Police

Excerpts from freelance journalist Josh Wolf

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What follows are excerpts from an Aug. 14 letter that freelance journalist Josh Wolf wrote to reporter Sarah Phelan from inside Dublin Federal Correctional Institute. Wolf has been held at Dublin FCI since Aug. 1 refusing to give a federal grand jury unpublished footage from a July 8, 2005 anti-G8 protest that turned violent.

Aug. 14, 2006

Dear Sarah,

Thanks for writing to me about my case;

On Judith Miller:

“The issue of Judith Miller is a complicated one. My reservations about the Judith Miller situation are as follows: She should be protected, but should she have published it in the first place? I’m very thankful that she has helped publicize my case and I have talked to her on the phone and wouldn’t want it to seem like I’m ungrateful for the support.”


On the injuries that a SFPD officer sustained during the July 8, 2005 anti G8 protest:

“The officer’s injury is a sad and unfortunate incident, and I do not in any way condone violence against any living creature. However, as tragic and unjust as it may have been, it is a potential crime which falls under state and not Federal jurisdiction and although the Assistant US Attorney has brought up the injured officer repeatedly, he has never asserted that this potential crime is part of the grand jury investigation and is therefore nothing more than an effort to sensationalize the case.

Furthermore, my mother’s statement is accurate, I neither witnessed nor filmed the alleged assault on the officer – I learned of the incident after hearing “officer down” by several bystanders. At that point in time, I was filming the aforementioned officer’s partner choking Gabe Myers whom has been charged with the conspiracy charge of attempting to lynch himself, along with resisting arrest and rioting. The published video illustrates this fairly well and can be accessed through http://joshwolf.net/grandjury/ along with the all the legal documents up until I became incarcerated and could no longer maintain the site.”

On the alleged arson to a SFPD patrol car:

“Another important factor in the police’s story of what happened that night is their claim that the Styrofoam sign (for the 500th time, there was no mattress) became lodged in front of their car, therein disabling it. While the Styrofoam sign may have been lodged – I have trouble believing that a piece of Styrofoam could actually force a modified Crown Victoria to a stop. As a rear-wheel drive car with more-than-ample horsepower, I believe it would’ve been able to push the sign along indefinitely, if not able to completely rise over the top of it. Beyond that, the officers immediately jumped out of their vehicle and chased after the 2 people they believed were originally holding the sign.

By the way, these officers – Shields + Wolf (no known relation to myself) were not assigned to the protest and were responding to some sort of complaint. These police officers attempted to disperse the crowd by accelerating their vehicle towards us – it was at that point that the sign carriers in the back of the crowd dropped their sign and dived out of the car’s path. The most accurate description I heard of the event came from Attorney Ben Rosenfeld who spoke at one of my press conferences, the video can be accessed at the URL I mentioned previously.”

On the grand jury investigation:

“As I’m sure you are aware, the subject of the grand jury investigation, or the reason that I’m in jail, is the alleged attempt to destroy property that the federal government may have had a fiscal interest in, the SFPD patrol vehicle. If this pretense for a federal interest is allowed to stand, then would not all public property – be it city, state, or federal serve to trump state protections such as the California Shield law. This would not only include streets, schools, and sidewalks, but also city hall itself.

Perhaps you recall Matt Gonzales last art exhibit as Supervisor – the Supervisor arrange to have graffiti art sprayed onto his office wall. Now, obviously he did this with the approval of the city, but could the federal government have intervened under the claim that this art damaged Federal Property? Obviously they wouldn’t, but according to the logic of the US Attorney, I imagine they might feel they could legitimately do so. The analogy is a stretch and borders on being cartoonist, but is it really any more outrageous than throwing me in prison for refusing to comply with this order to turn over a videotape regarding a police vehicle that apparently wasn’t even damaged – we’ve yet to see any repair orders for the squad car.
Both myself and my attorney have filed declarations to the fact that I did not film any attempts at arson on a police car. It seems highly unlikely that the US Attorney doesn’t believe us as I imagine lying in a declaration would result in perjury for me but could also, to my best understanding; result in my attorney facing even more serious repercussions than that. Neither myself nor my attorney would be stupid enough to behave that irresponsibly. I remember Alger Hiss.”

On Alger Hiss, McCarthyism and Black as the new Pink:

Speaking of Hiss, I feel that given the circumstances, this witch hunt could very likely be a witch hunt akin to those of McCarthey’s blood thirsty quest to expose communists. If that in fact is the case, then instead of a red-scare, this is a black scare.

Keep in mind, that each subpoena I have received not only demands the unpublished materials, but also my testimony. I do not feel that is paranoia which leads me to think that I would be compelled to identify anyone on the footage whom I might know in an effort to create a list of political dissidents and anarchists in the bay area.

Yes, the idea is alarmist, but; it happened in this country 50 years ago – and anyone with a decent education is painfully aware that history has a way of repeating itself. There is no way this much money and energy has been expended simply to investigate some kid throwing a firework four days after the 4th of July, and as the government has not been forthcoming, I have no reason not to assume the worst.


On life inside Dublin Federal Correctional Institute:

“In your letter you also asked me about Dublin; I don’t have a whole lot to say about my experience here, but I can say that the experience is nowhere near the nightmare I had expected. I’ve never felt like my personal safety is in jeopardy, and I have made friends with many of the inmates. There’s food which is edible during every single meal, and 90% of the staff have behaved with the utmost professionalism. At the same time, visits are limited to immediate family, and I only get to feel air on my face for an hour each day; 5 days a week.

Living in captivity is emotionally very difficult, and you find yourself missing the simplest of things. Not having my music, for one, has been very hard for me. The experience is akin to being a young child in man ways, and almost all decisions have been robbed from you. Regulations which serve no purpose abound – we are prohibited from doing laundry after 2pm; I have no idea why.
I have the opportunity by being here to catch up on a lot of reading; however, and I’ve written more letters by hand over the last two weeks than I’ve composed throughout my 24 years up till now. I miss email. I’ve also been inspired to create a new organization, but I can’t share the details just yet about that one.”

