proportions upon the natural world. I pull weeds and I love the killing, though not without remorse, for who am I to judge? (As a nonbreeder, I’m biologically nil compared to the reproductive success of an invasive plant.) I wonder if funny-man gardener Billy Goodnick would diagnose this murderous spree a “crime against” or a “crime in the name of” horticulture? An award-winning landscape architect and host of the Santa Barbara television show Garden Wise Guys, Goodnick brings his humor-infused message of sustainability to horticultural criminals, crazies (any “compulsive rakers” out there?), and petal perfectionists alike. (Renz)

7 p.m., $15

Conservatory of Flowers

100 John F. Kennedy, Golden Gate Park, SF

(415) 831-2090

www.conservatoryofflowers.org

 

COMEDY

Jay Pharoah

Even though comedian Jay Pharoah is only 23, he is already a seasoned veteran of the stand-up circuit, hitting stages since his early teens and honing his hilarious impersonation skills. Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, and President Obama are among his stable of dead-on, side splitting impressions, some of which, along with his many other comedic talents, have been featured on national television since he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live last year. Pharoah’s star is only certain to rise with more national exposure, so do yourself a favor and catch him this weekend in the cozy confines of Cobb’s before it’s too late. (Sean McCourt)

Thurs/14–Sun/17, 8 p.m.

Also Fri/15–Sat/16, 10:15 p.m., $18.50–$20.50

Cobb’s Comedy Club

915 Columbus, SF

(415) 928-4320

www.cobbscomedy.com

 

FRIDAY 15

PERFORMANCE

Persepolis, Texas

Sometimes it takes a Texas-reared second-generation Iranian American cisgendered female in drag to point out what should be obvious: “That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows” (to quote an old Englishman who never set a pointy shoe in Texas). Is self-presentation of any kind just a drag act by another name? Isn’t the real question whose terms apply in the fashioning of one’s persona? Whose hijab is it anyway? San Francisco–based performance artist Maryam Farnaz Rostami explores the tenuous line between identity, persona, eroticism, and exoticism in her first evening-length solo show, embodying a handful of characters — including Rostami’s celebrated drag persona Mona G. Hawd — in movement, music, and an unexpected narrative encompassing contemporary Iran, Iranian Texas, and queer San Francisco. (Robert Avila)

Fri/15–Sun/17, 8 p.m., $20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

1-800-838-3006

www.counterpulse.org

 

FILM

Skatetown, U.S.A.

Billed as “The Rock and Roller Disco Movie of the Year!” — the people behind Roller Boogie (which came out the same year) must have taken great offense — 1979 crapsterpiece Skatetown, U.S.A. has been very hard to find for years. What a cast: top-billed rodent Scott Baio, a slutted-up Marcia Brady (a.k.a. Maureen McCormick, who claimed she became a coke addict on this shoot), and 1979 Playboy Playmate-turned-1980-murder-victim Dorothy Stratten, to name just a few. Plus tons of actual roller-disco troupes — you can tell they thought this was their ticket to Broadway — and two genuinely talented dancers showcased as good and bad guy. The very Warriors-style villain is Patrick Swayze, making his film debut (his belt-whip skate solo smokes). With its mix of stupid skit comedy and stupider ensemble dramatics, Skatetown, U.S.A. is a fungal time capsule that played less-than-fresh even at its moment of birth. Yet it’s kind of great anyway. This one-night only revival features free tube socks, presumably not-free beer, and a post-screening roller disco party at Cellspace. (Dennis Harvey)

7 and 9 p.m., $15 (includes roller disco)

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611

www.roxie.com

 

