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Booker T. and Bettye LaVette punch up the soul

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By Andre Torrez

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In the 1960s Booker T. and the MG’s served as Stax/Volt’s house band, much like the Funk Brothers were for Motown. Playing alongside Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and the Staple Singers, among others, they beat Love and also Sly and the Family Stone to the racially-integrated rock-band punch. It was 1962’s "Green Onions" on the Memphis-based soul label that put them on the map. The song’s recent omnipresence at sporting events has given it a bit of a "jock jam" tag, but it isn’t tarnished completely.

Today Booker T. Jones is letting his signature Hammond organ sound sing alongside "the Great Lady of Soul," Bettye LaVette. After hearing her humbling rendition of the Who’s "Love Reign O’er Me" at that group’s Kennedy Center Honors, I knew LaVette’s tag was legit. Even Barbra Streisand — in attendance that night — recognized it. She turned to Pete Townshend in disbelief, asking if he’d really written that song.

Bettye Lavette, “Love Reign O’er”

LaVette gives the rock opera ballad a gut-wrenching, soulful treatment. She owns it.

For most of her career, the Detroit native has struggled, but she’s steadily built an audience, touring with late legends including James Brown and a young Mr. Pitiful along the way. LaVette’s had one-off singles released by Atlantic and Motown. It seems she is finally getting her due, having had the honor of dueting on a song at President Obama’s inauguration ceremony — even if it was with Jon Bon Jovi.

Now LaVette’s career has paralleled Booker T’s. Both are signed to Anti- Records. Booker’s new album for the label, Potato Hole, features Neil Young and includes a playful version of Outkast’s "Hey Ya," Expect covers aplenty — and some surprises, too — from this bill’s soulful one-two punch.

BOOKER T. AND BETTYE LAVETTE Fri/8, 8 p.m. Independent, 628 Divisadero, 415-771-1421. www.theindependentsf.com

Beyond May Day

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Text and photos by Joe Sciarrillo
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Thousands marched in Bay Area cities on May 1 to honor International Workers’ Day, or May Day, offering a preview of the big struggles to come on the national political front.

Mission District activists chanted on Dolores Street, “¡Qué viva las familias! ¡Qué viva el barrio! Viva!” energizing participants to join together to support their families and neighborhoods. Yet the daily struggles of immigrants and laborers, families living hand-to-mouth, and loved ones separated by borders has eluded most media outlets and commentators.

The nationwide marches focused on calls for comprehensive immigration reform and improving workers’ conditions, including passing the Employee Free Choice Act. This was just days after the first question at President Barack Obama’s April 29 news conference asked if he would close the U.S./Mexico border due to the swine flu outbreak. He, of course, responded by declaring that he would not do so.

Herrera lobbies for Healthy San Francisco

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By Steven T. Jones
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When I arrived back at San Francisco International Airport last night, weary after a long trip from Prague, I was surprised to bump into City Attorney Dennis Herrera. We chatted a moment and he told me that he was taking a red eye flight to DC to lobby the US Labor Department into supporting our Healthy San Francisco program.

As you may remember, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association has been mounting an aggressive (but so far unsuccessful) legal challenge of the city’s universal healthcare program, which is partially funded by employer contributions. GGRA is now trying to get the US Supreme Court to overturn the 9th Circuit’s ruling in the city’s favor.

Bush’s Labor Department filed an amicus brief supporting GGRA’s contention that the program violates the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act, a stance Herrera hopes the new administration will reverse. “We have higher hopes for the Obama Labor Department, so this is a preliminary discussion that Dennis is having with them,” Herrera spokesperson Matt Dorsey told me today.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, a former restaurateur who belonged to GGRA, claims credit on the gubernatorial campaign trail for Healthy San Francisco (which was actually created by then-Sup. Tom Ammiano), but did little to either get it passed or to defend it against attack from his allies. As with same-sex marriage, the other big feather Newsom tries to wear in his candidate’s cap, it is Herrera who’s doing the heavy lifting while Newsom pretends to Californians that he’s leading San Francisco.

A weekend under the influence: SFIFF 52

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By Lynn Rapoport

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Mabel (Gena Rowlands, in an Oscar-winning Oscar-nominated performance) has a rare calm moment in A Woman Under the Influence.

The first weekend of the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival produced a cheerful, if windblown, bottleneck along Post between Fillmore and Webster. The one outside the Castro on Sunday night had a slightly more shell-shocked emotional tenor. The crowd seemed in good enough spirits (though this reviewer admits to getting a bit misty-eyed) while giving Gena Rowlands a standing ovation when the 78-year-old actor came onstage before John Cassavetes’s A Woman under the Influence (1974). But the film’s two and a half hours of abrasive familial dysfunction and poorly attended-to mental illness are rough going, and no one could be blamed for wandering home in a torn-up, overwrought fugue. (Think happy thoughts: like the 2008 restoration of the film by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, underwritten by Gucci.)

Less emotionally brutalizing was Friday evening’s screening of Art & Copy (screening again Tues/28, 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki), where doc maker Doug Pray (Hype!, Scratch, Surfwise) expressed satisfaction at finally getting a film into SFIFF and noted that this one was centered on “the idea that if you hate advertising, make better advertising.”

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Radio, radio: a scene from Art & Copy.

DVRs, defaced billboards, and legislation to calm the traffic of branding on virtually every visible surface of public space also spring to mind. However, these and other options are left unexplored in favor of a brief history of the revolution that occurred in advertising midcentury; commentary by some of the rebel forces and their descendants, including locals Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein (Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners); entertaining behind-the-scenes tales of famous ad campaigns (Got Milk?, I Want My MTV); and stats sprinkled throughout on advertising’s cultural presence, nationally and globally.

Self-comparisons to cave painters and a sequence near the close that feels like an advertisement for advertising (emotionally evocative images of children’s faces upturned in wonder to the sky: check) are somewhat uncomfortable to witness. But Pray has gathered together some of the industry’s brighter, more engaging lights, and his subjects discuss their vocation intelligently, thoughtfully, wittily, and often thoroughly earnestly. It would have been interesting to hear, amid the earnestness, and the exalted talk of advertising that rises to the level of art, some philosophizing on where all this branding and selling gets us, in an age when it’s hard to deny that breakneck consumption is having a somewhat deleterious effect on the planet. Or to learn from these creatives whether there were any ad campaigns they wouldn’t touch, such as one centered on nuclear energy, or the reelection of George W. Bush. After all, many of the interviewees come across as shaggy ex-hippies and liberals. (Last fall, trade paper the Denver Egotist referred to “the entire creative world uniting against John McCain in support of Barack Obama” in a piece on Goodby, Silverstein-made anti-McCain spots that the agency cofounders reportedly underwrote personally.) Still, the film is successful in humanizing and developing a richer picture of a vilified profession. And what it reveals about the visions of its subjects (one compares a good brand to someone you’d like to have over for dinner; another asserts that “great advertising makes food taste better”; another that “you can manufacture any feeling that you want to manufacture”) makes it worth watching, even if you make a habit of fast-forwarding past the ads.