Thanks again, for covering the story and in the words of Edward R. Murrow,
Goodnight and Good Luck,
Josh

Don’t call the feds

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EDITORIAL It’s bad enough that the federal government is aggressively infringing on the rights of three Bay Area journalists, the sovereignty of California, and the freedom of San Franciscans to choose — through the elections of our district attorney, sheriff, and mayor — how laws should be enforced in this city. It’s even worse that the San Francisco Police Department has actively invited the feds in to abuse the city’s citizens.
Now is the time for Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief Heather Fong to strongly, clearly, and publicly spell out when the officers under their control are permitted to federalize investigations rather than turning them over to the District Attorney’s Office. Particularly during this dark period when the Bush administration has shown a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, those in positions of public trust within San Francisco must safeguard the rights and liberties that generations of Americans have fought hard to win.
Specifically, Newsom and Fong should join the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in calling for a federal shield law similar to the one enshrined in the California Constitution, which allows journalists to protect their sources and unpublished notes and other materials. Until that happens, it should be the policy of San Francisco to refuse to cooperate with federal prosecutions of journalists, an action that would be similar to existing police policies of refusing to take part in raids on marijuana dispensaries or in operations targeting those suspected of vioutf8g immigration laws.
Instead, in the case of videographer Josh Wolf — who has been jailed for refusing to turn over his work to a federal grand jury — it appears that the SFPD was the agency that used a dubious interpretation of the law to bring in the feds for this unconscionable witch hunt. This is a disgrace and an affront to local control and basic American values.
As Sarah Phelan reports in this issue (“The SFPD’s Punt,” page 10), the cowboys who run the SFPD have been so intent on nailing those responsible for injuring an officer during a protest last year that they have deceptively morphed the investigation into one involving a broken taillight on a police cruiser. The idea was to argue that because some federal funds helped purchase the cruiser, then it was legitimate to turn this case over to the feds — which was simply a ruse to get around the California shield law. Perhaps even scarier is that it was done under the guise of fighting terrorism, even though the cops knew they were talking about homegrown anarchists who have legitimate concerns about US trade policies.
Over and over — in openly defying local beliefs about drug and sex laws and the death penalty — SFPD officers have shown contempt for San Francisco values. Even Newsom and Fong said as much during last year’s police video scandal, when they chastised officers for making videos that mocked Bayview residents, the homeless, Asians, and transgender people.
Yet that incident wasn’t as obscene as the decision by the SFPD to turn the murder investigations of Bayview gangs over to the feds rather than allow them to be prosecuted by District Attorney Kamala Harris, with whom the SFPD has feuded. The still-high murder rate in this city is a problem that will only be solved when we come together to address it as a community, rather than simply calling in heavy-handed outsiders.
It’s no wonder that communities of color in this city don’t trust the SFPD, which bypasses the black woman we’ve elected as our district attorney in favor of the US Justice Department and its facilitator of empire, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Newsom has already demonstrated that he’s willing to stand up to unjust state and federal laws, as he did on same-sex marriage, pot clubs, and illegal wiretapping by the Bush administration. Now it’s time for him to say that we’re not going to invite unjust federal prosecutions into this proudly progressive city. SFBG
PS We also must strongly condemn the federal prosecution of Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada. They are facing jail time for refusing to reveal how they obtained grand jury information that indicated San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds knowingly took steroids. Journalists must be allowed to fully investigate important stories, particularly those involving public figures, without fearing they will be jailed for their work. Again, this case strongly begs for a federal shield law.
PPS Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition summed up the argument well in a commentary now posted on the Guardian’s Web site, www.sfbg.com, calling the prosecutions “a wholesale usurpation of state sovereignty. The Bush administration, which has been justly criticized for attempting to enhance executive power at the expense of Congress, is now eviscerating states’ rights in order to expand the power of the federal government. William Rehnquist, the conservative former chief justice of the US Supreme Court and intellectual champion of American ‘federalism,’ is no doubt turning over in his grave.”

A sister fears Halloween in the Castro

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OPINION Any attempt to organize an official Halloween in the Castro is a terrible idea, maybe even a deadly one. But before I rant, let me give a little history. In the wake of the Oct. 17, 1989, Loma Prieta earthquake, a BBC story reported that “a massive rescue effort is now underway in what experts believe is the second biggest earthquake ever to hit the United States.”
More than 3,500 people were injured and 100,000 buildings damaged. For this reason, a few members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence made a spontaneous decision to stand in the Castro among the drag queens and costumed folk that Halloween to put on street theater and collect donations for the mayor’s relief fund for the victims of the earthquake. A brilliant move. We collected thousands.
This put a bee in our bonnets … er … wimples to use Halloween as a fun fundraiser the next year. A tremendous success. Each year the caliber of entertainment drew more people and brought in more donations, enabling us to entertain the otherwise unruly crowds while collecting donations for AIDS charities. The events were a hit, until we saw attendees getting hit — with bottles, bats, and other deadly weapons — by drunken gay-bashers out to get their kicks. The next year we saw that police checking for weapons had collected garbage cans full of baseball bats, hammers, knives, axes (none of these were the rubber kind), and many blunt instruments that could harm people. I saw someone with a mask running a gas-powered chain saw. But when police told us that among other weapons they had confiscated an AK-47 assault rifle, that was the year the Sisters were through with Halloween in the Castro, frightened that an event we had sponsored might bring about death.
So we tried something different. Luring people away from the Castro and into a private club, we turned the Pleasuredome in SoMa into a Halloween-themed party space with ornate All Hallows Eve–oriented backdrops and props. We had stellar entertainment, and the door charge went to AIDS and cancer charities. There was only one rule: you had to be in costume. The event was called HallowQueen, with the slogan “Evolve with the Sisters as Halloween moves to the next level.” It was successful in getting people out of the Castro and into a safe space, but we couldn’t afford to do it again on our meager budget.
The attempt to move the party to the Civic Center did not work because of poor planning and insufficient advance public relations. And since the Castro was still gated off, the queer-bashers thought that was the better locale in which to be violent. There were several stabbings that year.
There should be no official gathering in the Castro. No gates set up to make it look like an event. Police should infiltrate the area to keep peace but not harass the costumed folk. And something must be scheduled by the city outside the Castro and managed well to draw the crowd away to safety. Then perhaps the Sisters will get involved again. Then maybe the Sisters will MC and run a stage. But as it is now, the cordoned-off section of the “official” Halloween will end at Market and Castro. That is potentially deadly — inviting bashers and spoilers to assemble right at the very entrance of the Castro. Boo! SFBG
Sister Dana Van Iquity
Sister Dana Van Iquity is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

COMMENTARY

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A freelance documentary filmmaker is in jail in Dublin, CA, for refusing to comply with a subpoena to turn over to federal prosecutors the out-takes of his filming of a 2005 street demonstration that turned violent. And two San Francisco Chronicle reporters are packing their bags for jail while they appeal contempt judgments for refusing to reveal to federal prosecutors their sources for evidence given the grand jury in the BALCO investigation.

If I were Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger or California Chief Justice Ronald George, I would be deeply troubled by these developments—not only because of the First Amendment issues at stake, which are huge, but because these federal actions against journalists in California represent a wholesale usurpation of state sovereignty. The Bush administration, which has been justly criticized for attempting to enhance executive power at the expense of Congress, is now eviscerating states’ rights in order to expand the power of the federal government.