PERFORMANCE

Hello, My Name is Joe

Bringing a global perspective to the push and pull of power structures, Meridian Dance presents 8213 Physical Dance Theater’s world premiere Hello, My Name is Joe, a site-specific work inspired by the concurrent visual art exhibition “In Extremis: Prints Monumental, Intimate.” Based in Taipei, Taiwan, under the direction of Chuo-Tai Sun with collaborator Casey Avaunt (a Maine native), 8213 Physical Dance Theater reveals the ways humans emotionally and physically battle controls. Launching from the old children’s song “Hello, My Name is Joe,” in which the protagonist is asked by his boss to push, pull, and turn buttons, the work challenges the performers to negotiate their freedom within the walls of the Meridian Gallery. (Julie Potter)

Fri/15–Sat/16, 7:30 p.m., $10–$20

Meridian Gallery

535 Powell, SF

(415) 398-7229

www.meridiangallery.org

 

SATURDAY 16

 

FILM

When Harry Met Sally …

They’ve brought salsa and swing dancing, a circus festival, and classical music to Union Square. Now the Jewels in the Square Performance Series reopens age-old debates about the nature of friendships and sex, the rebound girlfriend, and orgasmic deli dishes. The latest event on the outdoor-entertainment calendar (in partnership with Film Night in the Park and the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival) is a screening of 1989 classic rom-com When Harry Met Sally. Prime your funny bone for the upcoming 2011 SFJFF (opening night is July 21) with the ultimate “Can a straight man and a straight woman ever be just friends?” flick, starring Meg “On the Side” Ryan and Billy “Made a Woman Meow” Crystal. Bring a friend, significant other, or both. (David Getman)

8 p.m., free

Union Square

Geary at Powell, SF

www.sfjff.org

 

MUSIC

Black Dynamic Sound Orchestra

“Blaxsploitation” cinema is as much prized for its music as for its leather-wearing, Afro-having, ass-kicking heroes and the vengeance that they wreak. What would Shaft (1971) be without its theme song? How could justice be adequately dispensed, or love properly made, without exceptionally funky grooves? It was with questions such as these in mind that the producers of Black Dynamite (2009) must have chosen Adrian Younge to score their filmic love song to black belts and pointy collars. Younge, who also edited Black Dynamite, created a perfect backdrop to a ridiculous movie, and wrote some great songs doing it. With Younge at the helm, Black Dynamite Sound Orchestra takes his vision on the road, performing selections from the Black Dynamite original soundtrack as well as unreleased tracks from a forthcoming album. (Cooper Berkmoyer)

With Lord Loves a Working Man and the Struts

10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

EVENT

Phono Del Sol Music and Food Festival

Music festivals can totally suck. They cost an Xbox 360, take half a week of your life (that’s never coming back) to see four bands that were in town at small venues the month before, make you realize Kanye is better on YouTube, force you to fend off that bro who won’t stop asking for drugs, and camp in a in a parking lot next to Porta-Potties. It’s a little much. Thankfully the folks at the Bay Bridged blog and Tiny Telephone have you covered with this darling, commitment-free fest that combines two SF passions: music and food. They’ll bring musicians including Aesop Rock, Mirah, and Appetite, and you bring your appetite (plus cash for Off the Grid’s food trucks.) (Ryan Prendiville)

Noon-7 p.m., free

Potrero Del Sol Park

25th St. at San Bruno, SF

www.thebaybridged.com

 

SUNDAY 17

 

VISUAL ART/EVENT

“Google Family Day”

In its “Doodle 4 Google: What I’d Like To Do Someday … ” exhibit (through July 19), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art linked up with Google to showcase the works of 40 student artists. The works (selected from more than 100,000 submissions) were inspired by a prompt for kids to envision what they would like to do in the future — and channel that energy into redesigning a logo for the website’s continually changing home page. The moon-themed winner (which earned its seven-year-old creator, South San Francisco’s Matteo Lopez, $15,000 in college money plus a technology grant for his school) hit Google in May. The 39 other contestants have the pretty nifty consolation prize of having had their artwork hung in a museum before they’ve even hit 18. Today’s “Google Family Day” event offers free entry for families with kids under 12, with special hands-on activities, performances, and more aimed at young artists. (Getman)

11 a.m.–4 p.m., free for families with children under 12

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

 

