Planning

State of the occupations

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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State of the occupations

news@sfbg.com, rebeccab@sfbg.com

 

STUDENTS TARGET THE 1 PERCENT

Another Occupy offshoot sprung up at San Francisco State University Dec. 1 when about 150 students attended a march and rally that culminated at Malcolm X Plaza, now the site of the San Francisco’s newest Occupy camp.

Students symbolically blocked off ATMs, wrapped Chase Bank machines in cellophane and plastered nearby Wells Fargo and Bank of America ATMs with “meet the one percent” flyers profiling wealthy University of California Trustee Monica Lozano and California State University Regent Bill Hauck.

The highlight of the action came when SF State President Robert Corrigan arrived on the scene. The group was using the people’s mic to read a letter addressed to Corrigan, penned by the Occupy SF State General Assembly, demanding that he write two letters. One should be directed to the school’s chancellor and CSU Board of Trustees, “urging them to repeal the 9 percent tuition fee increase” that the board passed Nov. 16, and another should go to “the presidents of every other CSU campus asking them to also contact the chancellor and Board of Trustees regarding a repeal of the 9 percent tuition fee increase.”

Corrigan listened, then participated in a frank question-and-answer session with protesters, urging them to contact Sacramento legislators. Yet he refused to write those letters or declare support for Occupy SF State.

Afterwards, the students returned to Malcolm X Plaza and erected about 15 tents, which organizers said would contain “books, food, and homework help” along with providing shelter for sleeping protesters.

 

OCCUPY LA MISIÓN

In the Mission, where city officials have been encouraging OccupySF to relocate from its current home in the Financial District, a separate new Occupy effort could be underway.

Organizer Enrique Del Valle says he and other organizers have been distributing flyers and talking to people and organizations throughout the neighborhood. “We’re getting it together to have a General Assembly,” he told us.

The effort is unrelated to the OccupySF General Assembly’s Nov. 29 decision to decline the city’s offer to utilize an abandoned lot at 1950 Mission Street, he added. Before the city made that offer, Del Valle, a community volunteer with connections with many Mission groups, says he was already working on forming a neighborhood occupation.

If Occupy SF had set up shop in the space offered by the city, “We would have worked with them,” he explained, “but set up somewhere else.”

Meanwhile, Mayor Ed Lee and OccupySF are still waiting for one another’s next moves. On the evening of Dec. 1, when San Francisco Police officers surrounded the camp in steel barricades, protesters felt another raid was underway. But they resisted and took down some barricades, causing police to suddenly back down and remove the rest.

“They’ve just been mindfucking us,” OccupySF protester Markus Destin told us. “As soon as they spend all that money breaking us down, we’ll just come back in a week and re-encamp.”

Mayoral Press Secretary Christine Falvey said Lee wasn’t aware OccupySF rejected his offer: “We haven’t heard back one way or another from the group. The offer is still out there and the group has all of the information they need from us. We are awaiting a decision. Mayor Lee has made it very clear to the group that he supports their first amendment rights and their right to assemble, but that overnight camping at Justin Herman Plaza is not an option for the long term because of the health and safety problems it creates.”

 

OCCUPY AGAINST FORECLOSURE

Community members rallied outside a foreclosed Visitacion Valley home Dec. 1 before moving their protest to the offices of the company that purchased the property.

At 11 a.m., dozens gathered in front of the residence where 75-year-old Josephine Tolbert had lived for nearly 40 years. A day earlier, Tolbert had arrived home with three young grandchildren in tow to find her locks changed. Organizers say the evicted resident needs to access the house to retrieve food and medicine.

The crowd — which included neighbors, friends, and members of Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), OccupySF, and Occupy the Hood — demanded that Tolbert be let back in. According to Bayview resident and self-proclaimed “foreclosure fighter” Vivian Richardson, “They would not let her in to get food, diapers, or her diabetes medicine.”

Tolbert had run a daycare business from her home for 20 years. One of her regular clients, a mother with two young children, arrived during the rally. She was surprised to find that Tolbert was locked out of her home and unable to care for her children that day.

“I want to get in my home so I can resume my business,” Tolbert said. “That’s my occupation there, I don’t have any other way of caring for myself.”

The group then headed to the offices of True Compass Loan Services, LLC, the new owners of Tolbert’s home. About 20 supporters gathered at the Ocean Ave office, where ACCE organizer Grace Martinez singled out True Compass owner Ashok Gujral, who owns a $2.75 million home and multiple restaurants, according to a press release from a group calling itself the Foreclosure Fighters.

“The man is worth $10 million, and he has a bunch of limited liability companies,” said Martinez. “Everyone has been shocked at how this man could do this, he knows she is a senior.”

According to Martinez, Gujral personally refused to let Tolbert into her home Nov. 30. He and others from the company “don’t want her in there because they say she’ll refuse to leave,” Martinez added. Calls to Gujral’s office were referred to attorney Jak Marques, who did not return Guardian requests for comment.

A True Compass representative informed protesters “there’s no one here to talk to you,” then swiftly shut the door. But when a few protesters went around through a side entrance and let everyone else in, the group took their protest to the hallway inside.

They remained there for almost an hour, chanting, pounding rhythmically on the walls, and flooding the office on the other side of a locked door with phone calls, demanding Tolbert be allowed to return to her home to retrieve her medicine and belongings.

Five police officers arrived almost immediately as protesters entered company offices. One explained to the protesters that if they didn’t leave, they would face arrest for trespassing. A heated but measured back-and-forth ensued, in which protesters insisted that if Tolbert was his mother, the officer would feel differently. The officer, Lieutenant C. Johnson, responded, “If it was my mother — I don’t know. I have a house for my mother. But I feel for Josephine, and for the millions of other Americans in the same situation.”

Martinez quieted groans from protesters, replying, “You’re part of the 99 percent, and we’re not going to shoot the messenger.”

Organizers conferred and decided to leave the building voluntarily. Sergeant R. Young, who was also at the scene, told the Guardian, “It’s heartbreaking to do this. Their freedom of speech is a constitutional right that we take a sworn oath to protect.”

 

THE SEEDS OF A NEW AMERICA?

Does the Occupy movement signify a new beginning for America? Is history repeating itself? Is violence inevitable? These were some of the big questions pondered by a handful of prominent Bay Area writers, thinkers, artists, and activists Dec. 1 during a panel discussion organized by Salon.com.

Dan Siegel, who most recently made headlines for resigning as Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s legal advisor because he disagreed with her decision to order a police raid of the Occupy Oakland encampment, was a panelist. “The perspective of Mayor Quan and other mayors, besides reflecting the 1 percent, reflects a misguided paradigm,” Siegel said. “The nation’s clearly in an economic crisis that this country has not seen since the 1930s. The mayors should be on the side of the 99 percent. They ought not be the lapdogs of Wall Street.”

Renowned author Rebecca Solnit also participated in the panel discussion. Asked if she thought Occupy symbolized a new beginning, she reflected on the past. “Huge mistakes were made on the left,” in past social movements, she said. “It was supposed to be the revolution, but the women were still expected to make the coffee.” She offered that Occupy represented an evolved manifestation that had benefitted from lessons learned over the years.

“It’s a culmination of decades of refining, searching, and building coalitions,” Solnit said. “It’s the beginning in the sense that summer’s the beginning. We’re reaping the fruit of … what’s been imagined.”

It’s also provided a spark for campus-based organizing. “The Occupy movement has given a tremendous amount of wind to the sails of the student movement and had a consciousness-raising aspect,” said Matt Haney, executive director of the University of California Student Association. “Now they are prepared in a new way to join all of those other folks who are also suffering.”

A key question put to panelists was whether Occupy ought to consider running candidates for office. In response, panelist Melanie Cervantes, an artist and activist, got to the heart of the issue. “What is political power? Is it just representation?” she asked.

Cervantes pointed out that autonomous social movements in Latin America have given rise to leftist political leaders, and she spoke of the past successes of mass-based organizations. “There were things that preceded us generationally, and they worked,” she pointed out. “There’s a lot of different ways people are experienced in trying to change things.”

Panelist Peter Coyote, an actor, activist, and founder of a radical underground group called The Diggers, offered an analogy in response to the idea of Occupy running candidates for office. “If you take a healthy goldfish and throw it into polluted water, it’s gonna get sick,” he said.

Solnit framed her answer as an analogy, too. “We live in a really crummy house with roaches and a leaky roof … Occupy is saying, let’s try to build a better house,” she said. “Our demand is for a better world, isn’t that obvious? We’re building a whole new political vocabulary, a whole new sense of possibility.”

As to the question of whether violence is inevitable as the movement continues to unfold, some panelists discussed nonviolence as a protest tactic, while others focused on the violent behavior of law enforcement officers against protesters. “You don’t hear students talk about using violence,” Haney said. “It’s more like how do we deal with violence that’s being used against us?”

Siegel stressed that the protests ought to be disruptive, yet nonviolent. “The question for our society is, who has the power?” he said. “At the end of the day, we live in a nation state, and people control things. And if they continue to control things, we’re screwed.”

 

WEST COAST PORT BLOCKADE

Occupy Oakland organizers have been engaged in planning yet another shutdown of the Port of Oakland on Dec. 12, which will coincide with attempts to shut down West Coast ports in San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Longview, Tacoma, and Anchorage. “On December 12, the Occupy movements in different cities will … effectively shutdown the hubs of commerce, in the same fashion that Occupy Oakland shut down the Port of Oakland on November 2nd, the day of our general strike,” according to a Call to Action on WestCoastPortShutdown.org. “The message to you from Occupy Oakland in the face of police raids and continued disruptions of workers lives by the 1 percent is the following: The Occupy movement will strike back and rise again! We will blockade all of the West Coast Ports on December 12th in solidarity with longshoremen, port workers and truckers in their struggle against the 1 percent!” Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

CPMC provides little charity care despite huge profits

Sasha Cuttler
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30
CPMC provides little charity care despite huge profits

A new study has found that the California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC), an affiliate of nonprofit Sutter Health, provides far less charity care per paying patient than other hospitals in San Francisco even as it makes by far the most in profits, highlighting an issue that many city officials have raised as CPMC seeks permission to build a high-end new hospital on Cathedral Hill.