William Rehnquist, the conservative former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court–and intellectual champion of American “federalism”—is no doubt turning over in his grave.

California, like the District of Columbia and every other state except Wyoming, has enacted a “Shield Law” to protect the news media’s independence from government and to assure public access to information about wrongdoing in high places. (Memo to media: stay the hell out of Wyoming.) California’s Shield Law, enacted both as a statute and constitutional amendment, protects the press from subpoenas demanding access to confidential news sources and unpublished information. State shield laws, however, don’t apply in federal proceedings–and the feds have no shield law of their own.

The U.S. Justice Department, in these two California cases and others, had a choice to make: It could defer to the nearly unanimous judgment of the states, or it could decide–states’ rights be damned–that the federal government would insist on enforcement of subpoenas that would be void or illegal in nearly all state courts. It chose the latter.

And so Josh Wolf, the freelance filmmaker whose unused digital film California voters clearly meant to protect from compulsory judicial disclosure, is in jail. And Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance
Williams, the Chronicle reporters who wrote about the BALCO case, will soon be in federal detention unless the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit can be persuaded to change course.

The Justice Department’s enforcement proceedings don’t just undermine a valid state policy, they completely nullify it. This is so because reporters and their sources have no way of knowing, at the time of an interview with a source or the filming of a news event, whether a subpoena will issue from a California state court–in which case it can be safely ignored–or from a federal court, in which case it will be enforced through fines, jail, or other sanctions. Since the only safe strategy is to assume that one could end up in front of a federal judge, the state shield law is effectively voided.

To appreciate the extent of federal usurpation of state authority, imagine that the feds were disregarding, not state shield laws, but the attorney-client privilege (which is also a creature of state law). The reason for the privilege, which is recognized in all states, is to encourage people to seek legal advice and to fully disclose relevant information to their lawyers, who are bound to secrecy.

If the U.S. Justice Department took the position that the attorney-client privilege did not apply in federal proceedings, most legal clients, not being able to predict where and how their communications with their lawyer might be sought, would behave as though the states’ attorney-client privilege did not exist. They would not seek legal advice. They would not speak openly with their lawyer.

The feds’ takeover of state sovereignty is especially egregious in the Wolf case. The street demonstration that was caught on Wolf’s video camera involved self-styled anarchists who, in a July 8, 2005 rampage through downtown San Francisco, destroyed property, resisted arrest, and assaulted and injured at least one San Francisco police officer. The persons responsible most certainly should be prosecuted–in state court by state prosecutors and under state law (including the shield law).

How did this quintessentially state law matter become a big federal case? According to their pleadings in U.S. District Court, federal prosecutors assert federal criminal jurisdiction based on damage to a police car, which had been purchased partly with federal assistance. I’m not joking. And the damage to the police car, which is disputed, may have been limited to a broken taillight!

Bad enough that California’s authority is neutered by the feds. Far worse that it is neutered in a case in which a genuine federal interest is nonexistent–indeed, where the putative federal interest is, patently, a pretext for an end-run around California’s shield law.

It’s time that the federal courts wised up and put an end to this. The current appeals of the Wolf and Chronicle cases to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals provide an opportunity for the federal judiciary to rein in the Bush Justice Department, reassert the primacy of state law in the area of evidentiary privilege, and highlight the importance of a news media that is–and is seen as–independent of government investigators.
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Peter Scheer, a journalist and lawyer, is executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition,

Benefit for a journalist in jail (Josh Wolf)

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Benefit for a journalist in jail (Josh Wolf)

By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)

The item below was sent out by Riley Manlapaz, the Guardian’s ace promotions manager, to our email action list for a Saturday night benefit for Josh Wolf, who was jailed on Aug. l for refusing to honor a federal grand jury subpoena for the “out-takes” of his filming of an anarchist rally against the G-8 Summit Bush Administration economic and foreign policies.

I think Wolf’s arrest is a direct strike by Bush and the Attorney General against the City and County of San Francisco, the nation’s leading center of dissent and reportage critical of Bush and the Iraq war. The federal threat to jail the Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, for their superb reporting in the Balco/Bonds case, only makes this point even stronger and more ominous.

If Bush can get away with putting reporters in jail in San Francisco, he can do it anywhere he wants with impunity and he can impose a chilling effect all across the land. His new weapon: claiming federal jurisdiction in a local case involving local law enforcement on the dangerous basis that a police car that was burned during the demonstration was paid for in federal money. (Actually, as the police report shows, only a rear tail light on the police car was damaged.) But the point is that, with federal money pouring into local communities all over the country, from Homeland Security money up and down, the feds can consider almost anything is under federal jurisdiction and they can move against reporters (and protesters) with federal muscle and jail power. From Hearst/Chronicle reporters to a 24-year-old freelance filmmaker, nobody in the media is safe for the duration, inside or outside San Francisco.

Go to the website of the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC.org) for its resolution condemning the federal contempt sanctions against the reporters and for the full text of an amicus brief making the First Amendment arguments but also making a new and persuasive legal basis for a reporter’s privilege. See Sarah Phelan’s entry at the politics blog and our ongoing coverage. And much, much more!!! B3

JOSH WOLF BENEFIT
Join musicians and activists to raise money for the legal fees of Josh Wolf, the journalist incarcerated for contempt of court for his refusal to hand over unedited video “out-takes” he shot of a anti-G-8 rally held in the Mission on July 8, 2005. Spoken word artist Diamond Dave Whitaker of Enemy Combatant Radio, Oregon-based musician John Staedler, and DJ Chuck Gonzalez perform. Admission is free but donations will be greatly appreciated. Speakers on Wolf’s behalf include Liz Wolf-Spada, his mother; Krissy Keefer, the Green party congressional candidate in the Eighth District; and Harland Harrison, the Libertarian congressional candidate in San Mateo. 7pm-9:30pm. Can’t attend? Please consider donating online at http://joshwolf.net/grandjury/donate.html
August 19 @ Dance Mission, 3316 24th St
http://www.joshwolf.net/blog

Is Josh Wolf in jail because of federal laziness?