TUESDAY 19

 

MUSIC

Parenthetical Girls

Pop music. To some these two words together bring to fore images of cloying sweetness, a toothy smile in high gloss shrink-wrap bearing down on contented mall shoppers. Parenthetical Girls is here to remind us that pop still has cards up its sleeve, if not revel in the antagonism. The willfully obscure recording project (usually) from the Pacific Northwest warps complex operatic composition à la Sparks and Eno, adds a dash of Morrissey’s infamous ego, and ends up with songs that are almost caustically intellectual. Experimental it is, but not so much that the essential framework is smothered. Instead, Parenthetical Girls emerges as something uncanny; it draws you in with familiar pop music tropes but leaves you pleasantly unsettled. (Berkmoyer)

With Extra Life and Sam Mickens

9 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com 

 

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Calling the doom tune

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Calling the doom tune

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER 2012: The Musical!, the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s latest offering in its annual free outdoor theater shows, opens in the Oval Office, where President Obama (Michael Gene Sullivan) — face painted a garish red, white, and blue — sells out Workingclass Man (Cory Censoprano) at the bidding of his spooky capitalist overlords. It plays like a parody of agitprop conceits and, sure enough, it is. Audiences sprawled on the glade at the northwest corner of Dolores Park this Fourth of July (the production tours throughout the summer and fall across the Bay Area and beyond) were being treated to the radical stylings of “Theater BAM!”, a tiny left-wing theater company fighting the good fight against the Man and the Pigs, among other stock characters in the black-and-blue pageant of industrial and postindustrial capitalism.

It earned a good laugh, this dramatic feint. The scene ends, the company takes its bow, and the “real” play begins as life imitates art with uncomfortable (and self-referential) complications: the members of Theater BAM! are indeed committed to overthrowing the system, but have been at it some time now with limited results and redundant gestures. Worse still, the company is facing an unprecedented financial crisis that has them leaning toward corporate sponsorship.

This last detail appalls at least one member, steadfast artistic director Elaine (Lizzie Calogero). But the rest of the company finds itself swayed by Elaine’s sister and fellow BAMmer, ambitious daytime corporate sellout Suze (Siobhan Marie Doherty), otherwise busy climbing the ladder as assistant to investment banker Arthur Rand (Victor Toman). (“It’s all dirty money,” she sings, in composer-lyricists Pat Moran and Bruce Barthol’s bouncy 1950s-style R&B. “If you don’t take dirty money you don’t have any money at all.”)

Rand, for his part, tired of competing with the piffling “people” in the political marketplace, gets the idea (with Suze’s prompting) to buy himself a politician outright. The serviceable Senator Pheaus (Sullivan) does nicely in this position (i.e., supine). Eagerly, desperately following Rand’s explicit instructions, the telegenic Pheaus pushes forward Wall Street’s business-as-usual agenda through a ready rhetorical smokescreen of nebulous and all-pervading fear.

Meanwhile, the stalwarts of Theater BAM! find themselves underwritten by an ostensibly progressive, feel-good corporation called Green Planet, Inc., headed by a bubbly Ms. Haverlock (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro) who, with hands clasped firmly on the purse strings, “offers” increasingly invasive production suggestions. The upshot? A new musical about the end of everything called 2012, replete with Mayan priests and giddy millennial mayhem. Needless to say, apocalypse doesn’t go so well with political commitment or revolutionary change, but dovetails quite nicely with an apolitical consumerist ethos of all now and damn the future.

Directed with reliable snap by SFMT vet Wilma Bonet (augmented by Victor Toman’s big-time small-stage choreography) 2012: The Musical! is a solid SFMT production attuned to the timber of the “end times,” not as a biblical prophesy but as capitalist conspiracy. It also flags the messy compromises made all too easily by artists and audiences alike with “the system.” The script (by longtime head writer Sullivan, with additional dialogue from Ellen Callas) is along the way dependably smart and funny — and seemingly inspired at least in part by the recent Flake flap (to wit, Congressman and Arizona Republican Jeff Flake’s attack on NEA chair Rocco Landesman last May for the NEA’s funding of the 52-year-old left-wing San Francisco Mime Troupe). The half a dozen songs are equally snazzy, with admirably clear and pointed lyrics, and while the singing is not as strong as in recent years, the comic acting is first-rate.