The study by UC Hastings College of Law is called “Profits & Patients: the Financial Strength and Charitable Contributions of San Francisco Hospitals,” and the Guardian reviewed an advance copy before its official release this Thursday. It compares CPMC’s hospitals with St. Francis Memorial Hospital, St. Mary’s Medical Center (both are Catholic Healthcare West facilities), and Chinese Hospital.

“Mainly due to Sutter Health’s plan to alter its current hospital structure within San Francisco, the provision of community health benefits by San Francisco hospitals is now a major issue before the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors,” the report reads.

Even before that project, CPMC/Sutter is the dominant health provider in town, and by far the most profitable. Between 2006-2010, the report says the company made $743.9 million in profits from its San Francisco operations, compared to St. Mary’s $22.6 million in profits and the $14.8 million loss by St. Francis.

CPMC runs four of the largest hospitals in the city – St. Luke’s Hospital and CPMC’s Davies, California, and Pacific campuses – behind only San Francisco General Hospital, the city-run facility that does by far the most charity care. But while the other hospitals in the study are smaller, with much less staffed bed counts, they still manage to see the same or more charity care patients than CPMC.

For example, from the report, Saint Francis has 150 staffed beds and sees approximately 31 charity care patients per bed per year. CPMC has 514 staffed beds and sees only 14 patients per bed per year. “In 2010, CPMC’s three oldest campuses (Davies, California, and Pacific campuses) saw charity care patients at a patients per bed rate less than half that of Saint Francis, despite being more than 3 times the size of Saint Francis and having significantly greater financial stability,” read the report.

St. Mary’s and Chinese Hospital also see approximately 13 charity care patients per year per staffed bed, and their staffed beds are 160 for St. Mary’s and 31 for Chinese Hospital. If CPMC has so many more staffed beds, why aren’t their charity counts any higher than a hospital with only 31 beds to their 514 beds?

Hastings Professor Mark Aaronson, who put together the study, said that charity care is supposed to be at least 3 percent, the minimum expectation for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. CPMC’s is closer to 1 percent.

Why is it so low? If you ask CPMC, it’s not. “It depends on how you calculate it,” said CPMC spokesperson Kevin McCormack. “As a dollar amount, we give more in charity care than any other hospital expect for General Hospital.”

Well, obviously. CPMC is a massive conglomerate that has four campuses to maintain and put money into to have the beds and staff available. Having so much more space than any other hospital, they would have to put in more as a dollar amount just to sustain those campuses.

Given that CPMC is a non-profit organization, where does that extra few tens of millions of dollars go? Well, some of it goes to hire the huge team of consultants and lobbyists who are now trying to win approval for the Cathedral Hill project. But McCormack said it also gets absorbed into CPMC operations.

“It goes back into the system itself,” said McCormack. “It goes back into the hospital, into salaries, building new facilities, repairing old ones.”

Even so, the report shows CPMC to be in a different category than other hospitals when it comes to supporting San Francisco’s full population. It also found that the profits extracted from San Francisco’s hospital subsidize the whole chain, a situation that will only become more pronounced as it builds a hospital at Cathedral Hill that seeks to draw patients from around the country.

“CPMC-St. Luke’s is not only the most profitable hospital in San Francisco, but it is also the most profitable hospital in the Sutter Health statewide network. Out of twenty-one hospital groups within the Sutter Health network, CPMC/St.Luke’s brought in nearly one quarter of Sutter Health’s average net income over the last five years,” the report reads.

The report was prepared for the Good Neighbor Coalition, Coalition for Health Planning — San Francisco, and Jobs with Justice. The official public release of “Profits & Patients” will be at 11 am on Thursday, Dec. 8, at the UC Hastings College of the Law, 100 McAllister St., Room 300, San Francisco.

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

BART adopts policy on cutting cell phone service

Sasha Cuttler
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1
BART adopts policy on cutting cell phone service

 The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Board of Directors has adopted the nation’s first policy outlining the circumstances under which cell phone service can be suspended. The policy comes in the wake of BART’s disruption of cell service in a bid to preempt an August 11 anti-police brutality protest that was called to highlight the July 4 police slaying of Charles Hill by BART police at San Francisco’s Civic Center station.

That cell service cut thrust BART into the middle of a national debate over if and when it is appropriate for government agencies to cut cell service to the public. The fallout included multiple rush hour protests against BART this summer led by activists with No Justice, No BART and supporters of the hacker group Anonymous. In the wake of the controversy, BART directors set out to create a policy outlining the circumstances under which BART would cut cell service in the future.

“The intent of this cell phone interruption policy is to balance free speech rights with legitimate public safety concerns,” BART Board President Bob Franklin said. “This policy, with input from the Federal Communications Commission and the American Civil Liberties Union, will serve as a pioneering model for our nation, as a reference to other public agencies that will inevitably face similar dilemmas in the future.”

The policy was quickly adopted yesterday at the BART board’s regular meeting by a vote of 7-0, with directors Lynette Sweet and Joel Keller absent for the vote. The policy states cell service will be “interrupted only in the most extraordinary circumstances that threaten the safety of District passengers, employees and other members of public, the destruction of District property, or the substantial disruption of public transit service.”

What remains unclear is if BART’s controversial decision to cut cellphone service in order to prevent protest would have been justified under the new policy. In the lead up to the policy, BART directors said their aim was to craft a policy to be used in the most extreme emergencies, and not against the free speech rights.

“If we were faced with the exact same situation, we would not shut off cell phone service,” Franklin said, “we would arrest people.”

However, in the wake of the action, BART asserted in an official statement that, “Organizers planning to disrupt BART service on August 11, 2011 stated they would use mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police. A civil disturbance during commute times at busy downtown San Francisco stations could lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions.”

BART would seemingly be justified in a disruption cell service in these circumstances under the new policy, as the planned protest represented in the eyes of BART officials both a perceived risk to safety and a potential for service disruption – the stated strategy in the announcement of the August 11 anti-police brutality protest.

The judgment call on where to draw the line in emergency circumstances will rest with predesignated top BART officials. Those officials will be obligated to immediately inform BART’s directors of any disruption of cell service.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said BART’s policy was an important step towards responding to the incident, but he cautioned, “the legal and policy issues raised by the type of wireless service interruption at issue here are significant and complex.”

He said that the FCC will be undertaking a review of the issue and will “consider the constraints that the Communications Act, First Amendment, and other laws and policies place upon potential service interruptions.”

The FCC regulates cellphone service as part of its broader regulation of the nation’s airwaves. BART’s new policy outlining when to cut cellphone service will take effect immediately.

A link to download the new policy can be found here. http://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2011/news20111201.aspx.

 

Students forage in SF park for weekend Fungus Fair

Sasha Cuttler
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0
Students forage in SF park for weekend Fungus Fair

Late fall is the time for the fleshy bodies of fungi to find their way to the moist, earthy surface.

This time of year, mushroom specialist and biology teacher JR Blair can be found at McClaren Park with students from San Francisco State University collecting hundreds of species of mushrooms for the much-anticipated Fungus Fair (check Caitlin Donohue’s piece on last year’s fair here). 

“All of the mushrooms are collected the Friday before the fair,” Blair said. ”Between 100 and 200 species of mushrooms are sorted and brought to (the exhibit) by Friday night.”

Blair was featured on KQED’s video series Science on the Spot, foraging around McClaren Park sniffing, tasting, and delicately handling the mushrooms to identify the species.

“It’s like an Easter egg hunt,” said Blair in the Quest video. “You hear squeals of delight off in the woods.”

The collected mushrooms are spread over several tables and meticulously labeled, providing an elaborate mushroom gallery of all shapes, sizes, colors and smells.

The Fungus Fair has been an annual event for 41 years with exhibits that show mushroom hunters how to identify edible species and workshops that demonstrate how to grow your own on pieces of wet newspaper.

Around 200 volunteers, comprised of UC Berkeley and SF State students, help to gather mushrooms and run the different exhibit stations. The fair includes live cooking demonstrations, informational exhibits on poisonous, hallucinogenic, medicinal, and microscopic mushrooms and family-friendly workshops on how to make spore prints.

“I think everyone should go to the fungus fair,” said volunteer coordinator Stephanie Wright. “But I’m biased.”

This is Wright’s fourth year helping out with the Fungus Fair and her job wrangling college students is not one she takes lightly. An incredible amount of planning goes into the fair each year, but the rewards of the fair are worth it to those dedicated to spreading the mushroom love.

“Foraging for mushrooms puts me in touch with nature, slows me down,” said mushroom enthusiast and Fungus Fair coordinator Lisa Gorman. “I’m stopping, breathing more deeply and observing. The process compels me to attend to a world and kingdom other than my own.”

The fair takes place Dec. 3 and 4 at the Lawrence Hall of Science in the Oakland Hills from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and costs $15 at the door. For more information you can visit the Mycological Society of San Francisco website or the museum event site.

 

More backroom policy talks with the California Public Utilities Commission

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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On Dec. 8 and 9, high-ranking state government officials will attend a private conference with executives from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E), Chevron, AECOM, and other major energy industry players at Cavallo Point, a luxury resort in Marin County to talk about distributed generation, a decentralized system for renewable power. It’s a gathering of top governmental officials and industry leaders to talk about policy issues with far-reaching effects on California’s energy future, but members of the general public are not invited.

As officials pack their bags for the conference at the plush resort, California Sen. Leland Yee is preparing two separate pieces of legislation designed to promote transparency within the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and to make it harder for energy company executives to transition seamlessly into posts at the CPUC, the governing body that regulates utilities.

The conference is being organized by the California Foundation for the Environment and the Economy (CFEE), a nonprofit funded by investor-owned utilities and other corporations that wield tremendous influence in the Bay Area.