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By Sarah Phelan

An amicus brief filed this week in support of jailed freelance reporter Josh Wolf argues that federal common law already recognizes a reporter’s privilege, that it should be applied to Wolf’s grand jury case, and that before a journalist be compelled to divulge unpublished material in response to a subpoena, the requesting party must demonstrate “a sufficiently compelling need for the journalist’s materials to overcome the privilege.”
‘At a minimum, that requires a showing that the information sought is not obstainbable form another source,” argues the brief, which points out that , “it appears that the US Attorney has not even attempted to make a showing that alternative sources have even been consulted, let alone exhausted, or that Mr. Wolf’s videotape is unique. As the district court repeatedly pointed out, the events Mr. Wolf filmed took place on a public street and the published portions of his video show numerous participants and onlookers, (some with cameras) and dozens of police officers.”
Observing that, ” the record reveals a veritable treasure trove of alternative sources, including possible eye witnesses from law enforcement,” the brief concludes that, “The government seems to want Mr. Wolf’s video not because it is the only source of information about what happened to the police car, but because it speculates that it might be the best and most convenient source of information.”
The full text of the amicus brief which was filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the national Society for Professional Journalists, the WIW Freedom to Write Fund, and the California First Amendment Coalition can be viewed at http://www.cfac.org
P.S.! A fund-raiser for Josh Wolf happens this Saturday, Aug. 19, 7 to 9:30 p.m., at Dance Mission, 3316 24th st., San Francisco. Free Admission, donations appreciated. Entertainers include Diamond Dave Whitaker of Enemy
Combatant Radio and musician John Staedler. Chuck Gonzalez is the DJ.
Speakers include Josh’s mother, Elizabeth Wolf-Spada; Wolf’s uncle Harland Harrison, Libertarian candidate for Congress from San Mateo County;Krissy Keefer, Green Party candidate for Congress from San Francisco’s east side, and Rick Knee of the National Writers Union. Or consider donating online at http://joshwolf.net/grandjury/donate.html

Shackling the tax man

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Late last month, David Cay Johnston of the New York Times managed to get a story about IRS layoffs picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle and placed on page three. That’s no small challenge, even in one of the most politically charged cities in the nation. It was not a sexy story, neither to liberals nor to conservatives.
But the story’s timing was impeccable.
Johnston reported that the IRS was poised to lay off 157 of its 345 estate- and gift-tax attorneys working at agency offices throughout the country — a division of investigators that generates more revenue for the federal treasury by catching tax cheats than any other group of auditors, about $2,200 for every hour that they work.
Dismantling the estate tax has been among the most aggressive crusades taken up by the Republican Party and its friendliest contributors for at least the last decade. Leaked to the Times by IRS whistle-blowers, the story about the layoffs surfaced just days before Congress rejected for the fifth time since 2001 an attempt by fiscal conservatives to get rid of the estate tax. The legislation failed despite Republican control of both the House and Senate. Even tempting Democrats with the first federal minimum-wage hike in 10 years couldn’t do the trick.
So how could defending the estate tax and the right of the IRS to collect it survive two branches of the federal government dominated by a political party that holds most taxation in contempt? It’s because families awash in seemingly infinite wealth are the only ones who get hit by the tax — despite false claims made by the GOP that the estate tax kills small businesses.
California filed more estate-tax returns in 2001 than any other state in the country by a margin of thousands. The only state that came close was Florida, and California still filed around 6,000 more returns, according to the most recent IRS numbers.
In other words, the Golden State is filthy, stinking rich and more vulnerable to the estate tax than other states. GOP party leaders in Washington insist the issue will return in the form of a new bill, and the IRS is behaving as if the estate tax has already disappeared. If it does, the richest families in the United States — highly concentrated in California and the Bay Area — stand to collectively save billions of dollars.
The Bay Area contains within its sloping hills and mammoth upstart tech firms higher income levels and more general wealth than almost anywhere else in the country. In fact, the San Francisco metropolitan area is the fourth wealthiest in the nation, according to Merrill Lynch, and two tiny cities between here and Mountain View, where Google is based, have the highest per capita median income in the United States. Those two cities, Atherton and Hillsborough, have a combined population of about 17,000, and while many of these techie tycoons are young, the day will come when they die and pass millions of dollars on to their descendants. Will there be enough tax investigators available to audit those estates? Will there even be an estate tax?
Following Johnston’s revelations, a Times editorial suggested the layoffs were a politically motivated attempt by the Bush White House to circumvent the legislative process. What it can’t accomplish through Congress it can do by handcuffing the tax police.
“This is an election year issue,” said Jay Adkisson, a private sector tax lawyer from Laguna Niguel who documents egregious cases of fraud on his Web site, Quatloos! “They’re trying to appease Republican voters who were angry over the failure of Congress to do something about the estate tax.”
The story of the IRS layoffs didn’t just catch the attention of readers. Congress responded too. Twenty-three lawmakers — including, somewhat predictably, Democrat Tom Lantos of California’s 12th District — immediately fired off a letter to Bush-appointed IRS commissioner Mark Everson demanding to know if the agency could now effectively investigate estate-tax avoiders.
None but the most obscenely wealthy Americans pay even a dime in taxes when they earn an inheritance upon a death in the family. Estates aren’t hit with taxes until they reach a value of $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple. Only estates exceeding those amounts are assessed any tax, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
And if the family hires a savvy tax attorney or estate planner, those nontaxable values could easily rise to $10 million, according to Adkisson.
A research director at the Brookings Institution named Diane Lim Rogers opined in the Chronicle last May that because of current exemptions, about one half of one percent of dead people will actually be followed to the grave by the tax man. Besides, it’s the beneficiaries of an inheritance who pay. Despite grand claims made by Republicans that the beneficiaries of an estate will be paying half of what they’re handed in taxes, even the estates eligible for taxation see on average a 20 percent rate, according to the CBPP, which relied on the IRS for its statistics. For those who do pay estate taxes, deep discounts are available through charitable donations.
“The argument made about lots of people being ‘burdened’ by estate taxes is that they go through lots of convoluted tax-planning strategies in order to avoid the estate tax, so even if they don’t end up paying any estate tax, they are still adversely affected [burdened] by the existence of the tax,” Rogers wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian.
But even considering the cost of estate planning, Rogers said, no one would rationally spend more avoiding taxes than they would actually paying them.
Keith Schiller, a respected private sector tax attorney based in Orinda, earns princely sums teaching millionaires how to take advantage of loopholes in the federal tax code. He’s not opposed to the estate tax on principle; he just wants to simplify the way his clients pay their dues.
“I do believe the estate tax serves a social function of breaking down generational dynastic wealth,” he said in a phone interview.
Schiller said the IRS is conducting nowhere near the estate-tax audits it once did and that may be the only justification for laying off auditors. Still, the knowledge required by agency investigators to analyze and understand complex estate-tax avoidance schemes is immense. About 50 estate- and gift-tax attorneys based in Southern California and the Bay Area exclusively handle returns filed for the IRS from inside the state.
David Dean, president of the San Jose–based National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) Local 238, said it’s not clear which offices will have layoffs. All 350 estate-tax auditors are being offered buyout deals that include their pensions plus up to $25,000, or $13,000 after taxes.
Dean and the NTEU, which represents the auditors and opposes the layoffs, insist the IRS isn’t entirely sure how much money is hidden from the agency each year through either elaborate trusts or simple refusals to file. It’s known as the “tax gap,” and three days after Johnston’s story appeared, the inspector general of the IRS, J. Russell George, told Congress that the agency’s estimated figures for delinquent estate taxes hadn’t been updated in years. His report described a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the IRS expressed no desire to update the figures because “consideration is being given to eliminating or reducing the number of people required to pay estate taxes.” The last estimate was about $8 billion, but that figure is for the most part unreliable, he testified.
But the law still exists, regardless of whether an anti–estate tax agenda eventually succeeds in Congress.
“If a law is on the books, you still have to close down on the cheaters,” said JJ MacNab, an estate planner who spent 18 years in the Bay Area working for tech clients. “If you don’t enforce a law on the books, no one’s going to have faith in the system.”
MacNab now lives in Washington and as a hobby assists people who buy into tax-avoidance schemes that turn out to be illegal. She said these days, it’s low-income earners who are likelier to be audited, a conclusion Johnston also came to in his 2003 best-seller, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich — and Cheat Everybody Else. The book shows how the recent layoffs are a small part of a larger movement to weaken the IRS’s investigative capabilities.
And that movement begins with those who can afford to fund it. Who are they? Well, they’re not your average farmer.
Consistently during the debate over estate taxes, the GOP has co-opted the populist language that once dominated America’s agrarian communities by claiming that the “death tax” bleeds poor farming families dry. It’s a spectacular rhetorical tool, but it’s an ugly distortion.
In fact, it’s the nation’s wealthiest families who have led the charge to dismantle the estate tax, not its small farmers, according to an April report put together by two groups, Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy. The analysis identified a handful of enormously wealthy families that stand to save more than $70 billion if their lobbying efforts succeed. And that lobbying effort, the report notes, has amounted to around $490 million in direct and indirect lobbying expenditures since 1998.
The list includes Ernest Gallo of the E & J Gallo Winery, based in Modesto, and John A. Sobrato of Sobrato Development, listed by Forbes as one of the largest commercial landlords in Silicon Valley, with a familial net worth of approximately $2 billion. The Gallo family is reportedly worth about $1 billion.
The rest of the list is in part a who’s who of America’s billionaires: Wal-Mart’s Walton family; Charles and David Koch of the nation’s largest privately held company, the Kansas-based Koch Industries (also benefactors of libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, founded in San Francisco); and the Dorrance family of the Campbell Soup Co.
Ernest Gallo’s participation in antitax measures is particularly well documented. Elected officials he has supported with contributions in the past sponsored federal legislation in the ’70s and ’80s that allowed for millions of dollars in estate-tax exemptions for the Gallo family. One bill was even dubbed by estate-tax supporters the “Gallo amendment.”
The Public Citizen report links the Gallos to anti–estate tax lobbyist Patricia Soldano and her Orange County–based Policy and Taxation Group (PTG), which has spent $4 million lobbying solely against the estate tax since 1998. While the authors are unable to pinpoint exactly how much the Gallos had given to PTG directly, both the Sobratos and the Gallos are listed as clients of the group. The Gallos have reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of their own dollars supporting individual candidates.
It’s doubtful that very many people who actually paid estate taxes last year would know how to repair a grain harvester. In 2001, Johnston of the Times famously challenged the anti–estate tax American Farm Bureau Federation and the Bush administration to find just one example of a farm estate being sold to pay the taxes on it. Johnston reported they were unable to do so.
Estate planner Schiller likened opponents of the estate tax to medieval villagers who complained of gout to prove how well nourished they were.
“People want to believe they have an estate-tax problem,” he said, “so they can feel successful.” SFBG

