Opinion

Will the US bomb Iran?

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OPINION Half the warships in the US Navy are sitting within striking distance of Iran. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have stepped up their rhetoric, accusing Iran of killing Americans in Iraq and of threatening to start a nuclear holocaust. The British media is predicting that the Bush administration will bomb Iran in the near future.

The White House is using the same propaganda techniques to whip up popular opinion against Iran that it used four years ago against Iraq. Here’s the real story:

•Iran has no nuclear weapons and couldn’t have them for years. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body that was right about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, says it has no proof of Iranian plans to build nuclear bombs. The IAEA recently reached a binding agreement for Iran to reveal its past nuclear activities and allow full inspection of nuclear-power sites.

•The sophisticated explosively formed penetrators supposedly supplied by Iran to militias in Iraq are easily made in Iraqi machine shops and can be purchased commercially for mining operations.

•For years Iran has given political, economic, and military support to Shia and Kurdish militias, but the Bush administration has never proved that Iran is intentionally targeting US soldiers.

•For two years the United States has helped splinter groups among Iran’s ethnic minorities to blow up buildings, assassinate revolutionary guards, and kill civilians in an effort to destabilize the Tehran regime. In short, the United States does to Iran what it accuses Iran of doing in Iraq.

The hardliners in the administration, led by Cheney, see a dwindling opportunity to bomb Iran before Bush leaves office. They hope to launch a massive bombing campaign to so weaken Tehran that the regime will fall and Iranians will see the United States as their savior. Does this sound the faintest bit familiar?

In reality, a US attack would be disastrous. Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 25 percent of the world’s oil supplies passes. Oil prices would skyrocket. Iran could encourage Hezbollah to launch missiles into Israel. Muslims would hold demonstrations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Iran could mobilize that anger and encourage Shiite parties in Iraq to attack US troops.

In a truly nightmare scenario, Iran could encourage terrorist attacks inside the United States and in allied countries. When I interviewed Syria’s President Bashar al-Asad in 2006, he said, "If you do a military strike, you will have chaos. It’s very dangerous."

The decision to bomb Iran depends, in part, on actions by the American people. Now is the time to let your national and local politicians know that we don’t need another human disaster in the Middle East. Code Pink is organizing a national campaign to get city councils to pass resolutions against attacks on Iran (www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?list=type&type=135). US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has introduced a Senate bill to prohibit an attack on Iran without congressional authorization.

I can’t predict with certainty that the United States will bomb Iran, but the danger is greater today than anytime in the past 25 years. The question is, what will you be doing to stop it?

Reese Erlich

Reese Erlich (www.reeseerlich.com) is author of the new book The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis (Polipoint). Oct. 2 will be Reese Erlich Day in Oakland to honor his work and that of all investigative journalists.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi likes to say that murder and Muni are Mayor Gavin Newsom’s most obvious weaknesses, and there are all kinds of ideas about fixing Muni. Murder, that’s a little tougher.

The mayoral candidates we’ve been talking to all decry the city’s rise in violent crime, and they all say something has to be done. The district attorney says so, and so does the Police Officers Association. But there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on, and a lot of rhetoric and circling around and dodging. I realize it’s a tough, complicated issue; I realize that one city can’t utterly transform the socioeconomic impacts of more than a quarter century of federal neglect of inner cities. I know that poverty and desperation drive crime and violence, and what we’re experiencing in San Francisco won’t be solved by any one simple program.

But I have to say, I’ve heard an idea from one of the candidates that just makes a lot of common sense.

Lonnie Holmes, who almost certainly won’t be elected, told us in an endorsement interview that the mentor he relied on when he was a kid growing up in a tough neighborhood in San Francisco was the guy who ran the local recreation center. It was open all the time; Holmes would just drop in after school, hang out, play some basketball…. There was a place to go, with a caring adult who was a supervisor, coach, teacher, and role model. No pressure, no special classes to sign up for, no fee, no cost at the door. Just a local rec center. There are dozens of them, all over the city.

But these days a lot of them aren’t open as much. Budget cuts to the Recreation and Park Department have forced the rec centers to limit their hours. The center in Bernal Heights, where I live, used to be open on weekends; now the doors are mostly locked.

There’s not a lot in the way of quality public after-school programs either.

So kids who don’t have a stable home life, or whose parents or guardians are working two jobs and are rarely around, or who have any of a long list of factors that put them at risk for violence don’t have anywhere to go. Bad idea.

So why not a budget plan to fully fund all the rec centers and fund comprehensive after-school care as a means of violence prevention? It’s a lot cheaper than hiring a few hundred more cops.

Onward: there’s a fascinating comment at the very end of the seven-page city attorney’s opinion on Newsom’s call for mass resignations by department heads and other top city officials. It’s just two sentences, and the relevant part goes like this: "The resignations … may present other legal issues…. For example, there could be questions about whether to make public disclosures under certain city bonds or municipal debt issuances."

Here’s what that means: the city could be required to tell bond holders and underwriters that all of the department heads, the entire senior staff of the Mayor’s Office, and all commissioners — the combined pool of talent and experience at City Hall — have been asked to resign. If anything on this scale happened in a private business, the company’s stock would fall precipitously; one might assume that bond-rating agencies could consider San Francisco to be facing real leadership troubles and reduce our bond rating.

That, in turn, would cost the city a sizable amount of money.

I wonder, Mr. Mayor — did that ever occur to you?

Hey, did Gavin think about this?

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We know at this point that Mayor Newsom didn’t seek legal counsel before he decided to ask for everyone who runs anything in town to resign. If he had, and he’d thought about it a little bit, he might have discovered what City Attorney Dennis Herrera did: This could cost the city big money.

I’m not talking about lawsuits by forcibly resigned employees — Newsom had ever legal right to do what he did. No, what’s fascinating is a two-sentence note at the end of the city attorney’s seven-page opinion on the mass resignations. It says:

“The resignations of certain department heads or commissioner may present other legal issues for the City depending on the particular facts and circumstances. For example, There could be questions about whether to make public disclosures under certain City bonds or municipal debt issuances.”

What that means is that the city might have to notify the financial markets — the bond holders and brokers — about the mass almost-firings, the same way a company that holds public debt would have to notify debtors that all of its senior staff had resigned.

If the bond-rating agencies decide that a mass exodus of all the experience and talent managing the city is a bad thing for San Francisco’s financial stability, we could see a downgrading of our bonds — and that could cost us a lot of money.

I wonder if Gavin ever thought about that.

A theocratic democracy?

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lit@sfbg.com
My old friend Reese Erlich is remarkably optimistic about Iran, which is a pleasant perspective. I’m glad somebody is.
In his insightful, if sometimes choppy, new book, The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis, he offers an alternative view of a nation and a culture that has been either ignored or demonized by the mainstream press for more than 30 years. His basic thesis — that US policy toward Tehran is moronic, driven by foolish politics, bad information, and greedy geopolitical aims — is hard to dispute. His subtext — that there’s real hope for democracy in Iran — is a bit of a tougher sell.
Erlich has done what few US journalists ever do: he’s visited Iran, repeatedly, and taken the time to meet not just with government officials and activists but with ordinary Iranians. Almost across the board, they condemn the United States and support the Islamic state.
We’re presented with “liberal” politicians — which might be a bit of a stretch — and radical activists, including Marxists, who offer a vision of a democratic Iran. Me, I’m dubious about any hope for theocratic democracy; as a proud atheist, I think that separation of church and state — strict, inviolable separation — is essential for any functioning democracy.
But Erlich’s willing to give other cultures and ways of thinking a break, which is one of the main reasons he’s such a good reporter. And in The Iran Agenda he presents a picture of a nation far more complex than the caricatures we’ve seen depicted by the administration and the evening news.
That’s the real value of this book: you get a sense from a veteran journalist of what you’ve been missing all these years. Erlich tries to sort out the ethnic geopolitics of Iran and explain which groups are aligned with whom (and why the United States supports some of them). It’s all somewhat dizzying, but that’s part of the point. This situation is more complicated than most American opinion makers are willing to admit.
And for all that, it’s a good read.
THE IRAN AGENDA: THE REAL STORY OF U.S. POLICY AND THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS
By Reese Erlich
PoliPoint Press
192 pages, paper
$14.95
READINGS
Sat/22, 2:30 p.m., free
City College of San Francisco, Mission Campus, Auditorium (Room 109)
1125 Valencia, SF
Sat/29, 7 p.m., free
Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera
(415) 927-0960
www.bookpassage.com
For information on more Bay Area events, go to www.p3books.com.

Treasure Island fest – another view

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doug.bmp
Pulling it together: Doug Martsch of Built to Spill at Treasure Island fest. All pics by Kimberly Chun.

By Steven Touchton

This past Sunday was the first time anyone had ever rented out West Oakland’s DeFremery Pool in order to throw a late afternoon pool party featuring spazzy bands. Since it was a private rental, you could only attend by purchasing advance tickets from the Club Sandwich Bay Area Web site. It nearly sold out. The weather was perfect for the occasion.

My band KIT shared the bill with Los Angeles’s Captain Ahab and Foot Village, as well as local band Cell Block. Cell Block, which includes people from Ex Pets and Coughs, got things going with their brand of aggro-distorto noisy hardcore. People were already pumped just to be at an event like this, and Cell Block’s set just ramped up the excitement level that much more.

Foot Village are a vocals-and-percussion-only quartet who stole the show, in my opinion, with a sweat-drenched set of primal energy. Captain Ahab (winner of the Snakes on a Plane-song competition) closed it out, rave style. He brought along a fancy sound system and a dancer guy whose job is to “sexually harass” dudes in the crowd while singing along sans microphone. The dance-party covers included a Vocoder-soaked version of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8ter Boy.”

earlimart.bmp
Earlimart wear their fall colors.

Most of those who attended left this party excited and energized, making plans for one of the post-show hangouts that ensued. But I had to load out my gear and take off right away, skipping the after-parties, in order to catch Built to Spill at the Treasure Island Music Festival.

Forget the neighbors: build away!

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OPINION Having considered San Francisco something of a utopian American city (certainly compared with others), I assumed the only reason city officials were on the verge of allowing perfect little Valencia Street to be turned into Emeryville West was that they were simply unaware of what a handful of developers and a few folks in the Planning Department were cooking up.

All they needed was to hear from the neighbors, some responsible concerned adults, to call their attention to this under-the-radar remaking of our beloved Mission. Giant, five-story luxury condo blocks would be so obviously wrong for Valencia, so against the will of the vast majority of the citizens who live here, and so clearly in violation the intent of the law we passed to protect our neighborhoods that they would simply say, "Holy cow, thank you!" and stop it.

No. See, it doesn’t work that way.

Proposition M (the law passed by San Franciscans in the 1980s to protect the way our city looks and feels from just such neighborhood-crushing development) is not treated as law or as a defining statement by San Franciscans about how they want their city developed. Rather, it is ignored.