Slow down the solar project

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EDITORIAL The concept is so good it’s hard to imagine why anyone would criticize it: the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission wants to cover the Sunset Reservoir with solar panels, creating the largest municipal solar generating project in the country. The money would come from existing SFPUC revenue — no new taxpayer dollars. The Sierra Club loves the idea, and Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing it.

We agree that the reservoir is a perfect place for a solar project, and that the city ought to be pursuing this.

But the structure of the deal makes us uncomfortable — and the financing shows a serious flaw in how federal money for renewable energy is allocated.

Under the terms of the proposal, a private company, Recurrent Energy, would finance and build the plant at a cost of perhaps $40 million. The facility would have the capacity to generate 5 MW of electricity, enough to power 2,500 houses. The city, in turn, would agree to buy that power for the next 25 years, at about 23.5 cents per kilowatt hour — far more than the current market rate for electricity but less than what other cities have agreed to pay for long-term solar contracts.

The city would have an option to buy the plant from Recurrent after seven years for $33 million.

The good news is that this would be a public-power project — the city would own the electricity and could use it to power public buildings and eventually, once the community choice aggregation (CCA) system is running, could sell it as retail power to residents and businesses.

But Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and David Campos have asked the obvious question: Why is a private company even involved? Why can’t the city build the solar generating station itself? The CPUC’s answer: It’s cheaper to let Recurrent do the work — because the private outfit will get a $12 million tax break from the federal government.

That’s a serious problem — why is the Obama administration giving tax breaks for private projects that aren’t available to cities? "What we should be looking at is why San Francisco, with all its clout in Washington, can’t get that same sort of subsidy for a public project," Campos told us.

Or as Mirkarimi put it: "This only makes sense to me if there’s some guarantee that the city will actually buy the plant in seven years. Otherwise we’re going to look back at this in year 15 and realize it’s not such a good deal."

The city’s energy future is very much up in the air right now — CCA is on the cusp of viability, there’s still an active public-power movement, and it’s very hard to say what the city’s needs will be (or what the price of solar energy will be) 10 years from now, much less 25. So we’re very nervous about signing a contract of that length with a private company.

Yes, the Recurrent deal offers solar now — and that’s important. But the supervisors shouldn’t rush this through. At the very least, they should pass a resolution asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to seek to direct the same subsidies that private companies can get to public solar projects — and to delay a final vote on this until there’s a better analysis of why a private company should be given a long-term contract for what ought to be a public project. *

Don’t drill here

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY When U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar looked out at a sea of faces during a San Francisco public hearing April 16, a band of activists dressed as polar bears, sea turtles, and other marine creatures stood out from the rest. Their message, also articulated by a host of federal and state-elected officials, was unequivocally clear: no new oil and gas drilling off the California coast.

Waving a thick document in the air, Salazar explained that he’d inherited a five-year plan from the Bush administration to award new leases for oil and gas drilling in the federally controlled outer continental shelf, which comprises some 1.7 billion underwater acres off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska.

Rather than move the policy as planned, Salazar extended public comment for six months, met with stakeholders in each region, and placed greater emphasis on developing offshore renewable energy. The San Francisco public hearing was the last in a series of four that Salazar attended.

"One of the significant issues that is so important to President Obama is that we move forward with a new energy frontier," Salazar said. He advocated embracing offshore wind and other renewable alternatives as part of a "comprehensive energy plan going forward." Yet Salazar also indicated that future plans for the nation’s energy mix were "not to the exclusion of oil and gas," and mentioned that opportunities for "clean coal" technology should also be considered.

Under the five-year plan, three new leases are proposed off California’s coast — two in the south, and one in the Point Arena Basin, an underwater swath near Fort Bragg. Elected officials unanimously opposed any new offshore petroleum development. "Our state clearly is saying to you today, no," declared Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "Instead of putting our California coast and economy in jeopardy, we need to look at … green technology which will bring us new jobs."

Lt. Gov. John Garamendi sounded a similar note, saying the billions that would be invested in offshore oil could be put toward advancing clean energy. Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma) highlighted the risk of oil spills around the Point Arena Basin. "It could be turned from a wellspring of life into a death plume," she said. "This shimmering band of coast must be protected."

While nearly every testimony blasted new offshore oil development, the conversation brightened when Salazar asked for comments on renewable energy. According to estimates by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, offshore wind in shallow areas could provide some 20 percent of the electricity needs of coastal states nationwide. Wave energy, while still under study, might one day generate enough electricity to power some 197 million homes per year, according to Department of the Interior estimates.

Most of the oil that could be extracted from the outer continental shelf would come from the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, with some 10 billion barrels potentially available off the Pacific coast. Joe Sporano of the Western States Petroleum Association said offshore drilling could create jobs and limit dependence on foreign oil. Yet Boxer pointed out that, based on Energy Information Administration figures, drilling for oil across all areas would yield just 1 percent of the nation’s total oil consumption by 2030 — and it’s not believed to make a real difference in gas prices.

Richard Charter, government relations consultant with Defenders of Wildlife, seemed confident that California’s coast would be protected. "You have a new interior secretary for an administration that received California electoral votes … in a state that is pretty much single-minded in its position in terms of saving the coast," he said.

Charter’s optimism was helped by a recent federal appeals court ruling against the previous administration’s plan to award new offshore-drilling leases in the Arctic.

So now, "whatever Secretary Salazar does will have his own stamp on it," Charter said. "In each of these hearings, it’s become apparent that the Obama administration may be coming around to a new approach."

Public comment for the offshore leasing plan ends in late September. Salazar told reporters that he expects a decision by the end of the year.

Editorial: Slow down the Sunset solar project

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Why is the Obama administration giving tax breaks for private projects that aren’t available to cities?

EDITORIAL
The concept is so good it’s hard to imagine why anyone would criticize it: the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission wants to cover the Sunset Reservoir with solar panels, creating the largest municipal solar generating project in the country. The money would come from existing SFPUC revenue — no new taxpayer dollars. The Sierra Club loves the idea, and Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing it.