The Race is On: Candidates for local Nov. 7 races

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By Sarah Phelan

Sixty-six took out papers. Forty-one filed, meaning that over one-third of the potential candidates in local races in the Nov. 7 election, bailed before the train even left the station.

So who’s in the running?

On the Board of Supes front, there are five races.
District 2 incumbent Michela Alioto-Pier, who has not accepted the voluntary expenditure ceiling and does not intend to participate in the public financing program, faces one lone challenger: business management consultant Vilma Guinto Peoro, who has accepted a voluntary expenditure ceiling and intends to participate in the pubic financing program.

In District 4, seven candidates are vying to fill the vacancy Sup. Fiona Ma created as Democratic nominee for Assembly District 12, (where she is running against the Green’s Barry Hermanson.) Mayor Gavin Newsom has endorsed Doug Chan, who lent his name to PG&E’s anti-Prop. D campaign, has not accepted voluntary expenditure ceiling and does not intend to participate in public financing campaign. Chan, who also got Ma’s endorsement and has served on the San Francisco Police Commission, Board of Permit Appeals, the Rent Board and the Assessment Appeals Board, has promised to return SFPD to its legally-required numbers (it currently operates 15 percent below voter-mandated leval), and upgrade policies, practices and technology, and would likely become the establishment conservative on the Board,

Other contenders are business consultant Ron Dudum, who lost against Ma in 2002 and against then Sup. Leland Yee in 2000, anti-tax advocate Edmund Jew, who would also be popular with the district’s conservative base, and San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commissioner and Fiona Ma-supporter Houston Zheng, David Ferguson, Patrick Maguire and Jaynry Mak, though Neither Maguire nor Mak, who has already raised $100,000, had filed papers as of Aug. 11, perhaps because District 4 has a Aug. 16 filing extension, thanks to departing incumbent Ma.

District 6 incumbent Chris Daly, who has accepted voluntary expenditure ceiling and intends to participate in public financing campaign, appears to face the biggest fight—at least in terms of numbers, with seven challengers hoping to fill his shoes. Of these Mayor Gavin Newsom has portrayed former Michela Alioto-Pier aide Rob Black, who has accepted voluntary expenditure ceiling and intends to participate in public financing campaign, as “the best contender to lessen divisiveness in the district.”
Fellow challengers are Mathew Drake, Viliam Dugoviv, Manuel Jimenez , Davy Jones, Robert Jordan and George Dias.

District 8 incumbent Bevan Dufty faces stiff opposition from local resident and Oakland deputy city attorney Alix Rosenthal, who was instrumental in turning around the city’s Elections Department, has worked on turning the former Okaland Army Base over to the Redevelopment Agency and has helped rebuild the National Women’s Political Caucus. Rosenthal, who is running on a platform of affordable housing, sustainability and violence prevention, also wants to keep SF weird.