After months of work and research, countless meetings, and coordinating the support of hundreds of concerned neighbors into one large group, we waited more than 20 hours to speak for three minutes in front of the Planning Commission about just one of these giant condo projects, at 700 Valencia.

When we finally got our three minutes (at 11:45 p.m.!), two commissioners were literally asleep. The gavel swung. Approved.

It was like the people of San Francisco never showed up.

Like Prop. M never passed.

Like the Mission didn’t exist as a real neighborhood.

The feeling was like "OK, I’ve finally done something more than vote to actually make this city I’ve lived in and loved for so many years a better place. I’ve joined up with other idealistic San Franciscans, mostly wonderful neighbors I’d never even met before, who worked far more valiantly than I on this process. And it doesn’t matter."

The law, and the people of San Francisco and the Mission, are all simply impediments, nuisances, to developers making their money, the planning commissioners getting home to bed, and the people with degrees at the Planning Department who believe, incredibly, that they should personally get to change and remake ("plan") this historic, world-famously beautiful city.

It’s happening as you read this. The middle-finger building going up obscenely in front of the Bay Bridge is just the beginning. The destruction of Valencia Street may soon be an afterthought.

I’m suddenly very skeptical about the future livability of the neighborhood I’ve proudly been part of for more than 20 years. But it may not be too late to save yours.

Call, write, and visit your supervisors! Remind them that Prop. M is still the voice of the people.*

Dan Hoyle is a Valencia Street activist. He can be reached at savevalencia@gmail.com

Do wi-fi right — ourselves

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OPINION Although it’s only a "declaration of policy," Proposition J (the mayor’s wi-fi initiative) is garnering a lot of opposition. Taken at face value, the initiative seems like a no-brainer: of course we should have free, high-speed wi-fi for everyone, with adequate privacy and no public money, right now. The initiative makes it sound like all we have to do is bend over and pick up the golden wi-fi network lying in the street. Like other stories about precious paving, though, the reality is considerably less shiny.

Since Mayor Gavin Newsom filed Prop. J to whip up support for his proposed EarthLink network, that company pulled out of the San Francisco deal. EarthLink also pulled out of its agreement with Houston (paying $5 million in penalties) and laid off almost all of its municipal network division staff.

Prop. J was created to rally support for a deal that doesn’t exist anymore. Should we pass it anyway? Well, the problems that Prop. J points out are real. At least a fifth of San Franciscans have no home Internet access, and many more residents have only dial-up access.

Unfortunately, Prop. J is written to make a political point, not to ensure universal Internet access. In order to make that point, it insists on two features that were part of the EarthLink deal but don’t make sense if we’re actually trying to achieve access for everyone.

First, wi-fi is almost certainly not the technology on which to base a citywide network. It’s suited to quick-and-dirty outdoor networks or to extending indoor networks to multiple rooms, but as a network that’s supposed to cover large outdoor areas and reach into buildings, it’s got serious limitations.

A smarter approach would likely use wi-fi only where it makes the most sense as part of a larger network. A truly universal network would likely utilize a combination of wi-fi, the fiber-optic line that San Francisco already owns, and possibly other technologies, like copper wires or fixed-point wireless.

Second, Prop. J specifies that the network be built as a public-private partnership. The fall of the EarthLink deal proves that the fantasy of a company coming into San Francisco and giving everyone free Internet is just that: a fantasy. Simply declaring that we want a public-private partnership is not going to conjure some unknown company out of thin air to build a universal network in San Francisco.

Although the measure is not legally binding, many of its opponents, including several unions and a number of community groups, understandably fear that it’ll be used as an excuse to rush into a bad deal. If we’ve committed to a public-private partnership and "implementing … agreements as quickly as possible," we’re not exactly staking out a great bargaining position.

The mayor seems dead set on finding a private company to build this network, whether or not that makes sense. He’s likely to use Prop. J, if it passes, as a way to ignore the likelihood that we’re better off pursuing a city-run network. If ensuring that every San Franciscan has access to the Internet is something we really feel is important, it’s something that’s worth doing right, and if we want to make sure it’s done right, we should do it ourselves.

Sasha Magee

Sasha Magee is an activist who blogs at leftinsf.com.

Newsom and Black Monday

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We’ve now been able to independently confirm what the Chronicle reported a couple hours ago: Mayor Gavin Newsom has asked for the resignation of all the city’s department heads, senior staff, and appointees to city boards and commissions, although Newsom reportedly told them he will only accept some of them. But the mayor’s office and press secretary Nathan Ballard has not returned our calls or e-mails to make sense of this or get details, despite the fact that the department heads who were told of this request in this morning’s weekly meeting were asked to refer all press inquiries to Ballard.

It’s all very strange and unsettling, and it appears that many of the people being asked to resign can just say no. The City Attorney’s Office issued this opinion in 2004 outlining how appointees may be removed, and most are allowed to finish their terms unless the mayor wants to level official misconduct charges against them, which he’s not even been willing to do with disgraced Sup. Ed Jew.

Project Censored: The Byrne ultimatum

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amanda@sfbg.com

Sometimes the story behind a story is just as juicy as the story itself. One of Project Censored’s picks for the 2008 list – “Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict” started out as a project funded by the Nation Institute, and was supposed to splash the cover of the Nation magazine prior to the November 2006 election. Instead, it took some interesting peregrinations – involving some charges of partisan political influence — before it was finally printed in the North Bay Bohemian on January 24, 2007.

Petaluma-based freelance journalist Peter Byrne was originally paid $4,500 by the Nation Institute to research connections between lucrative defense contracts granted to Perini and URS companies, in which Richard C. Blum held stock, and the Senate Appropriations Military Construction subcommittee (MILCON) that funds the contracts– and which includes Blum’s wife, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, as a ranking member.

Blum’s companies were involved with more than $1.5 billion in defense contracts between 2001 and 2005. Michael R. Klein, Blum’s business partner and Feinstein’s legal advisor, had been informing the senator about specific federal projects in which Perini had an interest, specifically to avoid conflict of interest issues, but Byrne reported Feinstein was not told about potential URS contracts. So, in the case of Perini, Feinstein would be informed and recuse herself from pertinent decisions, but with URS, she’d remain in the dark, and because the detailed project proposals don’t include the names of the companies bidding, the senator wouldn’t know it was URS.

“In theory, Feinstein would not know the identity of any of the companies that stood to contractually benefit from her approval of specific items in the military budget – until Klein told her,” Byrne wrote.

According to Klein, a Senate Select Committee on Ethics ruled, in a confidential decision, that this was all above board.

But Byrne contends, “That these confidential rulings are contradictory is obvious and calls for explanation.”

Furthermore, Byrne’s research concluded that the senator could potentially look at the lists from Klein, compare them to the nameless funding requests and contracts coming before MILCON, and draw substantial conclusions on her own about where the money would end up.

“Klein declined to produce copies of the Perini project lists that he transmitted to Feinstein. And neither he nor Feinstein would furnish copies of the ethics committee rulings, nor examples of the senator recusing herself from acting on legislation that affected Perini or URS. But the Congressional Record shows that as chairperson and ranking member of MILCON, Feinstein was often involved in supervising the legislative details of military construction projects that directly affected Blum’s defense-contracting firms,” Byrne wrote.

A month after Byrne turned the story in to Bob Moser, who was the Nation‘s editor on the story, the piece was killed. In an email to Byrne, Moser wrote, “The main reason is that with Blum’s sale of

Perini and URS stock last year, this became an issue of what Feinstein did rather than an ongoing conflict. Because of that, and also because Feinstein is not facing a strong challenge for re-election, the feeling here, finally, was that the story would not likely have the kind of impact we want from investigative stories.”

Later in the email, Moser writes the story lacks a “smoking gun,” apparently because Byrne lays the case for a perceived conflict of interest and relies on the testimony of non-partisan ethics and government experts for support.

Still, Byrne told us, “I was shocked. The story was really solid, completely fact-checkable, and even though it was complex I think I boiled it down pretty well.”

The Nation‘s publicity director, Ben Wyskida, told us it’s rare for the magazine not to publish a story in which the Institute has invested significant time and money, but in this case the editors decided to pass. “Ultimately they just didn’t feel like he delivered the story that we’d hoped.”

“At the same time, we do think it’s an important story,” he added.

Undaunted, Byrne took it to Salon.com, which initially agreed to buy it, but then killed it as well. When asked why, news editor Mark Schone told us, “We don’t discuss those kinds of editorial decisions. We have a long history of publishing investigative pieces.”

Byrne thinks it was political. “In my opinion it’s because both the Nation and Salon have an editorial allegiance to the Democratic Party.” It was, he said, too sensitive a time to publish a story critical of a Democrat when the party was positioning to take control of the legislative branch.

The Nation vehemently denied the decision to kill had anything to do with that. “It’s absolutely false that we had any political biases that caused us not to run the piece. It was the reporting and the timeliness,” said Wyskida.

Salon would not comment on Byrne’s political theory.

When pushed for specifics on what the story lacked, Wyskida said, “Generally, we felt like it was possible there were pieces of the story we could not verify or stand behind.”

Byrne went on to pitch the story to Slate, the New Republic, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, and – thinking that conservative publications might bite – American Spectator and Weekly Standard. “Most of the editors praised the reporting, but turned down the story,” Byrne writes in an update for Project Censored’s publication. “So I sold the tale to the North Bay Bohemian, which, along with its sister papers in San Jose and Santa Cruz, ran it on the cover – complete with follow-ups. After it appeared, the editors and I received a series of invective-filled emails from war-contractor Klein (who is also an attorney) but, since he could show no errors of fact in the story, he did not get the retraction he apparently wanted.”

Klein, a key figure in the series of stories, is chairman and founding donor of the Washington, DC-based Sunlight Foundation, an organization that promotes more government transparency and grants investigative work undertaken with those goals. The Blum Family Foundation has also given seed money to Sunlight.

The foundation’s Web Site has posted a rebuttal to Byrne’s story, written by senior fellow and veteran investigative journalist, Bill Allison. It includes a spirited exchange between Byrne and Allison on some of the finer points of Byrne’s reporting, and links to the original Congressional hearings that Byrne cites for some of his evidence of Feinstein’s questionable ethics.

Shortly before Byrne’s story was printed in the North Bay Bohemian, Feinstein quit MILCON. Byrne reported this resignation in a March 21, 2007 story, in which he speculates thinks it was because of his questioning her ethics.

Feinstein’s office denies any connection. Press officer Scott Gerber said that at the start of a new Congressional session, “She took the opportunity to become chair of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee. It’s a better subcommittee for California.” Her office also attempts to blow holes in Byrne’s story with a detailed rebuttal similar to Allison’s – not issued as a press release but provided upon request (and available here in pdf form.)

Despite the rebuttals, which contend that facts have been distorted, Byrne says no evidence exists that merit any retractions.