We agree that the reservoir is a perfect place for a solar project, and that the city ought to be pursuing this.
But the structure of the deal makes us uncomfortable — and the financing shows a serious flaw in how federal money for renewable energy is allocated.

Daly and the Democrats

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Daly, Longo

By Tim Redmond

The race between Chris Daly and August Longo for regional director of the California Democratic Party has gotten a blog lot of blog press — far more attention than this low-lvel internal party stuff garners. Frankly, most people have no idea what a regional director does, or why it ought to matter to them.

But there’s a lot more going on here than what the cynics see as Daly looking for a new job when he’s termed out of office. (By the way, this isn’t exactly a job — the regional directors aren’t paid. It’s a volunteer position. And other than the chance to move up in state party leadership, it’s not a job that carries a lot of power or influence. Honestly — how many of you even knew that Longo was the ten-year incumbent?)

At the last state convention, there were signs everywhere that the Howard Dean wing of the party, the young, tech-savvy activists who were coalescing around Barack Obama, was getting restive. You saw it at the Resolutions Committee, where a handful of party-reform measures popped up, and were nadily shot down by state party Chair Art Torres. You saw it when Hillary Clinton was booed over Iraq. The Old Guard kept control, but you got a sense that the energy was all on the other side.

And now that Obama’s in the White House, that reformer energy will be even more visible in Sacramento this weekend. The Daly-Longo race won’t by itself change the party, but it will be a signal about its future direction.

Shades of green

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sarah@sfbg.com

When President Barack Obama signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in mid-February, folks across the country were hopeful that the $787 billion stimulus package would help preserve and create decent jobs in their communities.

And in mid-March, when the Obama administration announced that Bay Area social justice activist Van Jones was joining the White House Council on Environmental Quality, advocates for green jobs took it as a sign that Obama shares Jones’ belief that we can fix our nation’s two biggest problems — excessive greenhouse gas production and not enough good jobs for the working class — by creating a green-collar economy.

Jones cofounded Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which opposes police abuse and promotes alternatives to incarceration, and founded Oakland’s Green for All, which aims to create green-collar jobs in low-income communities. He defines a green-collar job as "a family-supporting, career-track job that directly contributes to preserving or enhancing environmental quality."

"Think of them as the 2.0 version of old-fashioned blue-collar jobs, upgraded to respect the Earth and meet the environmental challenges of today," Jones wrote in his New York Times bestseller The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (HarperOne, 2008).

But is Jones’ definition codified into Obama’s Recovery Act? And in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom speaks incessantly about green jobs and regularly praises Jones, will the jobs we create be for the people who need them most? And how will that play out in a city where blacks, Latinos and Asians experience higher unemployment, poverty, and incarceration rates than whites, and building construction has stalled, pitting skilled union workers against training program graduates?

Last month, an alliance of community and worker organizations from San Francisco’s working class neighborhoods sent a letter to Newsom outlining concerns about the Recovery Act’s equity, job quality, and transparency requirements.

Antonio Diaz of PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights), Alex Tom of the Chinese Progressive Association, Steve Williams of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), and Terry Valen of the Filipino Community Center asked Newsom to ensure that ARRA funds would be used to create "green jobs and opportunities primarily for low-income people and people of color" and "high quality jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits, safe and healthy working conditions, and career ladders."

"We ask for your commitment to greater transparency and community input in shaping and monitoring the infusion of ARRA funds for San Francisco’s developing green collar economy," they wrote.

Two weeks later Newsom announced the launching of www.recoverysf.org, a Web site that seeks to track stimpack funds coming to San Francisco. Although the Web site shows that $150 million of the first quarter-billion of formula funding is headed toward infrastructure projects, it does not include estimates of the numbers of green jobs created.

Wade Crowfoot of the Mayor’s Office told the Guardian that the city is focused on ensuring that green jobs are created with these funds and that the City Attorney’s Office is figuring out what is "allowable" under Recovery Act’s guidelines.

On April 3, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget issued a 172-page memo outlining the Recovery Act’s policy goals. The goals included ensuring compliance with equal opportunity laws and principles, promoting local hiring, providing maximum practicable opportunities for small business and equal opportunities for disadvantaged business, encouraging sound labor practices, and engaging with community-based organizations.

"But will all cities include achievable, measurable requirements?" Crowfoot said. "I don’t think so, without federal guidelines."

This lack of specifics, Crowfoot says, has the City Attorney figuring out if San Francisco can include "first source" hiring requirements, in which hiring halls agree to interview graduates from local training programs first. If so, Crowfoot says, the city will seek to leverage existing funding for energy efficiency programs and conduct hire-locally campaigns in low-income communities.

But as Crowfoot notes, although we know that $1.5 million in ARRA funding is coming to San Francisco for weatherizing homes — helping to decrease the energy costs of low-income residents, reduce the city’s energy demands, and increase the number of people hired from the local community to do energy audits and retrofits — we still don’t know how many jobs will be created per project, which is the basic goal of economic stimulation.

"If we spend the dollars, say, on boiler replacement, that’s more equipment and less labor," Crowfoot said. "But the more you hire locally, the more those folks get experience, the more they’ll be well positioned to get jobs in the non-subsidized sector once the stimulus funds are gone."

Acknowledging the tension between laid-off union workers and graduates of apprentice training programs, Crowfoot said, "We are trying to figure out a balance, whereby the community is not shut out, but the unions’ needs are addressed. We want to be careful about how many jobs we say are going to be created. We don’t want to build hope in populations who already have a lot of mistrust in the government."

Michael Theriault, secretary and treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, told us that 25 percent of the region’s 16,000 building trades workers are out of work, compared to nearly full employment last year.

In the past, the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council provided CityBuild with instructors and took the lion’s share of the program graduates, Theriault explains. But under present conditions, the Council isn’t keen on another CityBuild cycle.

"I think they should work to sponsor another cycle, but the ball is also in the city’s court," Theriault said, noting that the ARRA-funded weatherization program could soon be offering prevailing union wages ($20 an hour for roofers, $40 to $50 for plumbers and electricians) that could help ease the tension. And then there’s the inconvenient truth that some union members view non-unionized solar panel installers as "scabs," creating another barrier to using green jobs to lift the underemployed.

Mayor Newsom has until June to secure and implement stimpack funding as part of upcoming local budget proposals, a timetable that has Green for All issuing a call for action to ensure that Recovery Act implementation creates green-collar jobs, ensures transparency and accountability, and supports pathways out of poverty.

"This may be the most important opportunity you’ll ever have to bring green-collar jobs to your community," Green For All wrote in a public statement. "But the planning process will be over in the blink of an eye, and your community could miss out. That’s why we’re calling on you to take action now."