In District 10, Incumbent Sophie Maxwell, who says a November ballot measure opposing the Bayview Redvelopment Plan is based on fear and unfairness, has five challengers: Rodney Hampton Jr., Marie Harrison, Espanola Jackson. Dwayne Jusino, and former Willie Brown crony Charlie Walker. Of these, the most serious are Harrison, helped shut down the Hunter’s Point PG&E plant and has worked for decades to fight all the pollution that’s being dumped on southeast residents, and Espanola Jackson, who has fought for welfare rights, affordable housing, seniors and the Muwekma Ohlone.
In other races, Phil Ting runs unopposed as Assessor-Recorder.
18 challengers are fighting over three seats on the Board of Education, one of which is occupied by incumbent Dan Kelly, and six candidates are vying for three seats on the Community College Board, one of which is occupied by incumbent John Rizzo.

A brighter Sunday at the Chronicle

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Things improved at the Chronicle with yesterday’s weekend edition, compared to some of the fluff that graced its pages last week.

Congrats to cops-and-crime reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken for snagging the story on an out-of-control snitch named Marvin Jeffery Jr. that the San Francisco Police Department used to arrest a suspect in the 2004 shooting death of Officer Isaac Espinoza. An identity-theft master, Jeffery was repeatedly released from jail in exchange for information he’d provided to the department. And each time, he went right back to formulating fraudulent monetary schemes making somewhere around $3 million in the process. Now the department is not sure where he is.

Cop measure headed for full board

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By Sarah Phelan
The San Francisco Board of Supes Rules Committee voted 2-1 to send a resolution opposing federal meddling in local police investigations and calling for support of California’s reporter’s shield law, as well as support of similar bills at the federal level that are currently working their way through Congress.

Rage and resistance

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“It’s a whole different feeling on the East Coast.” Raymond “Boots” Riley, Oakland’s most famously outspoken rapper, is talking. The Coup, the group he’s led for more than a decade, has just returned from a series of spring New York dates. Their latest album, Pick a Bigger Weapon (Epitaph), has just dropped. It’s a good time to clock the distance between the coasts. “They’ve got a whole different code of language and lifestyle — and the same with the political energy that’s there. It doesn’t even translate,” he says. “We were in New York for four days, and like the old saying goes, ‘It’s a nice place to visit.’”
He pauses, perhaps for breath, perhaps to check himself, before continuing, “There are a million things to plug into back there. You don’t even have time to make a mistake. With all the stuff you hear about Oakland, the truth is that people walk down the street and say ‘what’s up’ to each other even when they’re strangers.”
For Riley, that sense of community is crucial. It keeps him going. Because exposing the dark hand behind the daily injustices heaped on the populace — and empowering people to stand against it — is what Riley is all about. Beginning with the Coup’s 1992 debut, Kill My Landlord (Wild Pitch), through his latest, the group’s fifth full-length, he has created a deeply personal, heartfelt, often funny body of work that captures the East Bay’s radical legacy, as well as its funky, booty-shaking musical sensibility.
ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
For those whose eyes were focused on other things — understandable under the circumstances — the original drop date for the Coup’s fourth album, Steal This Album: Party Music (75 Ark), was 9/11. If current events weren’t enough, the original cover featured Riley and Coup DJ Pam the Funkstress in front of a crumbling World Trade Center. It got the group a fair bit of publicity — not all of it favorable, including scrutiny from the political police. The result was that in some quarters, Party Music was seen as too hot to handle.
It contributed to a potentially lethal — career-wise — four-year-plus interlude between albums. Riley is frank about the delay.
“A couple of years were about us touring to make sure that people found out about that album,” he explains. “For a long time when we toured, we’d get into town and find out that the album wasn’t in the stores. I don’t apologize for anything about that album, and I wanted to make sure that it didn’t just disappear.”
But a nearly five-year wait?
“Well,” Riley says, “there was the business of what did I want the next album to be. And in the past, the first 12 songs I liked, there was the album. But this time, I had 100 songs I liked, I kept obsessing about the music, and a lot of that was me running away from making the album.” Party Music may not have gone putf8um, but it boosted the Coup’s visibility and reputation among more than just funk lovers. The past few years have seen an upsurge in political activism, and the group managed to find fans among those who like rebellion with their music. High expectations came with the territory.
“I got sidetracked when I started this album for a little bit,” says Riley. “I set out thinking I was going to have to address everything in the world. I was taking on too much.”
It’s instructive to understand what “too much” means to Riley.
“At first I’d think about writing a song that would break down the Palestinians’ fight for land,” he says. It led to what he calls overthinking the problem. “Some people look out at the world and see things simply. I see things in their complications. It’s how I understand the world, but it also can lead to problems. That comes out in my music sometimes, because I can always do something over by just erasing a line.”
What this led to in the case of Bigger Weapon was a classic hurry-up-and-wait situation. There was a time, for instance, when Riley would go into the studio and just follow his instincts. Now many listeners were knocking at the door. The president of Epitaph, Andy Caulkins, was one of them.
“He’d call me,” Riley remembers, “and say, ‘We’re really excited about this album. It’s really the time for it.’ ‘Laugh, Love, Fuck,’ a kind of personal manifesto, was the first song I turned in. After a few of my conversations, I’d be wondering if this was what they expected. But I realized that what motivates me to think about things on a world scale, it has to do with what is happening in my town, how it’s similar and dissimilar to what’s going on in the world. Otherwise it’s like I’m sitting in class, and it’s just a bunch of facts. When I first got into organizing I was 15, and I was really excited about learning things, and I think I read every book that was shoved at me. What stuck with me is the parts of the books that my actual real life made clear.
“How I write best is just me being myself — when I have what I call moments of clarity — just feeling things, reacting to things as I live my life. That’s when it works.”
The material is so personal that at moments Riley had difficulty handling the idea of a public hearing. “I have songs on here,” he says, “that I couldn’t look at people when I first played them … ‘I Just Want to Lay Around in Bed with You’ and ‘Tiffany Hall.’ The last one is about a friend of mine and what her death signifies to me. Those songs were hard for me in that very personal way.”
These tracks were foreshadowed by cuts like “Wear Clean Drawers” and the wrenching “Heaven Tonight” from Party Music. The former is a kind of heartfelt message to his young daughter warning her about the difficulties that life has in store for her; the latter is built around the story of a young woman with hunger pangs that are the unjust punishment of poverty.
At the time that he wrote “Drawers,” Riley remembers thinking, “Maybe this isn’t why I got into rapping, that I needed to break the whole system down.”
In fact, his songs do indict the system, like the tracks on the latest album — not by imparting lofty lessons, but by focusing on the human particulars. Ultimately, the album shows a confident Riley at home with an unambiguous approach to songwriting.
TAKE THE POWER
To say that the rapper is unapologetic doesn’t begin to describe his resolve. The truth is that he never budged from the original World Trade Center a flambé cover of Party Music, and there’s no give in Pick a Bigger Weapon. The title itself works two ways: as advice to the dispossessed and as a challenge to the powers that be.
“In my life,” he says casually, “I’m still probably the only person I kick it with who considers himself a revolutionary. I mean, I’m not in an organization, but I think that in this world the people can take power.
There are no doubt folks who feel that Riley lives in a different universe. When asked about the skeptical among us, he tells a story he heard from guitarist Tom Morello of the late rock-rappers Rage Against the Machine. Morello has become a Riley friend and fellow traveler who can be found on occasion playing behind the Coup, as well as working with Riley as a guitar-rap duo. According to the guitarist, Rage some years ago was working on a video with outspoken director Michael Moore. The idea was for Rage to arrive on Wall Street on a busy workday, where they’d set up and play, loud. The financial district population would, they thought, be pushed up against the wall by the Rage challenge.
What happened was unexpected, and for Riley serves as a case in point. “They showed up on Wall Street,” he explains, “and expected all kinds of chaos with people scared, threatened by their music, and the police coming and everything. But what happened was, out of the financial district came about 100 people in suits chanting, ‘Suits for Rage! Suits for Rage!’ The point is that there are a lot of people who don’t want to be part of the system and don’t see themselves as part of it.”
“We all hear about the problems, like you can’t say anything or the FBI’s gonna put you in jail,” continues Riley. “But the thing is that people need to feel empowered. I try to make music first that makes me feel good about life, that makes me feel empowered. Some beats make you feel like, ‘Damn, I’m gonna beat somebody’s ass,’ and sometimes might do that, but I try to make music that draws on a lot of different feelings.”
As Riley says, the album has many flavors. But when all is said and done, the essential message can be found on the first full track, “We Are the Ones.” Over a booming, bouncy bass line, he sounds almost laid-back as he raps, “We, we are the ones/ We’ll see your fate/ Tear down your state/ Go get your guns.”
It’s frank, on the ferocious side, and exactly what audiences have come to expect from the Coup. It took Riley nearly five years to release it, but Pick a Bigger Weapon is in your hands. Use it wisely. SFBG
THE COUP
With T-Kash and Ise Lyfe
Sat/12, 9 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$20
(415) 771-1421
www.independentsf.com