The Guardian spotlighted CFEE in an article about California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) President Michael Peevey, who regularly participates in educational travel excursions funded indirectly by the companies his commission oversees.

When CFEE spokesperson PJ Johnston was interviewed for that article, he justified CFEE events by saying, “The idea for us was that it made sense to have someplace where it was nonconfrontational to engage in policy, work-type discussions,” and added they’re “all about policy, on the 30,000-foot level.”

Peevey will be attending this conference, according to a list of participants posted on CFEE’s website. So will PUC commissioners Mark Ferron, Michael Florio, and Nancy Ryan. By press time, the CPUC had not returned calls seeking comment about why commissioners are participating.

More than a dozen California senators and assembly members are listed as conference participants, as are the director and deputy director of Gov. Jerry Brown’s Office of Planning and Research, Ken Alex and Wade Crowfoot. (Crowfoot previously served in former Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration as an environmental advisor. Newsom now serves at the state’s lieutenant governor.) Executives from Shell Energy North America, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Southern California Edison, and other heavy hitters in the industry will attend the conference too.

The conference agenda features educational sessions on distributed generation and state renewable energy goals. Several environmental and consumer advocacy groups will be present as well.

Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a consumer advocacy group, also plans to attend. “Events like this give the utility industry and energy regulators an opportunity to have policy discussions and to influence policy decisions outside of the political process. It’s a privileged space,” Toney acknowledged. “We don’t think this is a good way to make policy.”

Yet he said advocacy groups like his own face a dilemma when deciding whether to participate in such events. “On one hand, we could decide we want to have nothing to do with it. But if TURN isn’t represented, then the view of ratepayers and consumers won’t be represented by anybody.” He stressed that while TURN attends daylong conferences hosted by CFEE in order to gain access and hopefully have a positive influence within that priveleged space, the group does not participate in travel excursions organized by the organization, which have drawn controversy in the past. “It’s kind of a judgment call,” he added.

Closed-door, backroom policy discussions aren’t the only CPUC transparency problem drawing scrutiny lately. Recent press reports have spotlighted instances of the CPUC denying public access to safety reports, a highly sensitive issue given the fatal pipeline explosion that destroyed a neighborhood in San Bruno last year.

On Nov. 29, Sen. Yee announced he would introduce legislation in early 2012 to subject the CPUC to the California Public Records Act, by stripping away provisions that allow the commission to block the release of information. It would place the body on the same footing as other state agencies with regards to information sharing.

“If you want anything out of the PUC, it takes an affirmative vote of the commission,” explained Adam Keigwin, Yee’s legislative aide. Secretary of State and former Assembly Member Debra Bowen initiated a similar push for transparency at the CPUC in 2006, but the effort did not go anywhere. On Nov. 30, Yee sent a letter to Peevey, the CPUC president, asking for the results of a study on transparency issues that the commission was supposed to undertake nearly six years ago when Bowen was pushing for the bill.

Keigwin added that Yee is also looking at legislation that would bar utility executives from serving on the PUC for a certain length of time, so as to prevent undue influence.

Whose park?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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150
Whose park?

news@sfbg.com

Golden Gate Park and Ocean Beach have long been destinations for locals and tourists to take in natural beauty within an urban setting, but a controversial plan to build a complex of artificial turf soccer fields at their intersection is drawing opposition from neighbors and environmentalists.

The project seems to belie the original intent of Golden Gate Park as a uniquely wild setting. The Master Plan for Golden Gate Park, drafted in 1995, emphasizes environmental stewardship and maintaining the park in a natural, multi-use way. Among its provisions are “major meadows and lawns should be adaptable to host a wide variety of activities, rather than designed for a specific use.”

But the Recreation and Park Department (RPD) and sports advocates are pushing a plan to install seven acres of synthetic turf fields, complete with 60-foot, 150,000-watt lighting that will shine until 10 p.m. year-round.

The project will have its first major public hearing before the Planning Commission on Dec. 1 at 5 p.m. in Room 400 at City Hall. Public comments on the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Report, which was released in October, will be accepted at the Planning Department until 5 p.m. on Dec. 12.

Critics of the plan, including the Ocean Edge Steering Committee, have been distributing educational materials and trying to energize people to oppose a project that the group says runs counter to the park’s purpose and which will harm wildlife and cause other negative impacts.

The fields are slated to be installed over the four existing run-down grass fields in the Western Edge of Golden Gate Park, which sits directly across from Ocean Beach and next to the Beach Chalet historical building and restaurant. The project is projected to cost up to $48 million, about $20 million of which comes from the Clean and Safe Neighborhood Parks bond measure approved by city voters in 2008.

Advocates for the synthetic fields — most notably the City Fields Foundation, the main proponent of converting grass to turf in city parks (see “Turf wars,” 10/13/09) — say that this project will only take up a fraction of the natural space in the park, and that turf has many benefits over natural parkland.

“You can put a grass field in, but then you have to limit public access,” said Patrick Hannan, communications director for the City Fields Foundation. “If you want to have grass, there’s only so much sports play that can happen.”

Hannan says that this project is a response to the high demand for usable athletic fields and the limited play provisions of grass fields and availability of usable fields also limits the number of adults and children able to play sports.

RPD spokesperson Connie Chan was not responsive to Guardian questions about the project’s consistency with the Master Plan, and on the main project, she referred to a statement on the RPD website: “We are proposing to renovate the dilapidated Beach Chalet Athletic Fields in the western end of Golden Gate Park with synthetic turf, field lights and other amenities because Beach Chalet is one of three primary ground sports fields in San Francisco but unfortunately, these fields are in abysmal condition, often closed, and lacking spectator seating.”

But activists say the RPD shouldn’t disregard its own planning documents. “It took a long time to draft the Master Plan,” said Shawna McGrew, an activist who worked at RPD for 30 years. “They have no legal obligation, but a moral obligation to uphold the Master Plan.”

The grass soccer fields have been run down due to lack of maintenance and a continuing gopher problem. But environmental advocates argue that installing the planned light fixtures and synthetic turf will interfere with the wildlife, particularly the nesting birds.

“It’s been referred to as the mothership landing,” said Nature Trip tour guide and bird watcher Eddie Bartley, discussing the impact of the proposed lighting fixtures.

Environmentalists are seeking a greener alternative to this project.

“We feel that there’s a compromise alternative that should really satisfy the concerns that everyone has,” said Katherine Howard of the Ocean Edge Steering Committee. She said her group’s goal is “to renovate the athletic fields, but to do it with real grass. They need a good drainage system, a state of the art irrigation system, gopher control barriers, and top notch grass.”

Howard has spent a significant amount of time approaching people at Golden Gate Park to inform them of the upcoming plans. She believes that not enough park users have been notified about the proposal to install the synthetic turf.

“I had no idea that they were going to do that,” native San Francisco resident Rick Rivero said in response to Howard’s description of the plans. “I played soccer in this field myself and I don’t want to see them changed.”

Rivero said that he hadn’t seen any flyers around the park mentioning plans to change the soccer fields.

RPD originally tried to do the project with conducting an EIR to study alternatives and environmental impacts, but groups like the Golden Gate Audubon Society and Ocean Edge objected. The resulting DEIR stated that, after a few alterations and formal recommendations, the project will have a “less than significant impact” on the biological resources of the area. But environmentalists are dissatisfied with the report.

Among their objections was the report labeling some trees as “tall shrubs” in order to allow for their removal. Studies cited in the DEIR state that water toxicity from the runoff of synthetic turf fields — which can contains plastic and other waste products — “decreased over time” and should have no effect on those using them.

But there have been conflicting studies of that issue, the subject of controversy through the country. Environmentalists noted that water used in natural fields filters down into the underground aquifer where it can be reused, whereas runoff from the turf will be need to be treated as wastewater, a fact given short shrift in the DEIR.

“In our opinion, the EIR is inadequate and incomplete,” Howard said. “And we will be submitting letters to that effect before Dec. 12th, as well as testifying to that on Dec. 1st.”

But the DEIR doesn’t wholly endorse the project. For example, it also states that the project’s impact on cultural resources, referring to the original intent of Golden Gate Park, will be “significant and unavoidable.”

Some parents and sports enthusiasts are disappointed with this backlash and argue that the turf fields will provide an important asset to the city.

“I’m 60, but a few decades ago I played soccer on the Beach Chalet Fields. They were in crappy condition [then] and they’re still in crappy condition,” said Tim Colen, a “soccer parent” we were referred to by Hannan. Colen is also executive director of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition and someone who regularly testifies at City Hall in favor of large development projects.

“It surprises me that a small minority of people has been able to obstruct this project,” Colen said, noting that many parents support the project because the shortage of fields is forcing families out of the city and toward the readily available fields in the suburbs.

Community meetings and even mayoral forums have addressed the proposed Beach Chalet fields. As reported by the RichmondSF blog, mayoral candidate Joanna Rees showed up to a debate wearing her daughter’s soccer jersey and voiced opposition to the artificial turf. Board of Supervisors President David Chiu also reminisced about the joy of playing soccer on grass fields.

Other community meetings have been flooded with youth soccer players from San Francisco and beyond advocating the installation of the turf fields. But local environmentalists say Golden Gate Park was meant to be a refuge for all city residents and visitors.

“Golden Gate Park was created as a place for people to get away from the city,” Howard said. “The amount of contiguous park land is very important.”

Protesters target UC to demand openness, accountability, and the restoration of cuts

Sasha Cuttler
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2
Protesters target UC to demand openness, accountability, and the restoration of cuts

UPDATED BELOW — Protesters with ReFund California and other groups are gathering today (Mon/28) at UCSF-Mission Bay and three other UC campuses to protest a teleconference of the UC Board of Regents, which will discuss state funding levels and tuition increases, as well as recent incidents of police violence against nonviolent student protesters.