Green for All field organizer Julian Mocine-McQueen is scheduled to sit down with Crowfoot this week in an effort to get Newsom to sign his group’s pledge. He said there’s been an expansion of the city’s lighting and refrigeration cooling retrofitting program, starting with small business owners who speak English as a second language. "It’s good," McQueen said. "But it’s not enough."

He believes green job success will depend, in part, on including hiring parameters. "A job in the city’s southeast sector may not pay $70,000 a year, but it would be a huge step toward creating a family-sustaining job," McQueen said, noting that the Obama administration has "to a certain extent" adopted Jones’ definition of green-collar jobs. "I’m not sure that they have codified it," McQueen said. "They have recommendations."

Asked to define green jobs during a recent media roundtable on projected budget deficits, Newsom talked about weatherization and sustainability and plans to expand the city’s training academies before handing the floor to the Office of Economic and Workforce Development’s Kyri McClellan, whom he described as his "green czarina."

McClellan, who describes herself as "the lead cat-herder" of Recovery Act funds, told reporters that San Francisco is expected to receive a quarter of a billion dollars in formula funds in the coming fiscal year, 95 percent of which have been allocated to "shovel-ready" projects that were already queued up under the city’s 10-year capital plan.

During a subsequent board committee hearing, McClellan shared job estimates — 30 jobs from the $11 million Department of Public Works street paving allocation and 250 jobs from the $18 million Housing Authority retrofitting allocation — that raised eyebrows.

McClellan said that OEWD is "moving as quickly as possible to take the dollars we’ve been allocated, get approval from the Board of Supervisors, and get programs up and running."

Observing that the city also has parallel funding for training programs such as CityBuild and a Green Academy, McClellan added that "no one is working harder than Rhonda Simmons." Reached by phone, OEWD’s Simmons said she has been working with San Francisco State University professor Raquel Pinderhughes to identify five job sectors that have "the capacity to grow the greatest number of green jobs."

These include solar installation, energy efficiency, landscaping/public greening, recycling, and green building. "In an economy like this, you have to be competitive," Simmons said. "And almost all the programs that come out of my shop are geared toward low-income to moderate-income folks."

Observing that OEWD is using a $238,000 federal earmark to seed a Green Academy and that will expand the GoSolarSF workforce incentive, compete for a $500,000 EPA brownfield cleanup training grant, and coordinate with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to develop "workforce incentive language" for biodiesel reuse program and energy efficiency projects, Simmons notes that it was the unions that helped create CityBuild in the first place, and the city is working to ease current concerns.

"It is our intent as OEWD designs the academy that any training programs must demonstrate that they train individuals for occupations with opportunity for upward mobility," Simmons said, after emerging from a meeting cochaired by Crowfoot and Pinderhughes to help community-based organizations understand green jobs and figure out how to link with the Green Jobs Corps that Pinderhughes set up in Oakland.

Eric Smith runs the Bayview-based Green Depot, a nonprofit that promotes biodiesel use in neighborhoods facing environmental justice issues and ran a $9,000-per intern pilot program with Global Exchange. He worries that administrative costs will chew up much of the stimulus money, citing SFPUC figures that the cost ratio for trainers to interns is about 3:1.

"There is a lot of concern in the Bayview that the money will end up going to consultants and administrators when we have people who are hungry and desperate to work," Smith said.

After two green jobs hearings, Sup. Eric Mar says that he and Sups. Sophie Maxwell and David Chiu have concluded "that unless the board takes action and gives clear guidelines and expectations, green collar job creation will be miniscule."
Noting that Oakland’s Green Job Corps and Richmond’s solar program seem years ahead of San Francisco’s efforts, Mar said his next step will be to talk with labor, environmental groups, businesses, and nonprofits to get a sense of an appropriate structure to prioritize the low-income communities as the main beneficiaries of green-collar job creation. "It’s pretty clear that the [Newsom] administration’s commitment to the numbers of jobs created is pretty small," Mar said. "The community is going to have to push for more."

What’s in the Republicans’ tea?

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By Steven T. Jones
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As overhyped and ridiculous as tomorrow’s Republican Tea Party events are, I find them a fascinating manifestation of the perplexing posture of victimhood that the US ruling class and its right-wing shills seem to revel in. So I might just have to pop down to Civic Center Plaza from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. tomorrow to see San Francisco’s festivities.

The US has one of the lowest rates of taxation in the industrialized world. Fiscal conservatives have been calling the political shots in this country since 1980, resulting in an extraordinary consolidation of wealth, a threadbare social safety net, and an economic system collapsing because we refused to regulate greed and corruption.

“Yet on this Tax Day, all taxpaying Americans should be concerned that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats’ runaway tax hikes will be the death of America’s economy as they extend the ‘Pelosi Recession,’” warned National Republican Congressional Committee director Guy Harrison in an alarming mass e-mail. “This week, thousands of patriotic Americans will gather to protest oppressive government taxation, and stand as one for fiscal sanity at tea parties across the nation.”

Really? We should all be alarmed that Congress and President Barack Obama are considering increasing the upper income tax bracket by a couple of percentage points? Frankly, I’m pissed that they’re being too timid in getting our money back from the rich motherfuckers who stole it. And I certainly feel that our corporate-sponsored political system is essentially taxation without representation from those of us who can’t afford a campaign contribution.

So maybe we’re all a little indignant.

A Q&A with Nick Cave

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By Johnny Ray Huston

Nick Cave and I probably crossed paths in Heaven one night. Heaven was a club on Woodward Avenue in Detroit where you could go, after 2 a.m., to dance and sweat and lose yourself to the sounds of DJ Ken Collier. Cave’s time in Heaven has made it possible for him to create “Meet Me at the Center of the Earth,” his show at Yerba Buena Center of the Arts. Time spent in that kind of cathartic, uninhibited place is necessary for someone — someone like Cave — to bring people to the Earth’s core and allow them to begin reimagining from the center of existence. When Cave and I talked on the phone recently, the morning of a full-page profile of him appeared in the Sunday New York Times, our discussion started near Heaven, and ended in Barack Obama’s Chicago.

SFBG How has your studio changed over the years, in terms of location, layout, and contents?
Nick Cave My studio has changed according to the way my career has changed. I’ve expanded in space due to demand. I’ve had to bring on more studio assistants. It’s evolved and grown, but without expanding beyond my means. I look at it the same way I did when I had a clothing store. I try to make smart moves.