“Stories get killed all the time for various reasons but what I found interesting is that they paid me almost $5,000,” said Byrne, who expressed admiration for both the Nation and Salon. “The editor worked really hard with me but it was leading up to the elections. I’m not actually accusing them of anything nefarious. They basically told me they weren’t going to print it for political reasons.”

Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored, which rated the Byrne story as #23 out of the top 25 stories the mainstream media missed last year, said it played a part in prompting him to conduct a survey of 10 popular “left”-leaning publications. The survey looked at whether or not liberal news outlets touched stories that weren’t reported by the mainstream media and the results were included as a chapter in Project Censored 2008.

EDITORS NOTE: The above story reports that the piece on Dianne Feinstein’s conflicts of interest was slated to
run on the cover of The Nation. Ben Wyskida of the Nation contacted us after publication say that “we just don’t make promises like that; our covers never get decided until all the edits are in.”

Censored!

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>>Project Censored’s 15 missed-story runners up

>>Big local stories that never made mainstream headlines

>>The story behind a censored story that was killed by The Nation

amanda@sfbg.com

There are a handful of freedoms that have almost always been a part of American democracy. Even when they didn’t exactly apply to everyone or weren’t always protected by the people in charge, a few simple but significant rights have been patently clear in the Constitution: You can’t be nabbed by the cops and tossed behind bars without a reason. If you are imprisoned, you can’t be incarcerated indefinitely; you have the right to a speedy trial with a judge and jury. When that court date rolls around, you’ll be able to see the evidence against you.

The president can’t suspend elections, spy without warrants, or dispatch federal troops to trump local cops or quell protests. Nor can the commander in chief commence a witch hunt, deem individuals "enemy combatants," or shunt them into special tribunals outside the purview of our 218-year-old judicial system.

Until now. This year’s Project Censored presents a chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for the most part, the major news media weren’t paying attention.

"This year it seemed like civil rights just rose to the top," said Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored, the annual media survey conducted by Sonoma State University researchers and students who spend the year patrolling obscure publications, national and international Web sites, and mainstream news outlets to compile the 25 most significant stories that were inadequately reported or essentially ignored.

While the project usually turns up a range of underreported issues, this year’s stories all fall somewhat neatly into two categories — the increase of privatization and the decrease of human rights. Some of the stories qualify as both.

"I think they indicate a very real concern about where our democracy is heading," writer and veteran judge Michael Parenti said.

For 31 years Project Censored has been compiling a list of the major stories that the nation’s news media have ignored, misreported, or poorly covered.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines censorship as "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts," which Phillips said is also a fine description of what happens under a dictatorship. When it comes to democracy, the black marker is a bit more nuanced. "We need to broaden our understanding of censorship," he said. After 11 years at the helm of Project Censored, Phillips thinks the most bowdlerizing force is the fourth estate itself: "The corporate media is complicit. There’s no excuse for the major media giants to be missing major news stories like this."

As the stories cited in this year’s Project Censored selections point out, the federal government continues to provide major news networks with stock footage, which is dutifully broadcast as news. The George W. Bush administration has spent more federal money than any other presidency on public relations. Without a doubt, Parenti said, the government invests in shaping our beliefs. "Every day they’re checking out what we think," he said. "The erosion of civil liberties is not happening in one fell swoop but in increments. Very consciously, this administration has been heading toward a general autocracy."

Carl Jensen, who founded Project Censored in 1976 after witnessing the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 in spite of mounting evidence of the Watergate scandal, agreed that this year’s censored stories amount to an accumulated threat to democracy. "I’m waiting for one of our great liberal writers to put together the big picture of what’s going on here," he said.

1. GOOD-BYE, HABEAS CORPUS


The Military Commissions Act, passed in September 2006 as a last gasp of the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Bush that Oct. 17, made significant changes to the nation’s judicial system.

The law allows the president to designate any person an "alien unlawful enemy combatant," shunting that individual into an alternative court system in which the writ of habeas corpus no longer applies, the right to a speedy trial is gone, and justice is meted out by a military tribunal that can admit evidence obtained through coercion and presented without the accused in the courtroom, all under the guise of preserving national security.

Habeas corpus, a constitutional right cribbed from the Magna Carta, protects against arbitrary imprisonment. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called it the greatest defense against "the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny."

The Military Commissions Act has been seen mostly as a method for dealing with Guantánamo Bay detainees, and most journalists have reported that it doesn’t have any impact on Americans. On Oct. 19, 2006, editors at the New York Times wrote, in quite definitive language, "this law does not apply to American citizens."

Investigative journalist Robert Parry disagrees. The right of habeas corpus no longer exists for any of us, he wrote in the online journal Consortium. Deep down in the lower sections of the act, the language shifts from the very specific "alien unlawful enemy combatant" to the vague "any person subject to this chapter."

"Why does it contain language referring to ‘any person’ and then adding in an adjacent context a reference to people acting ‘in breach of allegiance or duty to the United States’?" Parry wrote. "Who has ‘an allegiance or duty to the United States’ if not an American citizen?"

Reached by phone, Parry told the Guardian that "this loose phraseology could be interpreted very narrowly or very broadly." He said he’s consulted with lawyers who are experienced in drafting federal security legislation, and they agreed that the "any person" terminology is troubling. "It could be fixed very simply, but the Bush administration put through this very vaguely worded law, and now there are a lot of differences of opinion on how it could be interpreted," Parry said.

Though US Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) moved quickly to remedy the situation with the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, that legislation has yet to pass Congress, which some suspect is because too many Democrats don’t want to seem soft on terrorism. Until tested by time, exactly how much the language of the Military Commissions Act may be manipulated will remain to be seen.

Sources: "Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right," Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams Web site, www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm, Feb. 12, 2007; "Still No Habeas Rights for You," Robert Parry, Consortium (online journal of investigative reporting), consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html, Feb. 3, 2007; "Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?" Robert Parry, Consortium, consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html, Oct. 19, 2006

2. MARTIAL LAW: COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU


The Military Commissions Act was part of a one-two punch to civil liberties. While the first blow to habeas corpus received some attention, there was almost no media coverage of a private Oval Office ceremony held the same day the military act was signed at which Bush signed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, a $532 billion catchall bill for defense spending.

Tucked away in the deeper recesses of that act, section 1076 allows the president to declare a public emergency and dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police if he determines them unfit for maintaining order. This is essentially a revival of the Insurrection Act, which was repealed by Congress in 1878, when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in response to Northern troops overstaying their welcome in the reconstructed South. That act wiped out a potentially tyrannical amount of power by reinforcing the idea that the federal government should patrol the nation’s borders and let the states take care of their own territories.

The Warner act defines a public emergency as a "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any state or possession of the United States" and extends its provisions to any place where "the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order." On top of that, federal troops can be dispatched to "suppress, in a state, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy."

So everything from a West Nile virus outbreak to a political protest could fall into the president’s personal definition of mayhem. That’s right — put your picket signs away.

The Warner act passed with 90 percent of the votes in the House and cleared the Senate unanimously. Months after its passage, Leahy was the only elected official to have publicly expressed concern about section 1076, warning his peers Sept. 19, 2006, that "we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders." In February, Leahy introduced Senate Bill 513 to repeal section 1076. It’s currently in the Armed Services Committee.

Sources: "Two Acts of Tyranny on the Same Day!" Daneen G. Peterson, Stop the North America Union Web site, www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/articles/Fear.html, Jan. 20, 2007; "Bush Moves toward Martial Law," Frank Morales, Uruknet.info (Web site that publishes "information from occupied Iraq"), www.uruknet.info/?p=27769, Oct. 26, 2006

3. AFRICOM


President Jimmy Carter was the first to draw a clear line between America’s foreign policy and its concurrent "vital interest" in oil. During his 1980 State of the Union address, he said, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

Under what became the Carter Doctrine, an outpost of the Pentagon, called the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, was established to ensure the uninterrupted flow of that slick "vital interest."

The United States is now constructing a similar permanent base in Africa, an area traditionally patrolled by more remote commands in Europe and the Pacific. No details have been released about exactly what AFRICOM’s operations and responsibilities will be or where troops will be located, though government spokespeople have vaguely stated that the mission is to establish order and keep peace for volatile governments — that just happen to be in oil-rich areas.

Though the official objective may be peace, some say the real desire is crude. "A new cold war is under way in Africa, and AFRICOM will be at the dark heart of it," Bryan Hunt wrote on the Moon of Alabama blog, which covers politics, economics, and philosophy. Most US oil imports come from African countries — in particular, Nigeria. According to the 2007 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations, "disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to US oil-security strategy."

Though details of the AFRICOM strategy remain secret, Hunt has surveyed past governmental statements and reports by other independent journalists to draw parallels between AFRICOM and CENTCOM, making the case that the United States sees Africa as another "vital interest."

Source: "Understanding AFRICOM," parts 1–3, b real, Moon of Alabama, www.moonofalabama.org/2007/02/understanding_a_1.html, Feb. 21, 2007

4. SECRET TRADE AGREEMENTS


As disappointing as the World Trade Organization has been, it has provided something of an open forum in which smaller countries can work together to demand concessions from larger, developed nations when brokering multilateral agreements.

At least in theory. The 2006 negotiations crumbled when the United States, the European Union, and Australia refused to heed India’s and Brazil’s demands for fair farm tariffs.

In the wake of that disaster, bilateral agreements have become the tactic of choice. These one-on-one negotiations, designed by the US and the EU, are cut like backroom deals, with the larger country bullying the smaller into agreements that couldn’t be reached through the WTO.

Bush administration officials, always quick with a charming moniker, are calling these free-trade agreements "competitive liberalization," and the EU considers them essential to negotiating future multilateral agreements.

But critics see them as fast tracks to increased foreign control of local resources in poor communities. "The overall effect of these changes in the rules is to progressively undermine economic governance, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable multinational firms, robbing developing countries of the tools they need to develop their economies and gain a favorable foothold in global markets," states a report by Oxfam International, the antipoverty activist group.

Sources: "Free Trade Enslaving Poor Countries" Sanjay Suri, Inter Press Service (global news service), ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=37008, March 20, 2007; "Signing Away the Future" Emily Jones, Oxfam Web site, www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp101_regional_trade_agreements_0703, March 2007

5. SHANGHAIED SLAVES CONSTRUCT US EMBASSY IN IRAQ


Part of the permanent infrastructure the United States is erecting in Iraq includes the world’s largest embassy, built on Green Zone acreage equal to that of Vatican City. The $592 million job was awarded in 2005 to First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. Though much of the project’s management is staffed by Americans, most of the workers are from small or developing countries like the Philippines, India, and Pakistan and, according to David Phinney of CorpWatch — a Bay Area organization that investigates and exposes corporate environmental crimes, fraud, corruption, and violations of human rights — are recruited under false pretenses. At the airport, their boarding passes read Dubai. Their passports are stamped Dubai. But when they get off the plane, they’re in Baghdad.