ReFund California, a coalition of student and labor groups, is angry with the UC’s decision to abruptly cancel the Nov. 16-17 Regents meeting at UCSF, citing public safety concerns surrounding a meeting that the group had been planning a convergence on for months – as well as a hastily called meeting on the day after Thanksgiving.

The group has created a pledge that it wants the Regents to agree to, which includes calling for higher taxes on the rich, a restoration of cuts to the public university systems, removal of commercial land from Prop. 13 property tax caps, and a fee on Wall Street financial transactions.

ReFund California is also dismissive of independent investigations the UC has initiated to look at aggressive police repression of students protests, including police at UC Berkeley using batons and mass arrests to dismantle an OccupyCal tent city and police at UC Davis dousing passive protesters with pepper spray. Video of both incidents went viral and have helped galvanize the overlapping Occupy and student movements.

“No amount of new ‘police protocols’ will prevent violence against students and workers, as long California’s corporate and financial elite along with their representatives among the Regents and administrators of the UC rely on police to address the concerns of students and workers,” the ReFund California Coalition wrote in the letter to the UC.

Today’s action at UCSF – centered around the meeting site at 1675 Owens Street, where a Guardian reporter is on the scene and will offer her report later today – joins similar protests at UC Davis, UCLA, and UC Merced, the four sites where the Regents will gather.

Meanwhile, ReFund and other groups are also angry that the CSU Board of Trustees went ahead with its Nov. 16 meeting behind closed doors, clearing out student protesters and the public before they approved a 9 percent tuition hike, an action that Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (a member of that body) denounced.

“While I understand the CSU leadership’s concerns regarding public safety, the spirit of open deliberations has been marred,” Newsom wrote in a Nov. 18 letter to Chancellor Charles Reed, calling for the matter to be re-voted at the Dec. 5 meeting to “allow the full board to hold an open debate, with full public comment and members of the media present.”

In related news, many students and faculty at UC Davis are on strike today to protest the pepper-spraying incident. And tomorrow (Tues/29) at noon, members of OccupyOakland say they plan to retake Frank Ogawa Plaza (which they renamed Oscar Grant Plaza) and set up another 24/7 encampment.

UPDATE NOON: Guardian reporter Christine Deakers says there is a heavy police presence at the UCSF meeting, where only 50 members of the public are allowed inside and most of those seats have been claimed by ReFund California members. When the Regents decided to limit the time for public testimony, the group held a General Assembly in the meeting, drowning out the Regents and causing the meeting to adjourn until 1:30 pm. You can follow her tweets here or here.

UPDATE 1:50 PM: The UC Board of Regents did not reconvene, instead cancelling the rest of the meeting without taking action. The San Francisco Chronicle quotes Newsom as saying he supports the demands of ReFund but that he’s not willing to sign its pledge.

The one percent on the waterfront

Andrew Lam
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10

EDITORIAL While Mayor Ed Lee struggles with the OccupySF encampment, another, very different group has its eyes on the city’s waterfront. On the edges of the ground where protesters are talking about the one percent of Americans that control the vast majority of the nation’s wealth, two major development projects aimed entirely at that very wealthy sliver are starting to move forward.

At 8 Washington and 75 Howard, developers want to build a total of 365 condominiums aimed at people with incomes that place them in the top sliver of the richest Americans. It will be a key test for the Ed Lee administration: Will he evict the Occupy protesters and allow the One Percent to claim choice property on the waterfront?

The 8 Washington project calls for 165 of what developer Simon Snellgrove says will be the most expensive condos ever built in San Francisco. The 12-story building, sitting on the edge of the Embarcadero, would include units selling for as much as $10 million, and even the low-end places would go for $2.5 million or more.

At 75 Howard, the Paramount Group and Morgan Stanley want to demolish a parking garage and erect a 284-foot tower with units that the San Francisco Business Times predicts would sell for at least $1,000 a square foot.

Just to be clear what we’re talking about here, a $2.5 million condo, according to real estate experts, would require that a buyer have $625,000 cash to put down and an income of more than $450,000 a year. Either that or millions in spare cash to plunk down.

That, needless to say, is not the majority of the working people in San Francisco.

There’s no conceivable planning or housing-policy rationale for either of these projects. They offer nothing that the city needs; there is absolutely no shortage of housing for people with that kind of income. In fact, allowing these two projects to proceed would directly violate the city’s own General Plan and every regional planning proposal for San Francisco’s housing mix. The General Plan states that some 60 percent of all the new housing built in San Francisco should be below market rate. Environmental sanity suggests that the city ought to be building housing for people who work here — high housing costs have driven thousands of local workers to live in the East Bay or further out, leading to long, energy-intensive commutes. And the more of this ultra-luxury housing the city builds, the more the housing balance gets disrupted — and the more rapidly San Francisco becomes a city of, by and for the One Percent.

The two projects have powerful support — among other things, Lee’s friend and ally Rose Pak is promoting 8 Washington, as is lobbyist Marcia Smolens. If Lee has any scrap of independence he’ll make it clear that both of these projects are dead on arrival.

Guardian editorial: The one per cent on the waterfront

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Guardian editorial: The one per cent on the waterfront

EDITORIAL While Mayor Ed Lee struggles with the OccupySF encampment, another, very different group has its eyes on the city’s waterfront. On the edges of the ground where protesters are talking about the one percent of Americans that control the vast majority of the nation’s wealth, two major development projects aimed entirely at that very wealthy sliver are starting to move forward.

At 8 Washington and 75 Howard, developers want to build a total of 365 condominiums aimed at people with incomes that place them in the top sliver of the richest Americans. It will be a key test for the Ed Lee administration: Will he evict the Occupy protesters and allow the One Percent to claim choice property on the waterfront?

The 8 Washington project calls for 165 of what developer Simon Snellgrove says will be the most expensive condos ever built in San Francisco. The 12-story building, sitting on the edge of the Embarcadero, would include units selling for as much as $10 million, and even the low-end places would go for $2.5 million or more.

At 75 Howard, the Paramount Group and Morgan Stanley want to demolish a parking garage and erect a 284-foot tower with units that the San Francisco Business Times predicts would sell for at least $1,000 a square foot.

Just to be clear what we’re talking about here, a $2.5 million condo, according to real estate experts, would require that a buyer have $625,000 cash to put down and an income of more than $450,000 a year. Either that or millions in spare cash to plunk down.

That, needless to say, is not the majority of the working people in San Francisco.

There’s no conceivable planning or housing-policy rationale for either of these projects. They offer nothing that the city needs; there is absolutely no shortage of housing for people with that kind of income. In fact, allowing these two projects to proceed would directly violate the city’s own General Plan and every regional planning proposal for San Francisco’s housing mix. The General Plan states that some 60 percent of all the new housing built in San Francisco should be below market rate. Environmental sanity suggests that the city ought to be building housing for people who work here — high housing costs have driven thousands of local workers to live in the East Bay or further out, leading to long, energy-intensive commutes. And the more of this ultra-luxury housing the city builds, the more the housing balance gets disrupted — and the more rapidly San Francisco becomes a city of, by and for the One Percent.

The two projects have powerful support — among other things, Lee’s friend and ally Rose Pak is promoting 8 Washington, as is lobbyist Marcia Smolens. If Lee has any scrap of independence,  he’ll make it clear that both of these projects are dead on arrival.

 

 

State of the occupations

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
State of the occupations

rebeccab@sfbg.com

The police evictions of OccupyOakland and OccupyCal over the last week, and the looming threat of another attempt to evict OccupySF, presented challenges for the Bay Area protests just as similar police crackdowns targeted Occupy encampments in Portland, Denver, New York, and other cities nationwide.

These fast-moving developments also come at a time when university students from around California will be descending on San Francisco for a Nov. 16-17 University of California Board of Regents meeting that was canceled this week because of public safety concerns. All of this adds up to a big and unpredictable moment for the widening movement (see “The growing 99 percent,” 11/9).

So we’ve decided to start a regular feature to track the latest developments in an Occupy movement that seems adamant about standing its ground even as it’s forced to deal with threats from police, organizing challenges, and the coming of winter.

 

#OCCUPYCAL GROWS UP FAST

Students at the University of California at Berkeley burst onto the Occupy scene Nov. 9 with the launch of OccupyCal, a student-led protest that made waves nationally after university police advanced on around 500 students in Sproul Plaza, the historic epicenter of the Free Speech Movement, and struck them with batons after they tried to set up camp.

UCB police made 39 arrests in two separate actions against protesters, fueling student protesters’ resolve at a general assembly convened afterward that drew more than 1,000 people and lasted well into the night. At around 1:30 am, students voted to hold a student strike on Nov. 15 in solidarity with others throughout the UC system.

The harsh police response prompted condemnation from the Free Speech Movement Archives (FSM-A). “It appears that the campus police are in need of remedial education concerning fundamental protections offered by the US Constitution — including First Amendment rights to Free Speech and Free Assembly that were clearly recognized and enshrined on the UCB campus 47 years ago on these very steps,” the group noted in an open letter.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau, who was out of the country during the violent police crackdown, issued a statement on Nov. 14 ordering a third-party investigation of the clash and granting amnesty under the Student Code of Conduct to all students who were arrested for blocking police from removing the encampment.

“It was only yesterday that I was able to look at a number of the videos that were made of the protests on November 9. These videos are very disturbing. The events of last Wednesday are unworthy of us as a university community. Sadly, they point to the dilemma that we face in trying to prevent encampments and thereby mitigate long-term risks to the health and safety of our entire community,” he wrote. “Most certainly, we cannot condone any excessive use of force against any members of our community.”

 

#OCCUPYSF, THE NEXT BATTLEGROUND

At press time, student and labor groups that were planning to converge on the UC Regents meeting at UCSF Mission Bay on Nov. 16 by the thousands were deciding how to respond to the meeting cancellation, but protests are still planned for that day, with support from OccupySF.

Meanwhile, Mayor Ed Lee continues to insist that OccupySF break camp, but instead it has only grown larger, with the tents spreading out from Justin Herman Plaza onto the nearby sidewalk along Market Street in front of the Federal Reserve. At press time, protesters feared what seemed an imminent police raid, particularly now that the election is over and busloads of student protesters were headed into town.