To hell with the world

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One question that has swirled around Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center is whether it is too soon to make a film about the WTC attacks. Survivors have compared their experiences to Bruce Willis movies, The Planet of the Apes, and The Towering Inferno, and the rest of us only ever experienced the event as representation anyway — is it too soon to turn a disaster film into a disaster film? Or is it too soon to turn the deaths of more than 2,700 people into entertainment?
Perhaps fearing such criticism, Stone doesn’t entertain; instead, he’s created one of the most plodding disaster flicks ever made. By focusing on two Port Authority police officers trapped beneath the rubble, Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) and John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage), Stone tries to form a heavily underlined allegory about passing through hell to make it to the light.
There is an oft-repeated urban legend about an actress — Pia Zadora, usually — who is so awful in a theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank that during the second act, as the Nazis are searching the house, somebody in the audience calls out, “They’re in the attic!” Cage approaches that level of performance here. He usually conveys “befuddled” and “dopey” with a kind of genius, but Stone highlights his regular-guy qualities and removes humor and irony to create a caricature of virtuous and inarticulate American masculinity. Cage’s failed attempt to act against type combined with Stone’s blaring sentimentality might easily lead audiences to hope against hope that the next crumbling building will drop a girder just so and end this tortured performance for good.
The sappy music and fuzzy domestic scenes that Stone relies on to convince us we should care about his characters only suggest instead that Americans, in our relationship to technology, have stopped being human. Stone, at least, seems to believe that we wouldn’t know what to feel about death and salvation without an orchestra drowning out our ability to feel anything but contrived replicas of grief and hope. Cute and heartwarming moments usually serve to negate the reality of death. More profound cinematic journeys into hell, such as Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water, with its creepy Hello Kitty bags, and Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, with its badass fuzzy heroine, face death, complexify reality, and transform cute into its opposite; Hotel Rwanda never uses the “heartwarming” survival of its heroes to look away from the deaths of thousands. Turning historical events into heartwarming allegories is a problem generally, because it creates meaning at the expense of complexity; it’s also a problem specifically, because America didn’t actually pass through hell on Sept. 11 but settled in and began vigorously exporting hell.
If you expected Stone to give voice to the conspiracy theories that serve as a dreamworld underbelly to the official story, you’ll be disappointed. You want to feel the deep cosmic sadness that such mass death and terror deserve? Sorry. As a historian, Stone has made a career out of distorting our collective mythologies. He waited almost 20 years to make the Doors pompous and boring (The Doors, 1991), about 30 to take the fun out of “Who shot JFK?” conspiracy theories (JFK, 1991), and millennia to make Greek imperialism trite and campy (Alexander, 2004). Instead of the Native Americans who often pop up in Stone’s films to deliver wise and mystical sentences, there is an apocalyptic Christian ex-Marine, Dave Karnes, (Michael Shannon) saying things like, “God put this curtain of smoke here to hide something we aren’t yet ready to see.”
Or at least something horrible and complicated that Stone isn’t ready to show us. Jimeno has his own visions of Christ with a water bottle, and Karnes goes off at film’s end to Iraq to avenge the attack. Stone might like to hide his reactionary focus on vengeance and family values behind the screen of a true story, but his waving flags, footage of President Bush, Christian imagery, and use of the word evil are choices that convey obvious political messages. Although many were too distracted by Colin Farrell’s silly blond wig to notice, Stone already revealed his secret affection for imperial military adventures in Alexander. Even worse, World Trade Center doesn’t have any silly blond wigs to distract us and keep us from pondering the political message of making an apocalyptic catastrophe as boring as hell. (Stephen Beachy)