Once on site, they’re often beaten and paid as little as $10 to $30 a day, CorpWatch concludes. Injured workers are dosed with heavy-duty painkillers and sent back on the job. Lodging is crowded, and food is substandard. One ex-foreman, who’s worked on five other US embassies around the world, said, "I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."

These workers have often been banned by their home countries from working in Baghdad because of unsafe conditions and flagging support for the war, but once they’re on Iraqi soil, protections are few. First, Kuwaiti managers take their passports, which is a violation of US labor laws. "If you don’t have a passport or an embassy to go to, what do you do to get out of a bad situation?" asked Rory Mayberry, a former medic for one of First Kuwaiti’s subcontractors, who blew the whistle on the squalid living conditions, medical malpractice, and general abuse he witnessed at the site.

The Pentagon has been investigating the slavelike conditions but has not released the names of any vioutf8g contractors or announced penalties. In the meantime, billions of dollars in contracts continue to be awarded to First Kuwaiti and other companies at which little accountability exists. As Phinney reported, "No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site."

Source: "A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy," David Phinney, CorpWatch Web site, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173, Oct. 17, 2006

6. FALCON’S TALONS


Operation FALCON, or Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally, is, in many ways, the manifestation of martial law forewarned by Frank Morales (see story 2). In an unprecedented partnership, more than 960 federal, state, and local police agencies teamed up in 2005 and 2006 to conduct the largest dragnet raids in US history. Armed with fistfuls of arrest warrants, they ran three separate raids around the country that netted 30,110 criminal arrests.

The Justice Department claimed the agents were targeting the "worst of the worst" criminals, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, "Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime."

However, as writer Mike Whitney points out on Uruknet.info, none of the suspects has been charged with anything related to terrorism. Additionally, while 30,110 individuals were arrested, only 586 firearms were found. That doesn’t sound very violent either.

Though the US Marshals Service has been quick to tally the offenses, Whitney says the numbers just don’t add up. For example, FALCON in 2006 captured 462 violent sex-crime suspects, 1,094 registered sex offenders, and 9,037 fugitives.

What about the other 7,481 people? "Who are they, and have they been charged with a crime?" Whitney asked.

The Marshals Service remains silent about these arrests. Whitney suggests those detainees may have been illegal immigrants and may be bound for border prisons currently being constructed by Halliburton (see last year’s Project Censored).

As an added bonus of complicity, the Justice Department supplied local news outlets with stock footage of the raids, which some TV stations ran accompanied by stories sourced from the Department of Justice’s news releases without any critical coverage of who exactly was swept up in the dragnets and where they are now.

Sources: "Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State," Mike Whitney, Uruknet.info, uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1, Feb. 26, 2007; "Operation Falcon," SourceWatch (project of the Center for Media and Democracy), www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON, Nov. 18, 2006

7. BLACKWATER


The outsourcing of war has served two purposes for the Bush administration, which has given powerful corporations and private companies lucrative contracts supplying goods and services to American military operations overseas and quietly achieved an escalation of troops beyond what the public has been told or understands. Without actually deploying more military forces, the federal government instead contracts with private security firms like Blackwater to provide heavily armed details for US diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where the nation is currently engaged in conflicts.

Blackwater is one of the more successful and well connected of the private companies profiting from the business of war. Started in 1996 by an ex–Navy Seal named Erik Prince, the North Carolina company employs 20,000 hired guns, training them on the world’s largest private military base.

"It’s become nothing short of the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration’s so-called global war on terror," author Jeremy Scahill said on the Jan. 26 broadcast of the TV and radio news program Democracy Now! Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was published this year by Nation Books.

Source: "Our Mercenaries in Iraq," Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232, Jan. 26, 2007

8. KIA: THE NEOLIBERAL INVASION OF INDIA


A March 2006 pact under which the United States agreed to supply nuclear fuel to India for the production of electric power also included a less-publicized corollary — the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture. While it’s purportedly a deal to assist Indian farmers and liberalize trade (see story 4), critics say the initiative is destroying India’s local agrarian economy by encouraging the use of genetically modified seeds, which in turn is creating a new market for pesticides and driving up the overall cost of producing crops.

The deal provides a captive customer base for genetically modified seed maker Monsanto and a market for cheap goods to supply Wal-Mart, whose plans for 500 stores in the country could wipe out the livelihoods of 14 million small vendors.

Monsanto’s hybrid Bt cotton has already edged out local strains, and India is currently suffering an infestation of mealy bugs, which have proven immune to the pesticides the chemical companies have made available. Additionally, the sowing of crops has shifted from the traditional to the trade friendly. Farmers accustomed to cultivating mustard, a sacred local crop, are now producing soy, a plant foreign to India.

Though many farmers are seeing the folly of these deals, it’s often too late. Suicide has become a popular final act of opposition to what’s occurring in their country.

Vandana Shiva, who for 10 years has been studying the effects of bad trade deals on India, has published a report titled Seeds of Suicide, which recounts the deaths of more than 28,000 farmers who killed themselves in despair over the debts brought on them by binding agreements ultimately favoring corporations.

Hope comes in the form of a growing cadre of farmers hip to the flawed deals. They’ve organized into local sanghams, 72 of which now exist as small community networks that save and share seeds, skills, and assistance during the good times of harvest and the hard times of crop failure.

Sources: "Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India," Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229, Dec. 13, 2006; "Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India take on Monsanto," Arun Shrivastava, Global Research (Web site of Montreal’s Center for Global Research), www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427, Oct. 9, 2006

9. THE PRIVATIZATION OF AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE


In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ushered through legislation for the greatest public works project in human history — the interstate highway system, 41,000 miles of roads funded almost entirely by the federal government.

Fifty years later many of those roads are in need of repair or replacement, but the federal government has not exactly risen to the challenge. Instead, more than 20 states have set up financial deals leasing the roads to private companies in exchange for repairs. These public-private partnerships are being lauded by politicians as the only credible financial solution to providing the public with improved services.

But opponents of all political stripes are criticizing the deals as theft of public property. They point out that the bulk of benefits is actually going to the private side of the equation — in many cases, to foreign companies with considerable experience building private roads in developing countries. In the United States these companies are entering into long-term leases of infrastructure like roads and bridges, for a low amount. They work out tax breaks to finance the repairs, raise tolls to cover the costs, and start realizing profits for their shareholders in as little as 10 years.

As Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway reported in Mother Jones, "the Federal Highway Administration estimates that it will cost $50 billion a year above current levels of federal, state, and local highway funding to rehab existing bridges and roads over the next 16 years. Where to get that money, without raising taxes? Privatization promises a quick fix — and a way to outsource difficult decisions, like raising tolls, to entities that don’t have to worry about getting reelected."

The Indiana Toll Road, the Chicago Skyway, Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and many other stretches of the nation’s public pavement have succumbed to these private deals.

Cheerleaders for privatization are deeply embedded in the Bush administration (see story 7), where they’ve been secretly fostering plans for a North American Free Trade Agreement superhighway, a 10-lane route set to run through the heart of the country and connect the Mexican and Canadian borders. It’s specifically designed to plug into the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, taking advantage of cheap labor by avoiding the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose members are traditionally tasked with unloading cargo, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose members transport that cargo that around the country.

Sources: "The Highwaymen" Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway, Mother Jones, www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html, Feb. 2007; "Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway," Jerome R. Corsi, Human Events, www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15497, June 12, 2006

10. VULTURE FUNDS: DEVOURING THE DESPERATE


Named for a bird that picks offal from a carcass, this financial scheme couldn’t be more aptly described. Well-endowed companies swoop in and purchase the debt owed by a third world country, then turn around and sue the country for the full amount — plus interest. In most courts, they win. Recently, Donegal International spent $3 million for $40 million worth of debt Zambia owed Romania, then sued for $55 million. In February an English court ruled that Zambia had to pay $15 million.

Often these countries are on the brink of having their debt relieved by the lenders in exchange for putting the owed money toward necessary goods and services for their citizens. But the vultures effectively initiate another round of deprivation for the impoverished countries by demanding full payment, and a loophole makes it legal.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast broke the story for the BBC’s Newsnight, saying that "the vultures have already sucked up about $1 billion in aid meant for the poorest nations, according to the World Bank in Washington."

With the exception of the BBC and Democracy Now!, no major news source has touched the story, though it’s incensed several members of Britain’s Parliament as well as the new prime minister, Gordon Brown. US Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Donald Payne (D-N.J.) lobbied Bush to take action as well, but political will may be elsewhere. Debt Advisory International, an investment consulting firm that’s been involved in several vulture funds that have generated millions in profits, is run by Paul Singer — the largest fundraiser for the Republican Party in the state of New York. He’s donated $1.7 million to Bush’s campaigns.

Source: "Vulture Fund Threat to Third World," Newsnight, www.gregpalast.com/vulture-fund-threat-to-third-world, Feb. 14, 2007

>>More: The story of U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein’s conflict of interest

Where is the love?

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OPINION Distant dreams of flowing colored scarves, glowing tie-dyed shirts, and rainbow dashikis commingling with mounds of facial hair and peace signs filled my mind as I walked through a deep recess of quiet green on a hidden trail in Golden Gate Park. It was 7 a.m. I was there to meet Mary X, an OG Summer of Love attendee, as she hastily closed her camp before, as she put it, "the po arrested me and stole all my stuff."

Despite the romantic images of the 1967 events, Mary’s campmates — black, brown, and white houseless elders, several of whom are veterans of the Vietnam War — were barely clothed in soiled flak jackets and torn tie-dyed shirts.

Further shattering the mythos of peace, human love, and community caring, many of these elders sported overlong beards that, unlike those in so many white-ified Jesus pictures, were filled with crumbs and spittle. Their hands were crippled with arthritis and barely able to hold their coffee cups, much less make a peace sign. "I was there," Mary stated plainly, her black eyes searching nervously for the next Department of Public Works truck or park police officer. "I was at the original Summer of Love in 1967." She stopped talking, picked up her backpack, and left without looking back at me.

Mary is a diagnosed schizophrenic, she told me during our original phone call, and like many poor folks in the United States — like my poor mama, Dee, who passed away last year — she has no money for mental health services. Her indigent program allows her a biannual visit with a disaffected psychiatrist who hands her a medication prescription she can’t afford to fill. Her only income is earned from long hours spent collecting cans and redeeming them for small change, very hard work that we at Poor call microbusiness — and a line of work that our magazine, in a recent exposé ("The Corporate Trash Scandal," 8/15/07), discovered is more likely to erase our collective carbon footprint that any corporate recycling company.

While Mayor Gavin Newsom continues with his daily sweeps of homeless people in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius writes weekly hit pieces that demonize and lie about the poor folks surviving in public spaces, equating them with the wild coyotes that roam the park. Nevius’s hit campaign begs the question for all of us: where is the love?