But if the story complicates the usual agitprop scenario represented by the fictitious Theater BAM!, it can also be too pat to be wholly satisfying. The excuse offered business as usual by the distracting and enervating fear of the millennium has several sources after all, including the pernicious hard-on by religious demagogues for spiritual redemption in a fiery end (a crowd and pathology wonderfully exposed in SFMT’s Godfellas). The solutions as presented here are also less than clear. Getting the airhead Senator Pheaus to save the day by reading a speech crafted by our heroes, instead of his Wall Street handlers, only underscores the idea that such “representatives” are ventriloquist dummies who lean left or right depending on whose forearm is up their ass. Those guys are Theater Bum, and they’re overfunded.

2012: THE MUSICAL!

Through Sept. 25

Various Bay Area venues, free

www.sfmt.org

 

TV party

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
2
TV party

TRASH These days we’re used to TV series regularly offering better, more serious, and more relevant drama than mainstream movies, a notion unthinkable not long ago. But even at the height of boob tube silliness, when zero cable alternatives and FCC strictures resulted in mostly bland programming, there was some room for deviation from formula. That room was primarily occupied by TV movies, which began being produced in 1964. By decade’s end they were a broadcast staple, earning strong ratings and lessening the need for networks to purchase old theatrical-release films for broadcast.

In the 1970s TV movies would increasingly take on social issues. That kind of activist edge was still pretty rare, however, when two little-remembered telepics the Vortex Room is showing on Thursday, July 14 first aired. Both are dated relics stylistically but surprisingly prescient politically.

The Man (1972), which was given a brief theatrical release after being made for ABC, was adapted from Irving Wallace’s trashy bestseller by The Twilight Zone‘s Rod Serling — fair enough, since its conceit must have seemed science fiction at the time. James Earl Jones plays a fusty academic Senate president pro tempore suddenly swept into the Oval Office after circumstances wipe out the succession line before him.

Having a “black,” “Negro,” or “jigaboo” (depending on who’s talking and how publicly) commander-in-chief naturally brings out the not-so-latent racism in the various old white male power-mongers used to minority colleagues being powerless token figures. Polite and awed by his position to a fault — he’s no 2008 Barack Obama — our protag nonetheless learns to stand up for himself and his office, even if that means making some decisions unpopular with black voters.

Four years earlier, another trashy novelist (Sidney Sheldon of The Other Side of Midnight) had the pretty good idea of updating (without crediting) Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 cautionary novel It Can’t Happen Here — about a “patriotic” political party pushing the country toward a fascist dictatorship — as a modern action-suspense series. What with Vietnam protests, campus unrest, civil rights struggles, and so forth, the concept of our nation undergoing civil war was evidently too hot for the networks. They passed even after the original script had been shorn of nearly all direct political commentary.

Nonetheless, feature-length pilot Shadow on the Land is fairly strong (and violent) meat for the era. Its hectic portrait of a nation oppressed by governmental “security” brutality, air travel restrictions, etc. on one side, destabilized by a “Society of Man” underground resistance on the other is a metaphor applicable to the Nazi threat of Lewis’ day, Nixon vs. the Left, or post-Patriot Act America. It’s by turns wooden, heavy-handed, shrill, and sophisticated — not exactly good, but still a credible picture of something that could well happen here, perhaps more easily now than in 1968.  

THE UNITED STATES OF VORTEX

The Man, Thurs/14, 9 p.m.;

Shadow on the Land, Thurs/14, 11 p.m., $5

Vortex Room

1082 Howard, SF

www.myspace.com/thevortexroom

 

1...161718...51Page 17 of 51

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org