 

TRAGEDY STRIKES #OCCUPYOAKLAND

On Nov. 10, Kayode Ola Foster, 25, suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the head following an argument, just yards from the Occupy Oakland encampment in Frank Ogawa Plaza (Oscar Grant Plaza to the occupiers who’d camped there for a solid month).

A somber mood settled over the plaza in the hours following the shooting as the tent city dwellers absorbed the gravity of the situation, and occupy activists held a candlelight vigil. Although initial reports suggested Foster had no relationship to the camp, police later said they believed he and one of two shooting suspects had spent time there.

 

#OCCUPYOAKLAND GETS THE BOOT

Three days after the fatal shooting near the OccupyOakland encampment sparked a hard-line response from local government officials, the camp was dismantled in an early morning police raid Nov. 14, the second to befall the occupation since it began a month ago. That evening, thousands marched back to the plaza in response to the raid and held a general assembly.

On the night of the raid, it took several hours for police to arrive at 14th and Broadway streets, where protesters began congregating in the intersection around 2 a.m. in anticipation of the forced eviction from camp. Law enforcement came en masse, with mutual aid support from seven different regional law enforcement agencies.

While two lines of riot police formed an L-shaped formation blocking protesters’ access to the plaza and nearby streets, hundreds more poured into the plaza to dismantle tents, flatten structures, and make arrests. Police arrested 32, the majority of whom belonged to a group of clergy members from the occupation’s Interfaith Coalition tent who sat calmly together in the plaza and sang by candlelight as they waited for police. Occupiers who witnessed the dismantling of the camp from behind police barricades yelled out, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

Fearing violence, UC cancels Regents meeting; Chancellor pardons arrested UC protesters

Sasha Cuttler
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15

Citing public safety concerns, University of California has canceled a UC Board of Regents meeting set for Wednesday morning at UCSF Mission Bay, a meeting that has been the target of months worth of student organizing to protest tuition hikes and service cuts and which dovetailed with the roiling Occupy movements in the Bay Area.

After police crackdowns on Occupy encampments in Oakland and in UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza over the last week, the long-planned showdown with the UC Regents – whom protest groups such a ReFund California say are among the powerful 1 percent that Occupy has targeted and which they blame for deep cuts in California’s public university system – was highly anticipated.

OccupyCal protesters have called for a strike on that and other UC campuses tomorrow to protest the violent police expulsion of student protesters at UC Berkeley last week. At a General Assembly at 6 pm today (Mon/14) in UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, attendees will decide how to respond to the cancellation of the meeting.

Other groups that include labor representatives, such as ReFund California, will also independently decide how to proceed. “We’re figuring out what to do,” said Jennifer Tucker with ReFund, noting that they will post that information on its website: www.makebankspaycalifornia.com.

A statement issued today by the UC President’s Office cited information gathered by UC Police: “From various sources they had received information indicating that rogue elements intent on violence and confrontation with UC public safety officers were planning to attach themselves to peaceful demonstrations expected to occur at the meeting.

“They believe that, as a result, there is a real danger of significant violence and vandalism. They have advised us further that this violence could place at risk members of the public, students lawfully gathered to voice concerns over tuition levels and any other issues, the UCSF community, including patients, and public safety officers, UC staff and neighbors of UCSF Mission Bay. They recommended to us, in the strongest of terms, that we cancel or postpone the meeting as scheduled.”

Tucker criticized the move: “We were floored this morning by the announcement that the Regents were canceling their meeting. There had been a statewide organizing campaign for months on this with thousands of students coming in on buses from throughout the state,” she said, adding that, “There will still be protests on Wednesday, but we’re not sure what form they will take.”

Meanwhile, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau, who was out of the country during the violent police crackdown last week, today issued a statement ordering a third-party investigation of the clash and granting amnesty under the Student Code of Conduct to all students who were arrested for blocking police from removing the encampment.

“It was only yesterday that I was able to look at a number of the videos that were made of the protests on November 9.  These videos are very disturbing.  The events of last Wednesday are unworthy of us as a university community.  Sadly, they point to the dilemma that we face in trying to prevent encampments and thereby mitigate long-term risks to the health and safety of our entire community,” he wrote. “Most certainly, we cannot condone any excessive use of force against any members of our community.”

The next D5 supervisor

Zelda Bronstein
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21
The next D5 supervisor

Now that it appears Sup. Ross Mirkarimi will be the next sheriff — and Ed Lee will be mayor for the next four years — the speculation is starting over who Lee will name to replace Mirkarimi as District Five supervisor. There are an abundance of qualified candidates, but my sources tell me the Mayor’s Office is looking right now primarily at two people — London Breed, director of the African American Art and Culture Complex and a former redevelopment commissioner, and Malcolm Yeung, an attorney who is president of the Asian American Bar Association and longtime policy person at the Chinatown Comminity Development Center.

Both, of course, were Lee supporters.They have a history of working on progressive causes (Yeung, at CCDC) and strong ties to the community (Breed at AAACC). Breed has spent more time as an activist in D5 (and was appointed to her job by former mayor Willie Brown), but Yeung is reportedly popular with Rose Pak, who clearly has the mayor’s ear.

I don’t know who Lee will be taking to about the appointment, but you can be sure both Brown and Pak will be giving their advice. And so far — although it’s still early — nobody has been talking to the current supervisor.

I called Mirkarimi and asked him who he would suggest, and he told me there were plenty of people — although neither Breed nor Yeung would be on his short list. He didn’t want to name names, but I can: queer/labor activist Gabriel Halland and Community College Board Member John Rizzo are both eminently qualified for the job, and Julian Davis would also be on a lot of short lists. So would Christina Olague, a planning commissioner (and Lee supporter) — but one City Hall insider told me that “Willie would never let that happen.”

Mirkarimi did suggest that he ought to be consulted. “I would think after all the work I’ve done in the district over seven years and two administration that  Mayor Lee would at least want my input,” he said. We’ll see.

San Francisco’s political spectrum: a primer

Sasha Cuttler
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120
San Francisco’s political spectrum: a primer

During yesterday’s post-election wrap-up at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, political consultant and analyst David Latterman cited the ideological breakdown of San Francisco voters: 19 percent are progressive, 36 percent are liberal, 39 percent are “moderate,” and 6 percent are conservative. I cited those figures in a post I wrote yesterday on the latest election results, and some people responded by asking me to explain those terms, so let me take a crack at that because I think it’s important to understanding the city’s political dynamics.

I even discussed the matter with Latterman – who self-identifies as moderate, whereas I and the Guardian have a progressive worldview. “That’s a fantastic question and I don’t think any of us can give suitable answers,” Latterman said. “These aren’t hard lines. It’s like: I don’t know how to define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” Nonetheless, we agreed on the basic outlines and borders between the labels, even though we might frame them and value them a little differently.

In San Francisco, there is general agreement on most social issues among the moderates, liberals, and progressives, although we may disagree on political tactics. We all basically support gay rights, reproductive freedom, the value of diversity, environmentalism, and freedom of expression. That’s why most people consider San Francisco to be a famously liberal city, because of our tolerance on social issues, which only that 6 percent who are conservatives don’t share.

Yet San Francisco is still a deeply divided city on economic issues, including land use and the role of government. This is where most of the political conflicts and divisions occur, and it is here where our political spectrum is as wide as anywhere – perhaps even wider given the extreme wealth and poverty here, as well as the long history of political activism and the setting of national political trends. And it is in this realm that our labels come from.

A “moderate” in San Francisco – which is a real misnomer despite its widespread usage – is a fiscal conservative: anti-tax, anti-regulation, an almost religious faith in the free market, and a resentment of the poor (particularly the homeless and the jobless) and those who advocate for them. They want bare minimal government and see the role of government as primarily to facilitate economic activity in the private sector and to provide the basic infrastructure that the private sector needs to operate efficiently. They even believe social services should be provided by the private sector, such as nonprofits, rather than by government. On economic issues, they’re almost indistinguishable from conservatives, with whom they disagree on social issues.

On the other end of the spectrum are the progressives, who don’t trust capitalists and large corporations and believe they need to be heavily regulated and taxed to provide for the common good. We believe in progressive taxation and a redistribution of wealth, particularly from the richest 1 percent, and that government has an important role to play in leveling the economic playing field and playing referee. Progressives generally believe this country has been drifting to the right for at least the last 31 years and that this is a dangerous trend that needs to be addressed with fundamental, systemic reforms. And at this point, we’re willing to adopt radical strategies for triggering that change, such as Occupy Wall Street or other forms of civil disobedience.

The liberals of San Francisco are somewhere in the middle. They’re Democrats (or DTS) who don’t believe in radical change or anything that might disrupt the existing order, preferring incremental reforms over long period of time. They accept the legitimacy of the two-party political system and an economic system governed by Wall Street and powerful corporations, and they believe we need to do what we can within that framework. They use neoliberal economic policies like business tax cuts and incentives to encourage private sector job creation and housing development, and they accept a shrinking public sector, which they expect to operate more like the private sector, and a waning labor movement.

The reactions to the OccupySF movement is an interesting illustration of the dividing lines. Moderates have voiced tepid support for the movement’s critique of the growing gap between rich and poor, but they’re appalled at the tactic of occupation, believing curfew and anti-camping laws are more important. Progressives have been the most enthusiastic supporters of a movement that echoes their core values and physically challenges the status quo. Liberals basically support the movement, but they’ve been very uneasy with the tactic of occupation and have been vacillating on how to deal with it.

Latterman and the moderates – as well as many liberals – see ideology as a dirty word, and he was happy that in this election “it was the least ideological race we’ve seen in a long time.” Mayor Ed Lee and Board President David Chiu – both of whom hover in the liberal to moderate range, depending on the issue – also treat the notion of ideology with disdain, claiming to support practical, pragmatic, or common sense solutions to problems.