SFBG Do those things influence your process, or do many of your ideas originate outside of the studio space?
NC I think it does occur outside the studio space. The studio is where the ideas are manifested. The ideas come from being out there in the world — just being open. Though sometimes a revelation may happen in the studio, based on an experience I’m developing. It happens when it happens.

SFBG We’ve both spent formative time in Detroit and the Detroit area. I went to Wayne State [University], while you went to Cranbrook Academy of Art]. I’d love to know more about your experience there with [fiber artist and teacher] Gerhardt Knodel. I wondered also whether you had ties to the club scenes in Detroit or Chicago at any time.
NC Oh, hell yeah [laughs].
Cranbrook was probably the most extraordinary place for me. I could have gone straight to New York [City], or to other schools, but I knew I needed an environment that was somewhat isolated, because of my desires to be distracted by other creative endeavors. Cranbrook provided this amazing intensive rigor and isolation from the world. Yet I had Detroit, which really allowed that gritty balance. It was the best of both worlds. When I needed to get the hell out of Cranbrook, believe me, I did.

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Photo by James Prinz

Bailout money — for newspapers?

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By Tim Redmond

Check out Nancy Pelosi on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. SHe looks pretty bad, has no sense of humor, etc, etc, but here’s the fun part:

At one point, Pelosi says that “newspapers” have been calling her, asking for federal TARP bailout money.

Now, I wonder which “newspapers” that might be.

We know Hearst — in the person of Phil Bronstein — has met with Pelosi, and that Pelosi has talked about relaxing antitrust rules for newspapers. Did Bronstein or someone else at Hearst also ask for federal money to support the ailing Chron?

I dunno — Pelosi’s press office hasn’t called me back to say whether she will identify the “newspapers” that have contacted her. I haven’t heard back from Bronstein, either.

I suppose it’s not out of the question — if the taxpayers can bail out AIG and General Motors, why not the San Francisco Chronicle? But would Obama then want to fire the publisher?

Shielding Goni

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news@sfbg.com

Top Democratic Party pollster Stanley Greenberg rolled into San Francisco last month to promote his latest book, Dispatches from the War Room — In the trenches with five extraordinary leaders (2009, St. Martin’s Press). The slight, bespectacled man spoke at the Commonwealth Club, sharing what he hoped were "honest and frank" accounts of working with leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton.

While he happily pontificated on the lessons these experiences held for President Barack Obama, he was a bit more defensive on why he had proudly featured in the book Gonzalo "Goni" Sánchez de Lozada, former president of Bolivia who is currently wanted for his role in a massacre of 67 people in October 2003.

Greenberg was drafted in 2002 to help Goni, a wealthy University of Chicago-educated businessman, get elected president during a time of social upheaval created largely by U.S.-backed neoliberal economic policies. Branding Goni as the only man who could "resolve the crisis," Greenberg and other U.S. political consultants helped their client scrape an electoral victory with just 23 percent of the popular vote.

The deaths took place less than a year later when Goni announced deeply unpopular plans to privatize the country’s natural gas reserves and give foreign corporations more control over Bolivia’s resources. Road blockades erected by protesters in the poorest outlying neighborhoods of the high altitude city of La Paz effectively cut off supplies. Goni signed a decree that instructed the army to clear the roads and promised "indemnification for any damage to property and persons which might occur." That effective carte blanche resulted in the army shooting live ammunition indiscriminately at men, women, and children.

Military repression brought to a head one of the country’s bloodiest years, in which more than 150 people died in social protests. Rising popular anger led Goni to flee the country to exile in the United States. He has since lived comfortably in Chevy Chase, Md., protected by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Greenberg admits in the book that the violence caused him "to take stock," yet he ends up saying he is now "more certain of my course and his [Goni’s]." He concludes: "I am proud of what we did to help Goni become President." From the podium at the Commonwealth Club, he blamed the atrocities on the supposed "parallel violence" by the protestors.

It seems a surprising conclusion for a man who is supposedly in touch with the electorate. Goni is universally reviled in Bolivia as a corrupt and arrogant politician who devalued Bolivian lives. Even Goni’s Vice President Carlos Mesa denounced him and swore that he would never use violence to enforce policies. Two-thirds of Bolivia’s Congress — including many who had formed part of Goni’s coalition — approved a trial seeking responsibility for the massacres. Disgust at Goni’s "free market" (or neoliberal) economic and social policies, which increased poverty and inequality, was partly behind the landslide 2005 electoral victory of one of the leaders of the protest movements, Evo Morales.

Yet sadly, Greenberg’s positive spin of Goni seems to be a view that is widely shared with the Democratic Party. At a Washington launch event for Greenberg’s book, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi also appeared to hold Goni in high esteem, warmly welcoming him to the event and calling him a "very special man." Goni’s former defense lawyer, Gregory Craig, is now Obama’s White House counsel. The Democrats’ historic loyalty to one of their favored pro-American friends seems to outweigh their commitment to human rights and fair legal process.

Rogelio Mayta, the resolute lawyer representing the families whose loved ones were killed in October 2003, tries to give Pelosi the benefit of the doubt. "We want to believe in the good faith of … Pelosi and believe that these praises are due to misinformation rather than a concrete line of action and thinking by the U.S. government," he said.

Yet the anger of Eloy Rojas, who lost his eight-year-old daughter when troops entered his village and started shooting indiscriminately, is harder to hide. "Every effort that allies of Sánchez de Lozada make to present the ex-president as a victim and an honest man is for us an offense. It is an offense against the pain and suffering that his terrible actions had for our lives. His determination to defend his and other people’s economic interests meant that he stopped valuing peoples’ lives … That is why we continue to seek justice."

In March, Bolivian families who lost loved ones marked a significant milestone in their struggle to end the legacy of impunity for political elites like Goni. After five years of navigating political games and legal loopholes, a date was set for the trial of responsibility for Goni and seven of his ministers. Yet the main defendant, Goni, will be missing because the U.S. government has ignored requests for extradition for several years.

Many in the U.S. and worldwide continue to hope that Obama’s inauguration will mark a new chapter in relations worldwide, especially in Latin America, where there has been a new wave of resistance against U.S. attempts to impose its economic interests. Obama has made some important first steps in ordering closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and reinvigorating the use of diplomacy in regions such as the Middle East. But if he really wants to start a new chapter of international relations rooted in human rights, he doesn’t need to travel abroad. He just needs to respond to Bolivia’s lawful request for extradition and send home the man who lives just seven miles from the White House. 2

Nick Buxton is a British journalist who was based in Bolivia for many years before moving to San Francisco last year. His blog, Open Veins, is at www.nickbuxton.info.