As thousands celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, how can we criminalize people for the sole act of living without a home and occupying public space? And who should really determine who belongs in open spaces like parks, beaches, streets, and sidewalks?

How have we in the United States come to equate cleanliness with a lack of poor human beings, and how are the people who have come to celebrate the Summer of Love — with their trash, picnic baskets, cars, belongings, and recreational drugs — any cleaner than the homeless folks who live and work in the park year-round and have nowhere else to go?

Tiny

Tiny, a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia, is the cofounder of Poor magazine and the Poor News Network (www.poornewsnetwork.org) and the author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America.

Eye spy

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea: I’ve found myself a femmy boy who’s willing — nay, enthusiastically prepared — to wear green eye shadow in public. This is delicious. However, we live in Colorado Springs, Colo., which is for its size a wealthy and well-educated town, but also headquarters for Focus on the Family, New Life Church, Will Perkins, Fort Carson, NORAD, and the Air Force Academy. One of my femmy-boy friends was recently chased down an alley downtown by some of the local military simians for the apparently gender-treacherous crime of wearing a top hat. It was lucky for him he knew the area well and wasn’t nearly as plastered as they were.

My two questions about the eye shadow thing are these: First, and I understand if you’re not able to answer because you don’t live here, if we do go on a date while he’s wearing it, what do you think our chances are of finishing the evening without getting the shit beaten out of us? And second, what’s your opinion on where one should put one’s feet while treading the fine line between keeping yourself safe and taking a stand for the right to do what you want with your body if it’s not hurting anyone else?

I guess the question is along the same lines as, how do you feel about him wearing a ball gag and leash to the local Starbucks? Eye shadow is just a less overtly sexual signal. Well. To some people. Not to me. Love, Don’t Kick Me

Dear Kick: Gotcha. And no, I surely do not live there, nor would I, but we did blow out a tire there on a cross-country trip once and got stranded for a couple days. Pretty town. Really nice park. I knew all that stuff (Air Force, antigay groups, etc.) was there, but you can’t tell by visiting — it’s not like there are giant "Fags go home" banners flying gaily over Main Street or anything. But would I, were I a guy, dress up in my gayest glad rags and sashay down the same main drag in a pair of darling red wedge espadrilles and a panty-girdle? I would not. I suspect you would not, either, were you a guy (you’re not, right?). It would be no safer for you to accompany your new girly-boy while he did it either. There is sticking up for your inalienable right to be a weirdo, and there is stupidity. I draw the line at stupidity in any other context, so why would I make an exception for this one?

There was a time in the late ’80s and early ’90s when all the cool kids were making a spectacle of themselves in the name of political action: visibility, I think we called it. All you had to do was print up some T-shirts or stickers and show up en masse where you weren’t expected and you got to feel all brave and thrillingly transgressive and challenging to heterosexual hegemony and stuff. It was great. It was also kind of fake — when you’re surrounded by a few dozen or hundred or thousand of your closest friends and you’re in San Francisco or New York or Washington, not Jakarta or Beijing or rural Rwanda, you’re pretty safe. Even if the cops get you, you’re going to be cited and set free; protesters in the United States are rarely brought to trial, let alone found bound and beheaded in a ditch. That doesn’t mean that nothing we do here is dangerous, though, and unfortunately walking certain streets in a state of visible gender ambiguity can still get you kicked in the face.

There is no set point on the continuum from safe but stifled to "Kick me" that I can recommend you find and cleave to, never again to stray. I do not think it would be very smart to dress your boy up and parade him around near the base at bar-closing time on a Saturday night; nor do I think those of us who fail to conform in every particular to local community standards for gender performance need cower at home forever for fear of attracting a disapproving glance. Somewhere between "Don’t frighten the horses" and "Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke" lies the perfect level of public self-expression for you two as individuals of your particular place and time. Find it. Also consider finding some fellow gender traitors with whom to make your scene, even if that scene is no more trangressive than going out for fish and chips (I’m pretty sure that’s what I ate at your local brew pub while waiting for our truck to be fixed so we could get the hell out of there) and the late showing of Snakes on a Plane. I think you’ll be OK. I wouldn’t recommend the Starbucks–ball gag excursion, but that’s because it’s in bad taste, not because it could get you killed. You’ll have to use your common sense. If you haven’t got any, I really do think you’d better stay home. Love, Andrea

Andrea’s on vacation this week: this column ran previously (8/22/06). But she’s still checking e-mail and eagerly awaiting your questions about love and lust! Contact her at andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com.

Too many golf courses

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OPINION The future of San Francisco’s public golf courses affects you even if you don’t play golf.

San Francisco’s seven public golf courses cover more than 700 acres of parkland, or 20 percent of our public open space. That’s three times the acreage in Chicago, a city five times larger with four times the population. Furthermore, San Francisco’s golf courses lose more than $1 million annually.

In a 2004 city-funded survey, San Franciscans preferred more hiking trails, community gardens, skate parks, playgrounds, off-leash dog areas, bike trails, and baseball diamonds. Golf ranked 16th out of 19 on a list of recreational priorities. If the city is serious about keeping families and children in San Francisco, we must prioritize the recreational uses preferred by our diverse community.

With the exception of Harding Park, San Francisco’s public golf courses operate at only 40 percent capacity. Golf courses effectively remain unused half the time. There is clearly an oversupply of courses, while demand continues to wane. We can convert this underutilized asset to greater use and still meet demand for golf at all ability levels.

Pleasanton recently hosted a soccer tournament. A friend noted that her hotel was filled with players and families. Our local economy would benefit by adding adequate acreage to our mere 25 acres of soccer fields to host similar family-friendly tournaments. Golfers get 700 subsidized acres, while soccer moms and dads get 25?

Recreation and Park Department studies indicate the city accommodates fewer than 50 percent of soccer teams with only one game and one practice per week. What about the other teams? Rec and Park recommended 35 more soccer fields to meet demand.

One of the city’s courses, Sharp Park, is a prime candidate for conversion to restore its wetland ecosystem, home to the endangered red-legged frog and San Francisco garter snake, while adding hiking trails and preserving golf play.

Public pressure from a broad coalition of park users to stop privatization of our public courses helped force Rec and Park to analyze conversion of some — not all — golf courses to other recreational uses. The city should compare the costs of conversion to the estimated $64 million needed to upgrade existing golf courses.

No one suggests closing all of San Francisco’s public golf courses or denying people access to them. However, we can likely meet current golf demand with two or three fewer courses.

Demand more equitable use of our open space by e-mailing recpark.commission@sfgov.org and board.of.supervisors@sfgov.org. Indicate you want the study funded by the Board of Supervisors to begin immediately.

Rick Galbreath, Jill Lounsbury, Dan Nguyen-Tan, Sally Stephens, and Isabel Wade

Rick Galbreath sits on the executive committee of the Sierra Club’s San Francisco chapter. Jill Lounsbury is manager of the Golden Gate Women’s Soccer League. Dan Nguyen-Tan works with the Coalition for Equitable Use of Open Space. Sally Stephens is a member of the San Francisco Dog Owners Group. Isabel Wade is executive director of the Neighborhood Parks Council.

Save the golf courses

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OPINION Public golf is a historically vital part of San Francisco life. Imported to the city by immigrants from Scotland around 1900, golf here has retained its Scottish character as recreation for all types and ages. This is fostered by one of America’s outstanding collections of municipal courses, from the flagship Harding Park to Sharp Park — designed by Alister MacKenzie, golf’s Frank Lloyd Wright — to Gleneagles, hailed as one of the country’s finest nine-hole courses.

Of all the city’s courses, Lincoln Park is the oldest and most charming — a signature San Francisco landmark like its neighbor, the Golden Gate Bridge. Beginning in 1902, Lincoln was built on a hilly former cemetery by Tom Bendelow, who was known as the Johnny Appleseed of American golf, and Jack Neville, designer of Pebble Beach. Ansel Adams took some of his earliest published photographs there. Every national poll recognizes Lincoln as among America’s top 10 most-scenic public courses.

But today Lincoln needs help. After years of deferred maintenance, it’s now unplayable for much of the winter due to the lack of a modern drainage system. The ancient clubhouse is dilapidated. So play at Lincoln has declined. Some detractors now call for Lincoln to be bulldozed and replaced by skateboard and BMX bike parks, a soccer field, a driving range, and an events center. Such high-intensity uses are unrealistic, incompatible with Lincoln’s extremely hilly topography, and unacceptable to the course’s neighbors in the quiet residential precincts of the Outer Richmond.

Those who attack golf as an elitist male pastime misrepresent the reality of public golf in the city and ignore Lincoln’s importance to our youths. Lincoln is the home of the city’s high school and junior golf programs; the course’s alumni include US Open champions Ken Venturi and Johnny Miller and LPGA stars Jan Ferraris and Dorothy Delasin. The First Tee program, based at Harding and with plans for a new learning center in the Sunnydale neighborhood, uses golf to uplift the lives of hundreds of children from the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. The city’s high school golfers now on university teams across the country — including Domingo Jojola (University of San Francisco), Katrina Delen-Briones (San Jose State), Keiko Fukuda (Brown University), and Elaine Harris (Indiana University) — are anything but male elites.

That the city’s golf courses need outside expert management is not seriously debatable. At the zoo, we hire professional zookeepers; at the museums, professional curators. What’s needed at our public courses is not more "wait and study the problem to death," as some politicians advocate, but an immediate injection of golf management expertise to prevent the terminal deterioration of the courses.

Improved public recreation cannot come by tearing down one sport to benefit another. We need to work together to improve all public recreation — including restoration of Lincoln and our other storied public golf courses. Visionaries of prior generations created these great civic assets. It is now our duty to preserve them for generations to come.<\!s>*

Lee Silverstein, Terese Cronin, and Tom Weathered

Lee Silverstein is a special education teacher and golf coach at Lowell High School. Terese Cronin is a fourth-generation San Franciscan who spent her youth at the city’s public golf courses. Tom Weathered is secretary of the Lincoln Park Golf Club.

Next week: why the city should look at other uses for Lincoln.

The poison in your sofa

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OPINION If your sofa was purchased in California after 1975, chances are its interior foam and cushions contain either brominated or chlorinated fire retardants. These toxic chemicals have been shown to cause cancer, reproductive problems, learning disabilities, and thyroid disease in laboratory animals and house cats. At the same time, these chemicals are climbing the food chain in increasing concentrations and are found in fish, harbor seals in San Francisco Bay, polar bears, bird eggs, and the animal at the very top of the food chain — breast-fed human babies.

A little-known California regulation known as Technical Bulletin 117 requires that the polyurethane foam in furniture withstand an open flame for 12 seconds without catching fire. This 30-year-old regulation is well intended, and upholstered furniture fires are a serious concern. However, since 1975 no other jurisdiction in the world has followed California’s lead, and other states have achieved similar or greater reductions in fire-related deaths without this standard.