But progressives see ideology as the essence of politics. They understand the world in terms of class struggle, and believe that the very rich have been aggressively exploiting the people and the planet for too long, and that the only real way to make progress is to fight them and win. They believe in the Occupy paradigm that the 1 percent – the greedy rich who have corrupted our political and economic systems – are actively hostile to the interests of the 99 percent. We know that’s an unsustainable system and we’re hopeful that this is the moment when progress – the core of our belief system, that it’s possible to devise better economic and political systems than the ones we’ve inherited – could finally be attainable if we continue to organize and challenge the system.

That’s my general analysis of San Francisco’s political dynamics. What’s yours?

Numbers coming soon

Zelda Bronstein
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4

Steve Jones tweets that the Department of Elections is planning to release the first (absentee) numbers at 8:45. Election-day numbers will come about 45 minutes later. Which means that by 10 p.m. we’ll have a good idea what’s happening.

The growing 99 percent

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The growing 99 percent

steve@sfbg.com

In recent weeks, the Bay Area has been roiled by anger and frustration with how the rich have grown richer while the rest of us endure underemployment, foreclosures, and deep cuts to public education and services, peaking with the Nov. 2 Oakland General Strike that drew more than 10,000 people into the streets to demand economic justice.

The Occupy Wall Street movement — and its many local manifestations, including OccupySF and Occupy Oakland — has been the main vehicle for those populist passions for the last two months, with the support of the labor movement. But now, student and faculty groups from California’s three public university systems are about to get involved in the fight in a big way.

Student and labor groups allied with the ReFund California coalition are planning a week of action for Nov. 9-16, culminating that final day in demonstrations outside the California State University Board of Trustees meeting in Fullerton and University of California Board of Trustees meeting at the UCSF campus in San Francisco’s Mission Bay.

Those protests aim to connect the problem of deep cuts and tuition hikes in the public university systems with the larger issue of wealthy individuals and corporations that haven’t been paying their fair share. The coalition wants the boards to pledge support for a five-point action plan that includes taxes on the wealthy, removing commercial property from Prop. 13 caps on property taxes, restoration of cuts to higher education, a sales tax on Wall Street financial transactions, and pressuring banks to reduce mortgage debt on underwater homes.

Charlie Eaton, a ReFund California organizer from United Auto Workers Local 2865, which represents teaching assistants at UC, notes that many UC and CSU board members also sit on the boards of major banks and corporations that have contributed to the current financial crisis and which have been in the crosshairs of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“It’s really a club of California’s corporate elites,” Eaton said. “It’s about saying to these folks: if you aren’t willing to actively support paying your fair share, or at least get out of the way, we can’t let it be business as usual at the Wall Street institutions that you help run.”

 

NO BUSINESS AS USUAL

He said there’s a direct connection between the actions of these corporate boards and lack of resources in California for public education and services, so it’s only right that these powerful board members — from Regent Richard Blum, the investment banker husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, to Trustee Bill Hauck, former head of the California Business Roundtable — support the needs of the 99 percent.

“We’ll be there to call on them to sign the pledge,” Eaton said of the Nov. 16 meetings. “And if they aren’t prepared to make that pledge, we’re headed to the Financial District to make sure there is no business as usual for these corporations.”

That day of action will echo the last ReFund California protest in San Francisco, the Sept. 29 “Make Banks Pay” march through the Financial District that was one of the first high-profile demonstrations involving OccupySF. The march was several hundred strong, targeting major financial institutions including a Chase Bank branch on Market Street that was occupied by protesters, resulting in six arrests.

When we asked Eaton whether the Occupy movement would lend its energy and numbers to these ReFund California protests, he said, “We’re embedded in the Occupy movement, so it’s not quite right to say it’s something the Occupy movement might help with…I think the Occupy Wall Street movement shows we can make them pay.”

Meanwhile, the next day (Nov. 17), Occupy Wall Street plans to march the 11-mile length of Manhattan in a day of action that will be supported by solidarity marches by Occupy encampments across the country. That is also the day that a two-campus strike is being threatened by the California Faculty Association.

“I think that day is going to be a busy day all around the nation,” Kim Geron, a political science professor at CSU East Bay and vice president of the CFA, told us.

On Nov. 7, the CFA Board of Directors authorized one-day strikes for Nov. 17 at the CSU East Bay and CSU Dominguez Hills campuses to protest CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed’s decision to withhold negotiated faculty pay raises. It would be the first faculty strike in the system since 1983, although a strike was authorized in 2007 but called off after a negotiated settlement.

After the vote, according to a statement put out to members, CFA President Lillian Taiz told her board, “We hope this carefully targeted strike, which symbolizes both our anger and our commitment to fairness, will lead to changes in his priorities and his positions. If it does not, the CFA leadership—and the CSU faculty we represent—are prepared to escalate the fight.”

 

DUCKING THE TAX ISSUE

CSU spokesperson Mike Uhlenkamp said the campuses will remain open despite the strikes. “We expect it to be business as usual,” he said. As for the pledge that ReFund California is seeking, “We don’t get into advocating between taxing and not taxing,” he said, saying that’s a state decision and “we’re not going to push them to make that determination.”

Guardian calls to the UC President’s Office were not returned by press time. A spokesperson for Gov. Jerry Brown, who is the subject of a student letter-writing campaign urging him to tax the rich and stop cutting public services, continued to blame Republicans.

“We too are deeply concerned about cuts to the state’s universities and colleges, which is why the Governor pushed for a solution to our budget deficit that included extending revenues. Unfortunately, Republicans in the Legislature refused to even allow the people of California to vote on the measure, which could have helped prevent future cuts,” Brown spokesperson Evan Westrup responded via email.

When we asked whether Brown was simply giving up, how he planned to deal with the problem, and why Brown has not followed up his campaign pledge to tax the rich with any proposals to do so, he wrote simply, “There are a number of ways to pursue additional revenue moving forward and these options are being considered.”

Geron said there is a clear connection between problems in the CSU system and the hoarding of resources by the richest one percent of Americans, the main critique of Occupy Wall Street, a movement driven largely by current and recent college students.

“We are part of it. One of our slogans is we are the 99 percent and we teach the 99 percent,” Geron told us.

While the CFU is focused on decisions by the Chancellor’s Office — indeed, the strike is legally allowed only because the chancellor broke the contract by withholding negotiated pay increases — Geron said those decisions were made in a climate of deep funding cuts prompted by the state budget crisis.

“Obviously, the economic crisis is a lot of the reason why all this happened. It’s part of a larger crisis that is going on about how to fund the public good, including higher education,” Geron said. “Students are paying a lot more and getting a lot less. That’s the heart of what’s going on.”

The UC Student Association is taking part in the ReFund California week of action, but has not yet voted to participate in direct action against corporations on Nov. 16, Executive Director Matt Haney told us. But he said that many UC students will still take part in that action, just as they’ve been taking part in the Occupy movement.

“It’s the same frustrations. We have to get out there and start pushing this ourselves,” he told us. “We need to show the state that things can’t just keep moving along as they have. We have to put a stop to business as usual. The economic collapse is what destroyed the UC system.”

Haney sees the student, labor, and Occupy movements starting to come together in a very natural way. “It has really put the wind in the sails of student activists to see the energy of the Occupy movement,” Haney said. “There is a coming together of students and labor, and it’s overlapping with the Occupy movement in a powerful way.” *

Find details about the ReFund California Week of Action at www.makebankspaycalifornia.com.

A journey through “Gay in America” with photographer Scott Pasfield

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
A journey through “Gay in America” with photographer Scott Pasfield

Incredibly, considering what a visual people my lavender tribe are, there has been no major photographic survey of gay men in America until now. (Well, at least in book form. I’m not counting Manhunt, here.) Author-photographer Scott Pasfield journeyed around the country for three years, taking some wonderfully enlightening shots of gay men, couples, and more who had responded to his online ads for photographic subjects who were willing to tell their stories. The tally for his “Gay in America” book: 224 pages, 140 men, 50 states.

Scott will be narrating a slideshow presentation of the book (“Not boring like a travel slideshow!” he says) on Sat/5 at 7 p.m. at Magnet in the Castro. I chatted with him over the phone about the project, the men, and the concept of gay “normalization.”  

SFBG What drove you take on a project of this magnitude?

SCOTT PASFIELD It was a combination of a lot of things. I work as a professional photographer in New York, but as with most things in this economic climate, that work was drying up. My fourteen-year-old dog passed away, and I found myself mourning more than I thought. And I really just needed to get back in touch with my craft, to reignite my passion for what I do, to push myself to do something big. I have an incredibly supportive partner now — but I was raised in a difficult household, my father had been very conservative and uncomfortable, to say the least, with my sexuality. So in the big scheme of things, I wanted to connect with other gay men around the country and get them to talk about their experiences, to see where we all were at this very interesting period in the gay American journey — and hopefully learn a bit about myself as well.

I had no idea what I’d find, but the response was pretty overwhelming when I started placing the ads for subjects. People welcomed the opportunity to talk about their lives, where they’d come from and what they were doing. As gay men, we often see each other through these restrictive lenses. I wanted to open that up.

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SFBG A lot of your subjects live in places like Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Kentucky that aren’t exactly known for gay cheerleading. Did you run up agaiinst any major barriers in getting them to pose for you? Or have attitudes changed in this age of the Internet and niche gay communities?

SP You know, it was the strangest thing. I had no problem finding guys in some of those more “remote” places. Of course, homophobia is still a major thing, but I felt that people in some of the out-of-the -way places really wanted to connect and tell their stories, maybe because they had to be strong to be who they are where they are, maybe just because no one had asked.Maybe there just aren’t as many social outlets.

It was in the big cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York that I had the darnedest time finding subjects. I don’t know if it’s because people are more jaded, or maybe they thought I was going to take advantage of them — that this was a hoax or porn. [Laughs.] I was blanketing chat rooms and social media for people to open up, and I did eventually find some great guys, but it was work.