The budget mysteries

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sarah@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s top budget advisors are predicting that dollars from President Obama’s stimulus package will help reinvigorate the economy over the next three years. But they also warn that the recovery will be slow, and that deficits will be part of political life for some time to come.

The findings are contained in a three-year budget projection report jointly compiled by the Mayor’s Office, the Controller’s Office, and the Budget Analyst’s Office and released to the news media at a hastily announced March 31 roundtable.

During the roundtable, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that the city faces a "staggering" $438 million budget shortfall in fiscal year 2009-10 — a deficit, financial experts warn, that could balloon to $750 million by fiscal year 2011-12 if cuts and wage concessions aren’t made and structural reform and revenue creating measures aren’t undertaken.

Those future numbers are scary — and a bit apocryphal. Nobody seriously thinks the city will simply ignore this year’s problems and put them off until next year, which means future deficits should be smaller.

But the decisions that will have to be made to keep the red ink under control have been the subject of intense speculation since December, when Newsom announced that the city was facing a deficit equal to cutting every other dollar in the city’s discretionary general fund.

REFORMS? WHAT REFORMS?


In January newly elected Board of Supervisors President David Chiu sought to address the anxiety crashing over the city’s business and labor leaders by inviting stakeholders, including Newsom, to budget meetings at City Hall. But Newsom only agreed to get involved once the youthful board president’s other bright idea — a special election that combined cuts, revenue generating measures, and structural reforms to save as many jobs, programs, and services — was off the table.

And with only two months to go until he submits his 2009-10 budget proposal, Newsom still has not clarified what budgetary reforms he will support this fall, even as the labor unions are being asked to give back $90 million in promised benefits, and the Board of Supervisors gets ready to prepare an annual appropriations ordinance by the end of July.

Newsom did announce last week that he will be is asking some, but not all, departments for 25 percent cuts in the coming fiscal year. Human Services Director Micki Callahan confirmed that 730 pink slips have been sent out since July 2008.

Yet the actual cuts remain a mystery. "I will not be accepting 25 percent cuts from some departments, but from others, I will," Newsom said. "I don’t believe in across-the-board cuts."

Asked which departments he would accept 25 percent cuts from, Newsom told reporters: "You’ll find out when you read my budget."

Within days of Newsom’s statement came news of a deal between the Mayor’s Office and Service Employees International Union Local 1021, the largest city-workers union.

"The goal of this tentative agreement is to protect vital services for San Franciscans, minimize layoffs to employees, preserve the integrity of the collective bargaining agreement, and assist the city with its economic recovery," read a joint public statement.

As of press time, SEIU’s 1021’s Robert Haaland told the Guardian that the two sides are still in negotiations, but confirmed that the union is discussing giving up about $40 million over 16 months, including furloughs and other benefits.

"At the end of the day, our members recognize that they need to share the pain," Haaland said. "The idea is to save jobs and programs."

These givebacks from SEIU are part of the $90 million in concessions the city hopes to get from unions, including those that represent police, firefighters and nurses.

THE PERILS OF TWO-YEAR BUDGETING


As it becomes clear that givebacks and cuts won’t be enough to solve the city’s fiscal crisis, there is talk that the mayor wants to switch to a two-year budget process. Critics say that could represent a massive transfer of power to the Mayor’s Office, unless the Board of Supervisors also gets the power to approve the mayor’s midyear cuts.

"As it is right now, we have power through the Board of Supervisors for one month of the year," said one community organizer, who asked to remain anonymous. "The rest of the time Newsom moves his own agenda through his midyear cuts."

A summary of a March 16 Controller’s Office "budget improvement project" recommends that "the board’s add-back process should require that program restorations and enhancements be reviewed and analyzed by department staff and the board’s budget analyst;" that the "mayor and board should outreach to the general public regarding budget priorities;" and that the "city should adopt a two year budget process consistent with the city’s financial plan."

Sup. Chris Daly said he thinks this year’s grim three-year budget projections make a strong argument against a two-year budget process. "Projections are never right," said Daly, who used to chair the powerful budget committee. "Two years ago we weren’t projecting how bad it was going to be. We can’t do budgets for years out past the current fiscal year. It just doesn’t work."

Sup. David Campos, who sits on the current budget committee, said he wants to see the increased Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) funding being provided to the city’s public health and human services departments used to restore proposed cuts, jobs, and services.

Much of the federal money will be earmarked for non-General Fund infrastructre projects at the Municipal Transporation Agency, Housing Authority, airport, and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

"We’re saying that if FMAP is coming in so that revenue cuts are not made in the public health area, then why not use these monies to fill gaps, replace cuts, restore funds, preserve programs?" Campos asked.

Campos also wants the mayor and the board to sit down and talk about the November ballot. "I don’t think the budget hole is going to be closed on backs of labor alone," Campos told us. "We’re focused on cuts, elimination of programs, layoffs … But why aren’t we talking about what revenue measures we are putting on the November ballot?

Chiu said he thinks Newsom is committed to some form of tax-based revenue measure. "Just as we can’t solve our budget deficit by taxing our way out of it, so we can’t solve it by cutting our way out of it either," Chiu said. "None of our tax or revenue-generating options would come close to filling 25 percent of that gap."

Noting that business is "more open to taxes that share the burden of who pays," Chiu observed that "it’s important to balance the cuts so it’s not just social services and the health department taking the burden."

Reject the Fisher Museum

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OPINION The Presidio Trust Board and the National Park Service in December rejected Gap Inc. founder Don Fisher’s proposed art museum in the Presidio. They complete their review of his second offer next month. They should reject the second offer as well, and the game will be over.

Fisher and his family should stop trying to convince the Park Service to bend its rules. They should set aside their pride and their own preferences in deference to those of the Park Service and the city of San Francisco. They should announce their decision to move forward with the city to find a location in the city proper.

Most of us in the Presidio’s neighborhood communities do not agree with the seven trust board members that developing a cultural theme park in the Presidio is a good idea. It was introduced by the board only in response to the unsolicited proposal by the Fishers in April 2007. These board members, Fisher’s former colleagues — who are mostly real estate developers — were appointed by former President Bush. President Obama will have his own appointees on the board by June, in time to make the final decision on the Fisher museum.

We don’t want an extravagant $50 million new gathering place in front of the Fisher museum — something the Fishers have offered to help pay for in exchange for permission to build where they want.

We cannot bear the thought of the series of traffic signals inside the park, near the Spanish El Presidio and the 160-year-old U.S. Army Post. The trust says those traffic signals, along with garages in the Presidio, would be needed to manage the daily visitors added by the Fishers’ museum. No national park in America has traffic signals.