Because brominated and chlorinated fire retardants don’t react chemically with foam, their molecules have a tendency to attach to dust particles in furniture. Each time someone sits on a sofa cushion, the dust particles escape into the air and can be inhaled or settle on the floor, where toddlers and house cats live and play.

These fire-retardant molecules mimic thyroid hormone, which in pregnant women regulates the sex and brain development of the unborn child. This mimicking is called endocrine disruption, and brominated and chlorinated fire retardants in even infinitesimal amounts can cause harm to human and animal health through this process.

Many national furniture manufacturers distribute only California-compliant furniture, which means that up to 10 percent by weight of foam cushions are composed of toxic chemicals. California’s standard is poisoning the whole nation, one sofa at a time.

The good news is that there are safer chemical and construction-based alternatives already in the marketplace that can provide an equivalent level of fire safety without the use of brominated and chlorinated fire retardants. The institutional-furniture industry and the mattress industry already comply with tough fire standards and do so without the use of these toxic chemicals.

Residential-furniture manufacturers could do so as well, except that state law and TB 117 prevent it. That’s why I have authored Assembly Bill 706, which would modify our outdated foam test. A modern residential-furniture standard, such as the one developed in California for mattresses, should address how the various components of furniture can together achieve equal or better fire safety without using the most toxic fire retardants.

AB 706 would establish a comprehensive process for weighing the issues of fire safety and chemical exposures. It would rightly rest the responsibility for assessing toxicity with state toxicologists, require the fire-retardant industry to prove that its products are safe, and leave the final decision on whether to prohibit a particular chemical to the state’s fire-safety scientists.

Soon the decision of whether California will continue to poison our kids and the rest of the nation will be made by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Thus far, state agencies have been directed from the top to oppose AB 706. The question for Gov. Schwarzenegger is, how loudly must our babies cry before toxic, cancer-causing, endocrine-disrupting chemicals are removed from our furniture?<\!s>*

Mark Leno

Mark Leno represents San Francisco in the State Assembly.

Harm reduction in the park

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OPINION Mayor Gavin Newsom’s moves to sweep homeless people out of Golden Gate Park have generated a lot of controversy — and a lot of people are missing the point.

I’m not so concerned about people sleeping in the park, just as I’m not so concerned about people sleeping on the sidewalks or the streets if there is no other place available, so long as they are just sleeping.

If folks just slept in the park, cleaned up after themselves, and moved on during the day, most of us would probably not notice. If my friends and I decided to take our tents and sleeping bags to the park and spend the night, there probably wouldn’t be any trace of our stay the next day.

My main concern is when ancillary conduct related to a poverty existence, such as defecation, urination, and the dispersal of syringes, becomes problematic. Is it worse when these things happen in Golden Gate Park or Corona Heights than it is when the same behavior occurs around Marshall Elementary in the middle of the Mission? The costs to police the park and the concrete public realm to the extent that one would see a difference in less feces and fewer syringes are probably as significant as the cost of constructing facilities to house and treat the homeless.

A feasible midrange political solution would be to adopt a broad front of harm-reduction policies designed to lighten the annoying footprints of the homeless on our public spaces without attacking them as human beings. Many are seriously messed up for an often overlapping variety of reasons. Outreach workers, instead of forcing homeless people through the criminal justice system, should offer appropriate technology disposal solutions for the most dangerous waste and trash as well as services to help with sanitation. I’d like for the city to initiate a "shit in a bag" program under which city workers would communicate to the homeless the importance of not befouling public space and provide plastic bags, toilet paper, and sanitizers for them to use.

Similarly, syringe-disposal systems are inherently safe, are designed to be unopenable without tools, and should be deployed in sites frequented by injection drug users.

It should be noted that nobody is noticing any more of these annoyances now than they were five years ago. The San Francisco Chronicle is simply tossing Newsom a softball for his reelection campaign so that he can appear tough on crime for his base voters (as if that is going to be an issue this year). It’s not cost-effective to deploy the San Francisco police to deal with homelessness. It’s also not cost-effective for the city to make up for the abdication by the state and federal governments of their responsibility to deal with the mentally ill and drug abusers.

So we can either complain or attempt another approach.<\!s>*

Marc Salomon

Marc Salomon is a member of the San Francisco Green Party County Council.

You can’t trust the voting machines

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OPINION California’s secretary of state, Debra Bowen, has released a landmark report showing what all honest brokers admitted long ago: electronic voting systems are completely vulnerable to hackers. "The independent teams of analysts [hired by the state] were able to bypass both physical and software security measures in every system tested," her report states.

A report on accessibility for disabled voters found that none of the direct recording electronic (usually touch screen) voting systems met federal disability standards.

And yet US House Democrats and People for the America Way are busy hammering out a deal in Congress to institutionalize in federal law the continued use of such disastrous voting systems.

Out of touch much? Which part of a transparent, counted, paper ballot (not a "trail" or a "record") for every vote cast in America do these guys not understand?

Late Friday, as Bowen’s report was being released, US House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) finally came to terms, reportedly, on a deal for a revision of Holt’s House Resolution 811, dubbed the Federal Election Reform Bill, which allows for the use of DREs — as preferred, almost exclusively, by People for the American Way, elections officials, and voting-machine companies. Saturday’s New York Times confirmed that it was "Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way, [who] helped broker the deal" between Holt and the House leadership.

And though Christopher Drew’s reporting at the New York Times is getting slightly better with each new story, it would be nice if the "paper of record" could learn enough about our voting systems to accurately report and help Americans understand what’s really at stake here and how the technology actually works.

Drew reported — misleadingly — that "the House bill would require every state to use paper records that would let voters verify that their ballots had been correctly cast and that would be available for recounts."

That’s just plain wrong. The fact is that adding "cash-register-style printers to … touch-screen machines," as Drew describes it, does not allow a voter to verify that his or her "ballots had been correctly cast." It allows voters only to verify that the paper record of their invisibly cast electronic ballot accurately matches their intentions, if they bother to check it (studies show most don’t) and if they’re able to notice errors on the printout (studies also show that most do not). The fact is, there is no way to verify that a person’s vote is correctly cast on a DRE touch-screen voting machine. Period.

Unless, of course, it’s me who is out of touch in presuming that if a ballot is cast, it means it will actually be counted by someone or something. Paper trails added to DRE systems are not counted; instead, only the internal, invisible, unverifiable ballots are. A "cash-register-style" printout prior to the ballot being cast and counted internally does nothing to change that. *

Brad Friedman

Brad Friedman writes on elections and political integrity for the Brad Blog at www.bradblog.com. A version of this piece first appeared as a post there.

Man vs. room service?

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On the Discovery Channel show Man vs. Wild, Bear Grylls parachutes into remote wildernesses, from the swampy Everglades to the freezing Scottish Highlands, and finds his way out, seemingly on his own. However, in an article posted on the BBC News Web site July 24, survival consultant Mark Weinert alleged that Grylls spent some nights in a hotel during the Hawaii episode, among other solo-survival no-no’s. Whatever the case, Man vs. Wild is, in my opinion, the greatest nature-survival show since Marty Stouffer’s Wild America. The following is an abridged version of an e-mail interview with Grylls, which took place prior to the controversy:

SFBG How helpful do you think being a regular viewer of your show would be in a survival situation?

BEAR GRYLLS Well, hopefully it is pretty helpful! Really, the best survival advice is always to sit tight and wait for rescue. But having said that, the whole series is full of survival advice, with most of it quite out-of-the-box stuff, like using shoelaces to climb tress or drinking the fluids from elephant dung for water. I do get quite a few letters from people saying that they used something they saw me do on a show and it saved their lives. Whether they are making it up or telling the truth, I never know, but it is encouraging to read. When we first started filming, I used to think, "Will anyone ever watch this?" So it’s nice that they do!

SFBG What’s the one thing you’d recommend as indispensable training for anyone in terms of being able to survive in the wild?

BG Understand that survival is all about strength of mind, not body — hence in so many survival epics it has often been the ladies in high heels with no skills who have been victims of airplane crashes, etc., who beat the odds, whereas their fellow male survivors with all the gear and gung ho have crumbled. Why? Because their reason for staying alive was bigger — it drove them further, it made them think laterally, made them keep making decisions, never giving up and doing whatever it took to stay alive long enough to be found or get lucky. Those who stick it out are those who win.

SFBG What would you say was the single most challenging survival situation you’ve ever been in?

BG Losing my father when I was still young.

SFBG In this season of the show, what was the most difficult environment to survive in?

BG Scotland, ironically, was tough — classified as an Arctic landscape. I was there in winter in minus-40 degrees in a storm, with very little clothing. I would have been in real trouble if I had not found a deer carcass that I could gut and sleep inside. I have just returned from the Sahara for season two, where it was 140 degrees. I definitely was on the outer limit of my endurance, I felt.

SFBG Have you ever been close to throwing in the towel and asking for assistance?

BG Well, when it has been raining for 24 hours torrentially, I am lost, with limited food and water, no tent or mosquito net, in the Amazon, and I miss my family and two boys, it is okay to have the odd moment of "What the hell I am doing here?" I am not a robot. Being away from my wife and kids is the hardest part of all this for me.

SFBG Obviously, people are fascinated by the foul things you ingest in order to stay alive. Do you have a list of the most disgusting?

BG The top list is: goat testicles, raw (just wait for the new season!), sheep eyeballs (exploding goo of gristle and blood), grubs as big as fists (yellow ooze), and raw zebra neck. But that’s all for my work life. When I am home, I just love home cooking! (Duncan Scott Davidson)

To read the complete interview, go to dsc.discovery.com/fansites/manvswild/manvswild.html

The generals should end the war

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OPINION All American military officers and commanders take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Their oath is a solemn obligation to the American people, and especially to their own troops, to abide by the law. Our men and women in uniform place great trust in their superiors. They risk their lives in the belief that they will not be used falsely or illegally or for ill gain.

There is no group of Americans with greater interest in the enforcement of international law than American troops themselves. Our youths pay a heavy price when their rulers plunge them into operations beyond international law. Immediately after the Abu Ghraib scandal, the infamous retaliatory beheadings began.

The legal status of the occupation of Iraq is not a mystery. The generals who command the US troops know very well that the occupation is based on lies, carried out in defiance of US treaties. The Nuremberg Conventions explicitly repudiate the doctrine of preemptive war. The United Nations Charter, for which many of our parents and grandparents gave their lives on the battlefields of Europe, outlaws war as "an instrument of policy."

Every general knows that the occupation is a war of choice. The commanders also know that, except for special UN-sanctioned interventions, defensive necessity is the sole legal basis for war. US Army Field Manual no. 27-10 states without equivocation, "Treaties reutf8g to the law of war have a force equal to that of laws enacted by Congress."