SFBG What are some of the things you’ve taken away from doing this project? Did anyone in particular inspire you?

SP This has been a very emotional journey and I hope I’ve done justice to all the people who appear in the book. You know, five of the guys have died and I hope Gay in America is a fitting tribute to their lives. 

Beyond that, everyone’s story was really affecting. I think the one that most sticks with me is Ken from Maryland, who calls himself “a true redneck.” He and his best friend Kevin had fallen in love, gone to school together, celebrated their anniversary, but had never come out. Until the night they got in a car accident and Kevin was killed. Ken couldn’t see him after they had taken him to the hosital, so he started yelling that he was Kevin’s boyfriend until they let him through. That was how he came out to the world. It’s such an emotional story.

SFBG In the trailer for the Gay in America, you say, “Feeling normal about yourself — which we all are — and that’s the whole point of this.” With all the advances that gay America has made in recent years, from the repeal of DADT to the continued gradual acceptance of same-sex marriage, many people feel the assimilation and normalization are pushing queer diversity and radicalism under the rug. The people in your book are incredibly diverse, although all men. Now that you’ve taken this wide view of gay men, do you have any opinions about the push toward mainstream assimilation?

SP I think there is a very valuable contingent, loud if nonetheless small, of people within our community who are raising important points about the cost of assimilation, and I appreciate that they’re around. The reason I used the word “normal” was more in a personal sense. I was raised to think that homosexuality wasn’t normal, and it took me a long time to accept that I was just as valuable as anyone else. That’s what I mean about feeling normal, feeling OK.

With Gay in America I wanted people to see that the people telling their stories may have been through some crazy stuff, but inn the inside the weren’t so different after all. And I wanted to upend some stereotypes — that gay men do and look like all kinds of things, we’re not all drag queens and mean twinkie-types like you see on TV. Although there are some drag queens out of drag in the book!  

SFBG Now that you’ve been all over the country, what was your favorite place? Would you relocate if you had the chance?

SP Well , Hawaii’s awfully nice [laughs]. So is Alaska, so beautiful. And, surprising to me, I really like Maine. But if I and my partner didn’t have our work in Manhattan, I think I’d move to Portland. I love the liberal vibe, how it’s so close to nature, and how the city itself is laid out. I’m an architect before a photographer, and the urban planning and regional architecture of portland was fascinating to me. Oh, and of course, I’m looking forward to sending some time in San Francisco — my partner’s flying in and we’ll be staying with friends.

GAY IN AMERICA PRESENTATION WITH SCOTT PASFIELD
Sat/5, 7p.m., free
Magnet Center
4122 18th St, San Francisco
(415) 581-1600
www.magnetsf.org

Followed by a book signing, drinks, and hors-d’ouvres at
Under One Roof
518A Castro Street
San Francisco,
(415) 503-2300
www.underoneroof.org
 


Alerts

Andrew Lam
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0

alert@sfbg.com

 

WEDNESDAY 2

Occupy Oakland General Strike

In response to last week’s police crackdown, Occupy Oakland called for a general strike on Nov. 2, urging workers and students to shut the city down and join the movement. Convene with neighbors, community members .and affinity groups to take part at a moment when “the whole world is watching Oakland.” Banks and corporations that don’t close will be marched on. The Strike Coordinating Council will begin meeting every Wednesday at 5pm in Oscar Grant Plaza before the daily General Assembly at 7pm. All participants are welcome.

All Day, free

Oscar Grant Plaza

14th & Broadway, Oakland

www.occupyoakland.org

 

THURSDAY 3

Transgender Film Festival

This year at the 10th Annual Transgender Film Festival, watch the captivating collection on defiance, bullying, romance, relationships, sex, and so much more. International filmmakers journeyed from across the globe. Be sure to buy your tickets before they sell out, which it is expected to.

8-10 p.m., $12-15

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

Contact Eric Garcia: intern@freshmeatproductions.org

www.sftff.org

 

FRIDAY 4

Sacred Sites Peacewalk

The Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Social Justice Committee will provide overnight shelter space for participants in Sacred Sites Peacewalk for a Nuclear Free World. All are welcome for a potluck dinner, speak out and discussion featuring a Buddhist teacher and peace activist. The walk began Oct. 22 at Diablo Canyon and ends Nov. 6 at Glen Cove, Vallejo.

6-9 p.m.

Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists’ Hall

1924 Cedar, Berkeley

(510) 841-4824

www.bfuu.org

 

SATURDAY 5

Occupy Wells Fargo

The marginalized in the 99 percent are fed up with austerity, especially these 67 Suenos, a collective of undocumented youth and allies that refuse to be passive about violence in the Bay Area community. Stand in solidarity against banks who aggressively invest and profit off anti-immigrant laws like Arizona’s AB 1070. Come and join in planning preparations.

10 am- 1 p.m., free

Contact: 67suenos@gmail

Oscar Grant Plaza/Downtown Wells Fargo 1 block away

14th St. and Broadway, Oakl.

 

Marxism Conference

From Athens to Cairo to San Francisco, capitalism has proven its instability and people are fighting back. With the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, it’s the perfect time to further understand the Marxist philosophy on exploitation and how the working class can liberate the oppressed. Featured speakers include Alan Maass, editor of Social Worker newspaper and Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, editorial board member of International Socialist Review.

10 am- 6 p.m., free

UC Berkeley

Rooms 220 Wheeler and 126 Barrows

Telegraph and Bancroft, Berk

iso@norcalsocialism.org

www.norcalsocialism.org

 

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Haunting the hunters

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Haunting the hunters

marke@sfbg.com

“There are so many popular ghost-hunting apps, software programs, and TV shows out there right now that rely only on the tech side of things — but what people don’t realize is that if you take the human part out of the ghost-hunting equation, you’re really left with nothing. Sure, it may look like your app is detecting some sort of peripheral movement, or the people on TV may be tracking some remote electromagnetic phenomenon. But you have to remember that ghosts were once people, that you’re dealing with human beings. Technology will only take you so far. You need that human sensory and extrasensory contact for the spirit to fully reveal itself as more than just a blip on a screen. You can’t just go take a photo of a ghost with your iPhone!”

Master of Parapsychology, professor at JFK university, and Bay Area ghost detective Loyd Auerbach (www.mindreader.com) is speaking to me over the phone about the book he published earlier this year with psychic Annette Martin, The Ghost Detectives’ Guide to San Francisco, a spooky and involving compendium of the duo’s 16-year investigations into local paranormal phenomenon. Auerbach had just come from a weeklong conference on the paranormal at Atlantic University in Virginia, where hot topics included quantum psychometrics, split beam research, global consciousness projection and convergences, and — his specialties — recurrent research with mediums and parapsychology education.

That’s some heady stuff for a down-to-earth guy who credits comic book geekiness as his gateway to paranormal investigation. “It’s either surprising or not surprising that so many paranormal investigators are comic book geeks and old TV show fanatics,” he says with a laugh. (Auerbach is also a well-known chocolatier: his Haunted By Chocolate line, www.hauntedbychocolate.com, will be featured at Berkeley’s Spun Sugar shop for Halloween.)

Besides the ghost detectives’ indepth sleuthing at places like Alcatraz, the Queen Anne Hotel, and Chinatown, I was particularly intrigued by Auerbach and Martin’s concept of “residual haunting” versus actual haunting. “Residual hauntings are simply traces of emotion or action that clutters the psychic territory of a location — even living people can ‘haunt’ a place residually. A real haunting consists of a complex set of phenomena that naturally involve one or several spirits, but that moves beyond repetitive enactments and into a fuller narrative.”

The ghost detectives do indeed experience fuller narratives — several of them chilling, like the barrage of negative feelings that assault Annette in Chinatown and the echoes of despair filling Alcatraz. And some are more, er, entertaining, like Auerbach’s intimate encounter with a specter named Cayte at the Moss Beach Distillery that’s jokingly referred to as “ghost sex.”

The book was to have kicked off a series exploring Bay Area. Unfortunately, Annette, whose “gift of the white light” brought her a considerable amount of TV and radio fame, passed away in September. “I have so much material from our collaboration, I’m still planning to do something,” Auerbach said. “And to answer your next question: no, I haven’t exactly heard from Annette from the other side. But several of her psychic friends have, and I’m hoping my next project will involve seeking her out.”

ENCOUNTER AT THE PRESIDIO OFFICERS’ CLUB

An excerpt from The Ghost Detectives’ Guide to San Francisco

LOYD I indicated we should move back to the main room, it had large windows looking out toward the bay. In front of the windows was a platform. Annette moved to the platform and windows.

ANNETTE What I felt was a lot of energy, right around here.

LOYD Right here?

I set down the TriField Meter as well as a natural EMF meter, which measures non-tech sources of magnetic and EM fields. The latter has a sound indicator to alert the user when the readings change.

ANNETTE I am going to turn on my tape recorder and see if we can pick up any voices.

Something is registering with me. … She stands at the window, waiting for him. Ah, she’s asking me why he hasn’t come.

[Annette took a few deep breaths and began to channel.]

My name is Annette and this is Loyd. There is nothing to be afraid of. Can you show me something? …

[Annette: She was certainly curious. I was getting her questions intuitively.]

ANNA MARIE Yes, I am from San Francisco. I went to school here, Notre Dame de Victoria and St. Gabriel’s and Mercy High School… Did I like the nuns? Some of them. You spend time in the chapel [at the Presidio]. You feel good there. You want to run and play with the children, but sometimes they get frightened.

LOYD What is your name?

ANNA MARIE Anna Marie.

LOYD What is your last name?

ANNA MARIA Guiterrez.

LOYD Where were you born?

ANNA MARIE Not in this country. I came as a child. Travelled a long ways…

LOYD How did you travel? By what means of transportation?

ANNA MARIE Mother said by boat. Mother was beautiful. I came back to find her, but she is not here ….

LOYD Do you remember when you came back here?

ANNA MARIE People, many parties … noise … people … men … no ladies. I used to swing on a tree.