Nor do we want the lineup of traffic and signal lights required outside the park, at entrances and on nearby residential streets, that the trust says would be required. The city would, I expect, refuse the federal trust’s request to change city traffic controls to support a museum — one that city officials want to see downtown.

The public will pay another million to respond to the Fishers continued effort. It will end in defeat, if the federal government follows its own review processes — or in a glaring corruption of those processes if it succeeds.

I urge the individual appointed members of the Federal Presidio Trust Corporation and National Park Service officials to reject the Fisher offer next month. Two years and $2 million is enough of our treasure to spend in responding to the unsolicited proposal.

I urge the public to attend the trust hearing April 16, 6:30 p.m. at the Presidio Golden Gate Club. Support the Fisher museum outside the park, and oppose it in the park. *
Donald S. Green is former executive director of the Yosemite Restoration Trust and vice chair of the Presidio Neighborhood Work Group of the SF Board of Supervisors.

It’s official: SF follows the stimpack money.

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A graph on the Mayor’s Office’s newly launched website seeks to break it all down.

Text by Sarah Phelan

So, finally, the Mayor’s Office has launched a website to track stimpack dollars that are coming to San Francisco based on census data (formula funding), or that can be competed for locally.

So far the newly launched website breaks down the dollars by the following categories: public safety, environment, education, housing, health and human services and transportation. It’s a good start.

What the site does not do is break down the dollars according to whether they are going to create green collar jobs. Such jobs been defined by Van Jones, Obama”s new Green Collar czar, as, ” a family-supporting, career-track job that directly contributes to preserving or enhancing environmental quality.”

I realize it’s early days and the city may truly not have a handle on this crucial date yet, and I’m trying to practice what Jones, who likes metaphors involving ships, (the Amistad, the Titanic, and Noah’s Ark all get invoked in Jones The Green Collar Economy,) calls “the Noah principles.

These five principles can be summed up thus: “fewer issues, more solutions; fewer demands, more goals; fewer targets, more partners; less accusation, more confession; and less cheap patriotism, more deep patriotism.”

Green-collar heat

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› sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Local residents, workers, and businesses are anxious to learn who and what will be stimulated by the billions of dollars that President Barack Obama authorized for release when he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Since January 2008, unemployment in the Bay Area has risen from 4.9 percent to 8.4 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, and house prices and consumer spending are down.

Despite all the anxiety, representatives from local low-income community groups hope to turn Obama’s stimulus package into an opportunity to make local government accountable for creating decent green-collar jobs. And Sups. Eric Mar, John Avalos, Sophie Maxwell, and Board President David Chiu seem happy to help further the community in this environmentally friendly cause.

Mar scheduled a March 23 hearing of the board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee "to obtain community input on the creation of jobs, particularly green-collar jobs, in San Francisco as the city positions itself for federal investment dollars."

"The hearing was the first step toward building a grassroots coalition to hold government accountable," continued Mar, who worries that the Mayor’s Office is not sharing enough information related to the stimulus package. "Labor and community groups, not just department heads and City Hall, should be at the table."

At the hearing, representatives from the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development said that a substantial part of the first wave of stimulus package dollars has already been allocated, mostly to shovel-ready projects such as the Doyle Drive rebuild and massive development projects at Treasure Island and the Hunter’s Point Shipyard.

OEWD representatives also indicated that more waves of formula funding are expected, for which San Francisco must compete with other cities, and that the city’s Department of Technology is constructing a Web site to track all local money from Obama’s $787 billion package.

OEWD deputy director Jennifer Entine Matz says community-based organizations, unions, and community colleges need to work together to ensure that people are successfully brought through any work program. "In many cases, green collar jobs are existing jobs," Matz said. "If we are successful in training people with green power technology, they will be more marketable here and beyond. We can also train and modify people in existing programs."

But representatives from the Chinese Progressive Association, PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights), and POWER (People Organizing to Win Employment Rights) expressed their belief that stimulus package funds should go to help low-income communities, not rich corporations.

"Let’s make sure we stimulate quality to make sure we stimulate the economy," said PODER’s Oscar Grande, who warned against using the funds on low-paid jobs with few advancement opportunities. He and others suggested tracking what communities receive funding. "We want to go past the green hype, the green-washing, and the green lifestyle marketing," Grande said.

Raquel Pinderhughes, an urban studies professor at San Francisco State University who helped Berkeley’s Green Business Council and Oakland’s Green Jobs Corp program, defined green-collar jobs as "blue collar jobs in green businesses.

"Green collar jobs can function to get more people out of poverty," Pinderhughes said. "They can provide living wages. They have low barriers to entry. They provide an opportunity for occupational mobility. They are inherently dignified, and they have a shortage of entry-level workers, so there is room for people."

But Pinderhughes warned that cities must link improving environmental quality to social justice to avoid creating temporary jobs and preserve industrially zoned lands for green-collar jobs. She also said that cities must fund case management services "so folks don’t quickly drop out."

The Land Use Committee has scheduled an April 6 continuation to address a plethora of outstanding issues like how much money is going to specific corporations and departments, the division of funds between public transportation and freeway projects, and how much Lennar Corp. is getting for its Hunters Point Shipyard/Candlestick Point redevelopment project.

Meister: Let’s truly honor Cesar Chavez

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, a veteran San Francisco journalist, is co-author of “A Long
Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America’s Farm Workers.”

It’s way past time that Congress declared the March 31 birthdate of Cesar
Chavez a national holiday. President Obama agrees. So do the millions of
people who are expected to sign petitions being circulated by the United
Farm Workers, the union founded by Chavez.

California, seven other states and dozens of cities already observe Chavez’
birthdate as an official holiday – and for very good reason. As the UFW
notes, “He inspired farm workers and millions of people who never worked on
a farm to commit themselves to social, economic and civil rights activism.
Cesar’s legacy continues to educate, inspire and empower people from all
walks of life.”

Newsom officials dodge budget questions

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By Melody Parker and Steven T. Jones

The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee yesterday held a hearing on deep budget cuts proposed for city health and welfare programs and tried unsuccessfully to get straight answers to why the Newsom Administration isn’t planning to use federal stimulus money to offset those cuts.
Congress and President Barack Obama specifically offered economic stimulus money to prevent cuts in things like housing, homeless, and social services that are most needed during hard economic times. San Francisco’s share is more than $50 milllion. As Obama said, “This plan will also help ensure that you don’t need to make cuts to essential services Americans rely on now more than ever.”
But Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and David Campos expressed frustration that the Mayor’s Office has said it doesn’t want to use these one-time funding to cover ongoing expenses and that they’ve refused to engage in a dialogue about that stand. At a press conference before the hearing, Mirkarimi said dealing with the administration has been like pulling teeth: “The Board had received zero word from Mayor Newsom.”
So they pressed Newsom’s Public Health Director Mitch Katz at the hearing, but still made little progress on getting a straight answer. As a lawyer, Campos said he was “familiar with nuanced language” and told Katz that he didn’t feel the administration is being responsive.