Many soldiers of conscience who dared to speak openly about the immorality and illegality of the war have been court-martialed and imprisoned. Their cases, dating back to 2004, raise serious doubts about the capacity of our soldiers to receive justice in our military courts. Five months prior to the Abu Ghraib scandal, a soft-spoken Army soldier named Camilo Mejía was visibly upset by the atrocities he observed during his tour of duty in Iraq. Repulsed by the slaughter of civilians and the needless deaths of American GIs — all reported in his riveting combat memoir, Road from Ar Ramadi (New Press, 2007) — Mejía gathered his courage and made formal complaints to his superiors. Commanders refused to listen and questioned his patriotism. Eventually Mejía was sentenced to a year in prison for speaking out, for telling the truth.

His trial, like subsequent trials of war resisters, was a travesty of justice. The judge, Col. Gary Smith, ruled that evidence of the illegality of the war was inadmissible in court, that international law is irrelevant, and that a soldier’s only duty is to follow orders, regardless of their legality. In essence, Mejía spent months in prison for upholding the rule of law in wartime. Had commanders listened to Mejía, had judges respected due process and the rule of law, the Abu Ghraib scandal that humiliated our troops might never have occurred.

Our military system is passing through a profound moral and legal crisis. A commander who knowingly orders troops to participate in crimes against peace betrays himself or herself and those who serve under him or her.

The time has come, long overdue, for American generals of conscience to break their silence. *

Veterans for Peace (Chapter 69, San Francisco) and Asian Pacific Islanders Resist

The above statement was issued by these two antiwar groups and is endorsed by the national Veterans for Peace group, which will launch a campaign next week calling on American generals to refuse to continue the war.

Dirty truth bombs

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Been around da block as Jenny and I have? Then you’re all way too familiar with that cad Hoochie Coochie Man, that bogus Boogie (Chillen) Man, and — natch, Nick — that Loverman. But hey, who’s this new game, Grinderman? This grind has little to do with a full-bodied Arabica, the daily whatever, or the choppers that go "Clink!" in the night. It’s all about that which is toppermost of the poppermost on young men’s minds, always skirting young men’s fancies. Namely, sex, sex, and more sex. Oh yeah, and sex.

No pretense, prenups, or prenatal care here. "An overriding theme of mine is, I guess, a man and a woman against the world," Grinderman’s primo romantic, Nick Cave, murmurs. "But for this record, the woman seems to be down in the street, engaged in life, and the man is kind of left on his own, with, um, y’know, a tube of complimentary shampoo and a sock."

It’s the rough, sordid, inelegant, dirty-old-man truth, youth — and judging from Grinderman’s self-titled debut (Mute/Anti-), it sounds awfully good to me. Consider the configuration of Cave on vocals and guitar along with three Bad Seeds (violinist and electric bouzoukist Warren Ellis, bassist Martyn Casey, and drummer Jim Sclavunos), his solo band set free to create music collaboratively, loosely tethered to Cave’s mad songwriting skills. There’s sex, yes, but Grinderman is also about finding fresh, new positions and approaches to the old rump roast of rock ‘n’ roll, copping new moves to old blues, and finding new grooves for honest old dogs. After all, Cave will have been on this blighted speck for half a century this year. "Look, I’ve been turning 50 for years, so it’s kind of academic at this stage," says the polymath who won over critics with his screenplay for the 2005 Aussie western The Proposition. "I think there’s an old man’s anger behind this record and a sense of humor about it as well, I guess, that you only get with age, really. Where all you can do is kinda laugh. But I do think there’s a sort of rage that’s 50 years old."

It’s there in "Go Tell the Women": "All we want is a little consensual rape in the afternoon<\!s>/ And maybe a bit more in the evening," Cave coos. Scenes abound of balding devils treating themselves to lonely hand jobs in the shower or restlessly flipping channels, fondling the changer, on universal remote; on "Love Bomb," Cave grumbles, "I be watching the MTV<\!s>/ I be watching the BBC<\!s>/ I be searching the Internet." He’s aware of the "mad mullahs and dirty bombs" out there ("Honey Bee [Let’s Fly to Mars]"), but instead of succumbing to death and devastation, Grinderman gets lost in the life force, a many-monikered lady, the old in-and-out, monkey magik — real Caveman stuff.

The band wisely avoided choosing the latter label. But amid testosterone, no one lit on the charm. Congenialman doesn’t have quite the same ring, though the Cave I speak to from his home in Brighton, England, is definitely a lighter, brighter, wittier, and much more charming creature than I ever imagined. Searching for a lighter midinterview, Cave is in fine spirits — Grinderman had only done three shows and an in-store, but he and Sclavunos were pleased with the reception to their collective nocturnal emission.

At the larger Bad Seeds shows, Cave explains, "the audience is a long way away. It’s just been really good to kind of … see what an audience looks like again."

The four first came upon the idea of starting a new group when, while performing as the Bad Seeds, Sclavunos says, "we’d catch glimmers of it in rehearsals or sound checks. Someone would make some awful noise, and we’d all get excited and start playing along with it."

The sole American member of Grinderman and the Bad Seeds — and a onetime member of the Cramps and Sonic Youth — laughs abruptly when I ask him to describe his dynamic with Cave: "Hah! Complicated!" They talk a lot, about matters beyond music. "There’s such a tendency, such an anti-intellectual streak in rock ‘n’ roll music," Sclavunos continues. "Such a fear of seeming to know things and such a tendency to dumb things down for the sake of trying to make it seem more real or give it more integrity. Don’t let it get too complicated or it starts smacking of prog rock or something! But Nick’s not afraid of ideas, and he’s not afraid to try out ideas, and in that sense we’re all of the same mind."

Grinderman is likewise as collective minded as possible. "We do it in very much the traditional democratic manner of bands," Sclavunos offers. "Whoever can be bossier in expressing an opinion about something has the opportunity to speak up, and if there’s anything really objectionable going on, you can certainly count on people raising a fuss!"

The idea was to try something different, Cave confirms. "I asked Warren Ellis what I should sing about lyrically because we had a pretty clear understanding what the music was going to be like, and he said he didn’t know but just don’t sing about God and don’t sing about love," Cave details. "A piece of information like that initially throws me for a six, but it’s actually enormously helpful for me as a writer because it kind of cuts down your options and pushes you into another place." Contrary to belief, the idea was not to re-create Cave’s cacophonous early combo, the Birthday Party. "The Birthday Party were actually way too complicated," Cave says mirthfully. "We don’t have enough brain cells left to be able to cope with that kind of thing."

Sooo … what with all the "No Pussy Blues" and the odes to "Depth Charge Ethel" shoved down Grinderman’s trou, one wonders what Cave’s wife, Susie Bick, must think of the lyrics? She likes the band and the shows, he says, then sighs, "Um, yeah. You know, I think there may have been a certain confusion to begin with, but I cleared that up." As in, who exactly you were writing about? "Yeah. Exactly. Yeah."<\!s>*

GRINDERMAN

Thurs/26, 9 p.m., $26 (sold out)

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.gamh.com

Also Fri/27, 9 p.m., $26 (sold out)

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

www.slims-sf.com

ROAMING, CHARGED

CRIBS


UK punk pop with enough energy — and provocation, thanks to the Femlin-perpetuated sex and violence in the video for "Men’s Needs," off their new Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever (Warner Bros.) — to shiver your baby bunker’s timbers. With Sean Na-Na and the Hugs. Wed/25, 8 p.m., $11–<\d>$13. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

BAT FOR LASHES


Another kick inside for Kate Bush lovers? Vocalist Natasha Khan is an ethereal ringer for the lady. I dug the all-girl folk-and-art-song combo when they played South by Southwest — and the affection is catching: Bat for Lashes’ Fur and Gold (Caroline) was recently short-listed for UK’s Mercury Prize. Mon/30, 8:30 p.m., $10–<\d>$12. Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

Gavin Newsom’s wireless Edsel

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OPINION What would you think if somebody tried really hard to sell you an Edsel when you could clearly see a Lexus on the lot for the same price?

That’s what Mayor Gavin Newsom is doing with his "wi-fi everywhere" franchise deal.

The mayor put out a bid to get everyone in the city connected wirelessly at high speeds with a decent free service. What he has gotten instead is a deal that doesn’t guarantee anyone will be connected, with free service so slow even your dog wouldn’t use it.

Newsom wants reelection points for an approved deal now, knowing he won’t have to take reelection hits for the network when people see what they’re really getting:

• If you want better than pedestrian speeds, you’ll pay fees comparable to those for DSL. But DSL is faster.

• If you live above the second floor or away from the front of your building, or in various locations around the city, you won’t be able to get service at all. Too bad for you.

• Service will drop out randomly without warning and may take days to fix.

• Even only a few people at a time downloading things makes the service hideously slow for all of them.

• The service uses the same frequencies as all the wireless gear people buy for common use. Use your wireless phone, ruin your Internet connection (and maybe your neighbor’s too).

• Google and EarthLink get to snoop on you, your traffic, and your preferences. Good-bye, privacy.

• The free service will operate at 300 kilobits per second — not even matching the 1,000 Kbps service that Google provides for free in Mountain View.

• The underserved will remain underserved despite all claims to the contrary.

While Newsom has been pushing wi-fi, optical fiber has become really cheap. But Newsom is ignoring fiber in favor of his pet wi-fi project. Newsom’s friends have been attacking various supervisors for failing to pursue the wi-fi deal, but the supes are looking at fiber as an excellent reason to drop wi-fi entirely. Why? Here’s what you get with community optical fiber:

• A connection of 1,000 megabits per second. Not 300 kilobits, not six megabits, but one gigabit.

• Potential savings of $1,000 per year per consumer.

• Near-absolute reliability.

• No slowdowns due to congestion.

• No snooping.

• Anyone on the network can become a video producer for the entire world.

• The elimination of monopoly control over our communication networks and a permanent commitment to network neutrality that can’t be overcome.

People have asked Newsom why he won’t offer free fiber connections to underserved community centers if he cares about them as much as he claims. He gives no answer: "Let them eat 300 kilobits."

It is the height of folly for a politician to pursue a bad promise to deliver poor services when the same politician could claim to be keeping up with the times and has something much, much better to offer. But that appears to be Newsom’s reelection strategy. He wants to give us an Edsel while pretending it really is better than the Lexus we can clearly see despite his best efforts to hide it. I’ll vote for the person who wants to sell me the Lexus. *

Eric Dynamic runs an ISP business in Oakland.

Problems with Peskin’s Muni plan

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OPINION Last week the Board of Supervisors received a proposed charter amendment that takes a misguided stab at the much-needed reform of the Municipal Transit Agency, which oversees Muni. In undertaking reforms we all agree are needed for the MTA to better serve our city, the supervisors should consider the Hippocratic oath required of doctors: “First, do no harm.”

Our union, Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which represents almost a thousand MTA workers, has enormous respect for the bill’s sponsor, board president Aaron Peskin. We know that Peskin strongly supports workers’ rights and has always stood for openness, transparency, and accountability in government. This initiative, however, undermines everything that he and his board colleagues stand for, and we urge progressives to oppose it.