LOYD A tree here? [Annette nods.] Were you married?

ANNETTE She’s turned away from me now, she says others come here but not her love, not her man. “Ships, many ships.”

LOYD Annette, can you tell what she is wearing?

ANNETTE Yes, she is wearing this long white dress, with something tied in the center. She has very long hair but there is something tied around her head. Like a white scarf… She looks, she could be 20. She keeps changing, sometimes she looks older…. This is where she is waiting for him.

LOYD The man she loves?

ANNETTE She says she calls him Pugsy, but that wasn’t his real name….She doesn’t want to talk anymore. Anna Marie, can you tell me his real name? “It’s too painful,” she says. It’s alright, it’s alright, we will call him Pugsy.

This is the place where they would meet. There was a big tree, a great big tree with branches that go way up. He put a rope around the branch so that she could swing and they would laugh.

She doesn’t understand why all these people were here. She says that if she stays here, maybe he will find her. She can’t find him…

LOYD What year does she remember being here?

ANNETTE She thinks it’s 1776…. This is 1996, Anna Marie. We come with love and we don’t want you to be sad and you can leave if you want. [Annette takes in two deep breaths.] OK, she ran away. Wow!

LOYD So she’s basically stuck here?

ANNETTE She is stuck here, on her fixation on this man. And there was this tree, like a big oak tree, I saw it so clearly, and laughing and giggling.

LOYD Do you think it was taken down to build this building?

ANNETTE I forgot to mention that I felt closer to the water when I was talking to Anna Marie. Did anything measure on the meter?

LOYD Yes, a couple times when she was speaking through you.

ANNETTE She would come in close to me and then she would back away. At one point is was like we were holding hands. She is very friendly, very loving, but also very sad.

From The Ghost Detectives’ Guide to Haunted San Francisco, copyright 2011 by Loyd Auerbach and Annette Martin, published by Craven Street Books

 

The selling of Ed Lee

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The selling of Ed Lee

steve@sfbg.com

Ed Lee has gone through a remarkable makeover in the last year, transformed from the mild-mannered city bureaucrat who reluctantly became interim mayor to a political powerhouse backed by wealthy special interests waging one of the best-funded and least transparent mayoral campaigns in modern San Francisco history.

The affable anti-politician who opened Room 200 up to a variety of groups and individuals that his predecessor had shut out — a trait that won Lee some progressive accolades, particularly during the budget season — has become an elusive mayoral candidate who skipped most of the debates, ducked his Guardian endorsement interview, and speaks mostly through prepared public statements peppered with contradictions that he won’t address.

The old Ed Lee is still in there somewhere, with his folksy charm and unshakable belief that there’s compromise and consensus possible on even the most divisive issues. But the Ed Lee that is running for mayor is largely a creation of the political operatives who pushed him to break his word and run, from brazen power brokers Willie Brown and Rose Pak to political consultants David Ho and Enrique Pearce to the wealthy backers who seek to maintain their control over the city.

So we thought it might be educational to retrace the steps that brought us to this moment, as they were covered at the time by the Guardian and other local media outlets.

Caretaker mayor

The story begins quite suddenly on Jan. 4, when the Board of Supervisors convened to consider a replacement for Gavin Newsom, who had been elected lieutenant governor but delayed his swearing-in to prevent the board from choosing a progressive interim mayor who might then have an advantage in the fall elections. Newsom and other political centrists insisted on a “caretaker mayor” who pledged to vacate the office after serving the final year of the current term.

It was the final regular meeting of the old board, four days before the four newly elected supervisors would take office. What had been a bare majority of progressive supervisors openly talked about naming former mayor Art Agnos, or Sheriff Michael Hennessey, or maybe Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin as a caretaker mayor.

When then-Sup. Bevan Dufty said he would support Hennessey, someone Newsom had already said was acceptable, the progressive supervisors decided to coalesce around Hennessey. That was mostly because the moderates on the board had suddenly united behind a rival candidate who had consistently said didn’t want the job: City Administrator Ed Lee.

Board President David Chiu was the first in the progressive bloc to breaks ranks and back Lee, saying that had long been his first choice. Dufty became the swing vote, and he abstained from voting as the marathon meeting passed the 10 p.m. mark, at which point he asked for a recess and walked down to Room 200 to consult with Newsom.

At the time, Dufty said no deals had been cut and that he was just looking for assurances that Lee wouldn’t run for a full term (Dufty was already running for mayor) and that he would defend the sanctuary city law. But during his endorsement interview with the Guardian last month, he confessed to another reason: Newsom told him that Hennessey had pledged to get rid of Chief-of-Staff Steve Kawa, a pro-downtown political fixer from the Brown era who was despised by progressive groups but liked by Dufty.

Chiu and others stressed Lee’s roots as a progressive tenants rights attorney, the importance of having a non-political technocrat close the ideological gap at City Hall and get things done, particularly on the budget. So everyone just hoped for the best.

“Run, Ed, Run”

The drumbeat began within just a couple months, with downtown-oriented politicos and Lee supporters urging him to run for mayor in the wake of a successful if controversial legislative push by Lee, Chiu, and Sup. Jane Kim to give million of dollars in tax breaks to Twitter and other businesses in the mid-Market and Tenderloin areas.

In mid-May, Pak and her allies created Progress for All, registering it as a “general civic education and public affairs” committee even though its sole purpose was to use large donations from corporations with city contracts or who had worked with Pak before to fund a high-profile “Run, Ed, Run” campaign, which plastered the city with posters featuring a likeness of Lee.

Initially, that campaign and its promotional materials were created by Pak (who refuses to speak to the Guardian) and political consultant Enrique Pearce (who did not return calls for this article) of Left Coast Communications, which had just run Kim’s successful D6 victory over progressive opponent Debra Walker, along with Pak protégé David Ho.

During that campaign, the Guardian and Bay Citizen discovered Pearce running an independent expenditure campaign called New Day for SF, funded mostly by Willie Brown, out of his office, despite bans of IEs coordinating with official campaigns. That tactic would repeat itself over the coming months, drawing criticism but never any sanctions from the toothless Ethics Commission. Pearce was hired by two more pro-Lee IEs: Committee for Effective City Management and SF Neighbor Alliance, for which he wrote the book The Ed Lee Story, a supposedly “unauthorized biography” filled with photos and personal details about Lee.

Publicly, the campaign was fronted by noted Brown allies such as his former planning commissioner Shelly Bradford-Bell, Pak allies including Chinatown Community Development Center director Gordon Chin, and a more surprising political figure, Christina Olague, a progressive board appointee to the Planning Commission. She had already surprised and disappointed some of her progressive allies on Feb. 28 when she endorsed Chiu for mayor during his campaign kickoff, and even more when she got behind Lee.

Olague recently told us the moves did indeed elicit scorn from some longtime allies, but she defends the latter decision as being based on Lee’s experience and willingness to dialogue with progressives who had been shut out by Newsom, noting that she had been asked to join the campaign by Chin. Olague also said the decision was partially strategic: “If we get progressives to support him early on, maybe we’ll have a seat at the table.”

Right up until the end, Lee told reporters that he planned to honor his word and not run. During a Guardian interview in July when we pressed him on the point, Lee said he would only run if every member of the Board of Supervisors asked him to, although about half the board publicly said that he shouldn’t, including Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who nominated him for interim mayor.

And then, just before the filing deadline in early August, Lee announced that he had changed his mind and was running for mayor, the powers of incumbency instant catapulting him into the frontrunner position where he remains today, according to the most recent poll by the Bay Citizen and University of San Francisco.

Lee the politician

With his late entry into the race and decision to forgo public financing and its attendant spending limits, one might think that Lee would have to campaign aggressively to keep his job. But most of the heavy lifting has so far been done by his taxpayer-financed Office of Communications (which issues press releases at least daily) and by corporate-funded surrogates in a series of coordinated “independent” groups (see Rebecca Bowe’s story, “The billionaires’ mayor”).

That has left Lee to simply act as mayor, where he’s made a series of decisions that favor the business community and complement the “jobs” mantra cited relentlessly by centrist politicians playing on people’s economic insecurities.

Yet Lee has been elusive on the campaign trail and to reporters who seek more detailed explanations about his stands on issue or contradictions in his positions, and his spokespersons sometimes offer only misleading doublespeak.

For example, Lee’s office announced plans to veto legislation by Sup. David Campos that would prevent businesses from meeting their city obligation to provide a minimum level of employee health benefits through health savings accounts that these businesses would then pocket at the end of the year, taking $50 million last year even though some of that money had been put in by restaurant customer’s paying 5 percent surcharges on their bills.

Although Campos, the five other supervisors who voted for the measure, four other mayoral candidates, and its many supporters in the labor and consumer rights movements maintained the money belonged to workers who desperately needed it to afford expensive health care, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce said it was about “jobs” that would be protected only if businesses could keep that money.

Lee parroted the position but tried to push the political damage until after the election, issuing a statement entitled “Mayor Lee Convenes Group to Improve Health Care Access & Protect Jobs,” saying that he would seek to “develop a consensus strategy” on the divisive issue — one in which Campos said “we have a fundamental disagreement” — that would take weeks to play out.

After a frustrating back-and-forth with Lee Press Secretary Christine Falvey by email, it’s still unclear how to resolve the contradiction between whether businesses could seize these funds or whether they belonged to employees, with her latest statement being, “The Mayor absolutely wants these funds spent on providing access to quality primary and preventative health care because this is the business’s obligation under HCSO. Making sure that these funds go to pay for health care is the most important objective.”

Similarly, when police raided the OccupySF encampment on Oct. 5, Lee’s office issued a statement that was a classic case of politicians trying to have it both ways, expressing support for the movement and its goal to “occupy” public space, but also supporting the need to police to clear the encampment of those same occupiers.

But now, in the wake of a repeat raid on Oct. 16 that has inflamed passions on the issue, the question is whether Lee can run out the clock and retain the office he gained on the promise of being someone more than a typical politician.

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