SF pot raid clouds federal drug policies

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pot3.jpg
Story by Steven T. Jones, Photos by Neil Motteram

Yesterday’s federal raid on the locally permitted SoMa medical marijuana dispensary Emmalyn’s California Cannabis Clinic caused confusion about what local growers can expect from an Obama Administration that recently announced that it would no longer be conducting such raids.

Drug Enforcement Administration officials are saying little about the raid, which came on a Wednesday, the day Emmalyn’s gives out free marijuana to poor patients. But the DEA seemed to be trying to dance around the conflict with the public statement, “Based on our investigation, we believe there are not only violations of federal law, but state law as well.”

Assembly member Tom Ammiano, whose Assembly Bill 390 would decriminalize even recreational uses of marijuana, told the Guardian that the raid sends a troubling message and could indicate internal conflicts within the administration.

“It’s a little vigilante for me. They’re obviously try to flex their muscles, probably to have a showdown with the Obama Administration,” Ammiano said of the DEA. “The dispensaries are going to be in the crosshairs of this struggle.”
pot2.jpg

T. Boone Pickens visits S.F.

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PICKENS._SL500_.jpg

By Rebecca Bowe

T. Boone Pickens, 80, is a Republican billionaire living in Dallas whose spot-on predictions about the petroleum industry have earned him the nickname the “Oracle of Oil.” More recently, the founder and chairman of BP Capital Management has garnered media attention for reinventing himself as a proponent of clean energy. On March 25, hundreds of San Franciscans came out to the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins Hotel to listen to the former oilman discuss the Pickens Plan: a blueprint for curing America’s addiction to foreign oil.

Pickens launched his campaign last July with a slick Web site designed by one of the top brains behind Obama’s online presidential campaign. So far, some 2 million supporters have signed on, Pickens said. “I found out this,” he told a team of reporters shortly before his talk. “When I was a rich guy going to Washington trying to get something done, I got in to see everybody and they were all nice, but not much happened. Today, with 2 million people with me, I’m a hell of a lot more important when I go to Washington.”

A main component of his plan is the installation of thousands of wind turbines through the central corridor of the United States, harnessing what has been called the “Saudi Arabia of wind” to provide what Pickens estimates to be 20 percent of the nation’s electricity supply. To make it work, transmission lines must be constructed to move that power east and west. And according to his vision, domestic natural gas currently used to fire power plants can be utilized as a transportation fuel instead.

DCCC supports sanctuary & due process for all

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The Democratic County Central Committee voted last night by an overwhelming majority (20 ayes, 5 abstains, I no) to support Debra Walker’s strong resolution, recommitting “support of the Constitution and our city’s Sanctuary Ordinance for all,” and rejecting Scott Wiener’s watered-down version (19 noes, 3 abstained, 5 ayes).

Walker, who plans to run for District 6 supervisor, when incumbent Chris Daly is termed out next year, says DCCC’s vote made her, “ feel good about the party.”

“It’s been way too long that this has been happening and we have done nothing substantive, on the part of the party,” said Walker, noting that a companion resolution asking President Barack Obama to stop the ICE raids will be introduced next month.

Last night’s vote came after several dozen immigrant residents attended the DCCC hearing and testified about the impact of San Francisco’s new policies toward immigrants.

As Angela Chan, staff attorney for the Asian Law Caucus told the Guardian, “One teenage girl bravely stood before the DCCC and said that as a result of the change in climate in San Francisco toward immigrants, she lived in fear each day that she would come home to find that her parents had been taken away by ICE. Another immigrant resident said that if the DCCC takes a stand to support immigrants, he would raise his children to become proud Democrats. Another immigrant resident, who was a mother and a child care provider for many families in SF, said it is difficult to know that the image of criminality is being projected onto her and her community, when most members of the community are hardworking, law-abiding, and family-oriented people.”

Chan says she appreciated the supportive comments she heard from Sups. David Campos, Daly, Robert Haaland, Michael Bornstein, and resolution co-sponsors Walker and Peskin.

“They demonstrated a strong commitment to upholding immigrant rights and a deep understanding of the contributions of immigrant residents to San Francisco,” Chan said. “I hope Mayor Newsom will take the cue from his own party (and his own residents), and swiftly move to rescind his undocumented youth policy and work with the immigrant community to develop a more thought-out and balanced policy that respects the due process rights of youth and the goals to the juvenile justice system.”

That vote confirms that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to do an about face last summer on San Francisco’s long standing sanctuary city ordinance is coming back to haunt him, as the gubernatorial race heats up.

Asked if the policy direction that Newsom ordered in 2008 guarantees due process for all, Newsom’s communications director Nathan Ballard did a classic obfuscation, telling the Guardian, “Yes. It was thoroughly vetted by the city attorney.”

But according to the City Attorney’s office, the original ordinance never did assure due process, “ if an individual was arrested for felony crimes.”

As for the revised policy direction, it directs police officers to report any juvenile “suspected of being present in the United States in violation of immigration laws,” and “booked” for commission of a felony” to federal immigration authorities,

The language, which is contained in the juvenile probation department’s policies and procedures section, directs officers to take into consideration, amongst other things, prior criminal history and “presence of undocumented persons in the same area where arrested or involved in illegal activity.”

To Walker’s mind, such direction amounts to a, “slippery slope.”

“It puts a lot of discretion in the hands of the police on the streets, and can end up with juveniles being referred to ICE and taken back to their country of origin, without any representation,” Walker said.

Herrera names stimpack “legal compliance” taskforce

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City Attorney Dennis Herrera has announced a stimulus spending taskforce, which he says will aim, ” to coordinate legal compliance and guarantee maximum transparency, efficiency and accountability for city investments made possible by the federal government’s recently enacted $787 billion economic stimulus package.”

“Our paramount duty is to ensure that this unprecedented level of federal funding is invested honestly and in ways that deliver real value to our communities and our children — we will not tolerate waste, fraud or abuse,” Herrera said in a press release.

“When President Obama signed the recovery and stimulus package into law, he challenged all of us in public life to prove to the American people that their trust in government is not misplaced,” Herrera said.

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