Most important, the initiative is profoundly undemocratic and would transfer oversight from an elected body to an appointed one. An MTA that no longer had to answer to our elected representatives would be a less accountable and less transparent board.

Downgrading elected oversight into appointive power resting in the hands of one person — the mayor — is not reform but a political power grab. Commissioners would be well aware that they might not be reappointed if they voted too independently of the mayor’s preferences.

The initiative would present additional risks for the abuse of power in local government by allowing MTA to approve its own contracts. This is a dangerous conflict of interest that would create more opportunities for problems, not reform.

The amendment furthermore would undermine workplace protections by increasing the number of nonunion workers from the current 1.5 percent to a whopping 10 percent. Working people would serve at the pleasure of an unelected board and lose their right to collective bargaining. Seven years ago many members of the Board of Supervisors and progressives strongly opposed a nonunion special assistant position in Mayor Willie Brown’s office. The board converted this position to a civil service job because of the perception of patronage and corruption. The current charter amendment exhumes that political cadaver while hiding behind the fig leaf of flexibility — which in this case is a code word for the power to fire people without just cause or due process, or for political expediency.

On one point we agree with this charter amendment: it’s true that the MTA needs more money to serve our residents the way it should, and this amendment would take $26 million from the General Fund and transfer it to the MTA budget. But we do not believe we should be raiding the General Fund without carefully considering the possible impact.

This is a charter amendment and cannot be easily undone. If it turns out to be a disaster, as we believe it will, San Francisco will find itself in a very dire situation without a timely remedy.

SEIU Local 1021 strongly opposes this charter amendment unless it undergoes major revisions. Sup. Jake McGoldrick’s competing initiative, by contrast, offers us a path that is much more democratic, promotes accountability and transparency in government, and protects the rights of working families. We agree that reform is needed, but if passed, Peskin’s initiative will create many more problems than it purports to solve. *

Damita Davis-Howard and Robert Haaland

Damita Davis-Howard is president of SEIU Local 1021; Robert Haaland is San Francisco political coordinator for the union.

 

The City College loophole

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EDITORIAL The 2000 law that made it easier for schools and college districts to sell bonds for capital improvements requires every agency raising money this way to create a citizens’ oversight committee to monitor spending. It also mandates regular audits.

But it’s a bit unclear what the audit requirement actually means — and as G.W. Schulz reports on page 15, that’s allowed some outfits, including San Francisco’s Community College District, to get away with spending hundreds of millions of dollars without proper accountability.

Some lawyers argue that school districts need only undergo perfunctory financial audits. Others say the law mandates detailed performance audits. This sounds like a minor point, but it’s not: financial audits only look at what was spent. Performance audits look at how and why — and whether the money was spent in accordance with what the voters were promised.

The City College administration is only now, reluctantly, agreeing to a performance audit, something that should have been done five years ago. The school’s lawyers say bond money can be freely shuffled from project to project, at any time, and there’s no need for regular performance audits.

There’s a simple way to clear this up: Attorney General Jerry Brown needs to issue an opinion on the intent of the law. And if he won’t do that or comes down on the side of unaccountable government, then the state Legislature needs to pass a bill mandating performance audits and requiring that bond proceeds actually go where the voters were told they would.

Who’s following the money?

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Part two in a Guardian series
Click here for part one

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

David Duer is proud of the volunteer work he’s done with the West Contra Costa Unified School District. He graduated from the area’s school system, as did his kids.

So despite what was sure to be a burdensome responsibility with no pay, Duer, a development director for the UC Berkeley Library, accepted the chance to serve on a committee formed under a state mandate to monitor how the district spent $850 million in bond money authorized by voters in three elections since 2000.

"There are schools all over the district that have been renovated," Duer beams today.

The committee initially proposed meeting every quarter but soon realized that wouldn’t be nearly enough to do the job right and chose to meet monthly instead. Since 2003 it has received full-blown management audits of the school system’s performance every year, with biannual updates from independent professionals not beholden to district bureaucrats.

The story of San Francisco’s Community College District could not be more different.

The oversight committee that’s charged with monitoring $560 million in bond spending has never seen an expansive performance audit, just basic financial reports that show community college officials here seem to be obeying their most fundamental fiduciary duties. The panel meets three times a year for more than an hour and a half each time, and for three years it didn’t even report to the public on City College’s handling of the money, which it’s required to do annually by the state’s Education Code.

The community college committee is hardly made of Rotary volunteers and bored retirees: the list includes San Francisco treasurer José Cisneros and former San Francisco Chronicle publisher Steve Falk, now head of the local Chamber of Commerce.

But even members say the panel has fallen down on the job — and that City College officials are freely shifting around the taxpayers’ cash with little or no accountability.

The mostly decipherable performance reports that West Contra Costa citizens receive, though lengthy, track all of that district’s bond expenditures and give the area’s oversight committee of taxpayers a vivid portrait of how well the school system and its administrators are managing hundreds of millions of dollars in building improvements. Any wonkish jargon in the reports that might mystify the committee is translated in "frank" terms by the outside inspectors, Duer says, without interference from school officials.

If a contractor were to double-bill the district or demand too much in change orders after promising completion within a set price range, Duer and his colleagues would know about it, and they could make suggestions on how to fix it. If the district was doing a stellar job, that would be clear too.

"I don’t see these performance audits as punitive," Duer said. "I see them as a confirmation that the process and systems in place are working."

MORE MONEY PROBLEMS


The Guardian reported last week ("The City College Shell Game," 7/4/07) that City College’s bond projects are running an astounding $225 million over budget. As a result, school officials have returned to the Board of Trustees five times in recent years to request that a total of $130 million be reallocated from one project to another to cover the overruns, leaving some projects promised to voters with little or no funding at all. We reported on a number of examples last week, but there are plenty more:

•<\!s> The construction of a new Mission campus was supposed to begin in 2002 but didn’t get under way until well into 2005. The project is now $30 million over budget, an increase of 50 percent, and the school recently requested another $6 million diversion from other bond projects. City College originally planned to build the campus where a shuttered theater currently stands on Mission Street but later moved the site to avoid a showdown with preservationists.

•<\!s> Since 1997, City College has asked voters for a total of $61 million to renovate and remodel existing buildings and meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements. In November 2005 it asked voters for $35 million to perform such work, but just weeks after the election, $20 million of the money was reallocated to a planned Chinatown–<\d>North Beach campus that’s now running $50 million over budget, an increase of 60 percent. That project’s ever-changing design has been heatedly challenged by everyone from the Chronicle‘s editorial board to Sup. Aaron Peskin to state senator Leland Yee.

•<\!s> Two projects for which voters authorized a combined $71 million won’t see the light of day unless the college returns to the ballot a fourth time, which school officials have discussed. The projects — a biotech learning center and a one-stop administrative shop for new students — have been drained of $42 million to save the Mission campus and an overdue Performing Arts Center, which will cost $75 million more than expected, an increase of 152 percent.

HUNTING AND PECKING


All of this irks Mara Kopp, who was appointed to City College’s oversight committee in late 2005 as a representative of the San Francisco Taxpayers Association. She’s complained openly that the school long ago should have hired auditors for the kind of far-reaching work West Contra Costa gets.

"If we received ongoing management reports, then we’d have something of substance," Kopp said. "We wouldn’t have to hunt and peck in a kind of naive, elementary way."

She is all but alone in her criticism, however, save for a small group of allies including former committee member John Rizzo and Milton Marks, one of the few voices on the independently elected Board of Trustees willing to apply tough scrutiny to Chancellor Phil Day’s office at board meetings. Green Party pol Rizzo recently became a trustee after closely beating longtime incumbent Johnnie Carter in the November 2006 board race.

Day has long argued that the school’s attorneys don’t believe such audits are required under Proposition 39, a 2000 state ballot measure that lowered the threshold for passing local school bonds. Prop. 39 required the formation of local citizens’ bond oversight committees.

Marks has questioned the strength of City College’s oversight committee and the lack of performance audits since at least 2005, but not until earlier this year were he and Rizzo able to force a resolution demanding the inspections, and now Day claims to welcome a management review. The school will bid out its first audit soon.

"The bottom line is, a performance audit as opposed to a financial audit would determine whether or not funds are being expended in the most efficient, effective, and economical manner instead of just adding up these funds and saying, ‘Here’s how much we expended and for what,’<\!s>" said Harvey Rose, a respected local auditor who’s reviewed city agencies and analyzed San Francisco’s annual budget for 35 years.

West Contra Costa concluded that Prop. 39 does require extensive managements audits. The committee even decided to include a $150 million bond election in 2000 in the scope of its work, although that wasn’t required, to ensure all the money was still being spent efficiently.

Duer said it doesn’t matter to him what the letter of the law requires. "It was always assumed with our work that this is something we had to have," he said.

The Los Angeles Community College District made the same assumption. Other districts statewide, however, appear to have interpreted Prop. 39 the same way City College has. And the Attorney General’s Office has never issued an opinion clarifying the matter.

Meanwhile, City College officials blame the millions of dollars in outsize project costs on inflation, a globally increased demand for steel and concrete, and slow-moving state regulators who must approve architectural designs.

"I understand both the college as well as the community would like to see us complete every single project we’ve proposed," Vice Chancellor Peter Goldstein told us recently. "We absolutely share that desire. The reality of cost increases has forced us to go back and look at our resources and reallocate in order to keep major projects going forward."

But Kopp and company argue that much earlier performance inspections would have revealed to the oversight committee and trustees where the increase in expenses came from with absolute certainty. That way, no one would have to rely exclusively on the glitzy project presentations made by Day and Goldstein that are often little more than slide shows with quotes from prominent business journals decrying the rising cost of construction materials. Trustee Marks has moaned repeatedly at board meetings that he doesn’t feel informed enough to vote on major reallocations, and his constant questions haven’t always made him popular.

"I think there’s this feeling that the board should not be adversarial," Marks said. "But I think by the nature of how things are set up, we have to be…. We have to look out for the best interests of the public at large."

Not everything’s rosy in West Contra Costa, of course. Anton Jungherr, a former San Francisco Unified School District official, sat on the West Contra Costa oversight committee for four years and fumed in an interview that the district didn’t take seriously the committee’s regular recommendations. He wants to form a statewide association of oversight committees to arm citizens with the information they need to track bond expenditures.

"There are legitimate reasons for change orders, but you have to analyze them and understand what the reasons are and then take the appropriate oversight action," Jungherr said.

But cost overruns in West Contra Costa still pale when compared with those at City College. Jungherr said that district has experienced about $100 million in unexpected costs on $850 million in projects undertaken since 2000, substantially less than what City College faces despite hundreds of millions of dollars more in bond projects.

Kopp still hopes City College’s oversight committee will build more muscle.

"If they were to show us documents they used themselves in monitoring all these things, that could substitute as long as the information was relevant and honest," Kopp said. "But it’s really been quite shallow all along."<\!s>*

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