Stone’s throw

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› cheryl@sfbg.com
Still several entries short of being its own disaster-movie subgenre, the miniwave of Sept. 11 cinema continues with Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. Scrubbed of any JFK-style theorizing, Stone’s respectful take on the tragedy focuses on a pair of Port Authority Police Department officers who were pulled alive from the Twin Towers rubble 12 hours after the buildings collapsed.
The film’s tagline promises “a true story of courage and survival,” and indeed World Trade Center goes for the uplift-amid-tragedy jugular. The 9/11 movies may be here, but it’s clearly still too early to dramatize the events without offering catharsis. Even United 93, Paul Greengrass’s take on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, spun its obviously devastating final moments into a tribute to its hijacker-defeating passengers. World Trade Center stacks the sentimental deck even higher by plopping movie stars (Nicolas Cage, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crash’s Michael Peña) into the disaster. While United 93 had a nearly documentary feel, with nonactors in key roles and gritty handheld camerawork, World Trade Center is classically cinematic, foregoing a sprawling retelling of the 9/11 story in favor of a tightly compacted exploration of human determination.
The day starts like any other, as PAPD cops John McLoughlin (Cage) and Will Jimeno (Peña) settle into their routine, tracking runaways and giving directions to tourists. Suddenly there’s a shadow overhead, a terrible sound, and the men are hustling several blocks to aid the evacuation of the first World Trade Center tower to be hit — accidentally, they think — by an airplane. Stone never shows the planes’ impact; within the film’s world, context (and explicit mention of terrorists) feeds in via televisions blaring in the background of nearly every scene that takes place beyond ground zero. Even when the towers collapse, trapping McLoughlin and Jimeno deep within a perilous pile of stone and metal, neither realizes what Stone assumes every viewer will already know about Sept. 11 chronology.
At a certain point, World Trade Center splinters. McLoughlin and Jimeno cling to life, chatting back and forth about pop culture (since the film is drawn from the men’s own recollections, it’s entirely likely the Starsky and Hutch conversation really took place), their intense pain, and their families. Meanwhile, Donna McLoughlin (Bello) and Allison Jimeno (Gyllenhaal) anxiously await news of their missing husbands, with golden-hued flashbacks reminding all partners of happy domestic moments they’ve been taking for granted. There’s a brief the-whole-world-is-watching montage that illustrates grief on an international level. And, of course, there’s President Bush on the news spewing rhetoric, inspiring ex-Marine Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon) to don his military gear and head to New York City to help out.
The problem here isn’t in the way Stone and first-time scripter Andrea Berloff characterize these real-life people as almost supernaturally brave under extraordinary circumstances (Jimeno’s personal encounter with Jesus is World Trade Center’s “ride the snake” moment, but it kinda works amid the ongoing theme of faith as a survival tool). And it’s not that the film disregards the people who died that day. The tone here is very, very reverent. But it’s telling that World Trade Center focuses on a success story; unlike the characters in United 93, which built off a few cell phone calls to reconstruct the flight’s last frantic moments, World Trade Center’s heroes lived to share their memories, sickly sweet what-should-we-name-the-baby arguments included.
By focusing so intently on just the McLoughlins and the Jimenos (and to a lesser extent Karnes, a rather one-note concession to Stone’s military fixation) the film leaves the door open for countless Sept. 11–related movies to come. It’s just a question of whether future filmmakers will hew to Greengrass’s example and go raw or create movies like Stone’s World Trade Center: a bit overcooked. SFBG
WORLD TRADE CENTER
Opens Wed/9
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
www.wtcmovie.com

Halloween Not a Friendly Ghost

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by Amanda Witherell
amanda@sfbg.com

At the Guardian’s Best of the Bay party last night, we caught up with city officials fresh from a meeting on what to do about that pesky Halloween party in the Castro. Supervisor Bevan Dufty’s attempt to quash the celebration last week caught the ear of Mayor Newsom, who quickly mobilized city department heads including the SFPD and the Entertainment Commission, to brew up an agreement that protects the sacrosanct Castro event.

The Entertainment Commission took the stance that cancelling the city-run event would never work: it is ingrained in the Bay Area psyche to report to the Castro for All Hallow’s Eve, whether the people who live there like it or not. Police Chief Heather Fong said she would cancel cop vacation time instead and a full force would be dressed in blues and billy clubs for October 31. The plan is to shift the event from Castro to Market Street, but most importantly, the right to costumed revelry is no longer under attack.

Voto por voto!

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Act One: The Middle Class

MEXICO CITY (August 4th) — Jacinto Guzman, an 80 year-old retired oilworker from Veracruz state, plants himself in front of the headquarters of the Halliburton Corporation on the skyscraper-lined Paseo de Reforma here and recalls the great strikes of the 1930s that culminated in the expropriation and nationalization of Mexico’s petroleum reserves.

Dressed in a wrinkled suit and a hard hat, the old worker laments the creeping privatization of PEMEX, the national oil corporation, by non-Mexican subcontractors like Halliburton, which is installing natural gas infrastructure in Chiapas. But he is less agitated about the penetration of the transnationals in the Mexican oil industry, or even Halliburton’s craven role in the obscene Bush-Cheney Iraq war, than he is about the fraud-marred July 2nd presidential election here.

The sign he holds reads “No A Pinche Fraude” (No to Fucking Fraud!), referring to Halliburton’s membership in a business confederation that financed a vicious TV ad campaign against leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), who insists that he won the July 2nd election from right-winger Felipe Calderon, to whom the nation’s tarnished electoral authority, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) awarded a razor-thin and much questioned “victory.”

Mr. Guzman’s appearance at Halliburton on a Friday at the end of last month was one of myriad acts of civil resistance invoked by Lopez Obrador at a July 16th Mexico City assembly that drew more than a million participants. The campaign is designed to pressure a seven-judge panel (the “TRIFE”), which must determine a winner by the first week in September, into opening up the ballot boxes and counting out the votes contained therein — “voto por voto.”

Zeroing in on U.S. transnationals that purportedly backed Calderon, AMLO’s people have invaded Wal-Mart, picketed Pepsico (its Sabritas snack brand was a big contributor to the right-winger’s campaign), rented rooms in big chain hotels (Fiesta Americana) and dropped banners from the windows decrying the “pinche fraude,” and blocking all eleven doors at the palatial headquarters of Banamex, once Mexico’s oldest bank and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Citygroup.

“Voto por Voto!” demonstrators chanted as the bankers smoked and fumed and threatened to call the police.

Demonstrators also blocked the doors at the Mexican stock exchange and surrounded the studios of Televisa, the major head of the nation’s two-headed television monopoly, both heads of which shamelessly tilted to Calderon before, during, and after the ballots were cast.

“!Voto por Voto! Casilla por Casilla!” (Vote by Vote, Precinct by Precinct.)

Seated on a tiny folding chair outside of Banamex, Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexico’s most luminous writers and the recent winner of Spain’s coveted Cervantes Prize, reflected on the civil resistance: “We have always seen the workers demonstrate here in the Zocalo, but this is all very new for our middle class. The middle class protests too, but in the privacy of their own homes. Now we are out of the closet.”

Ironically, the concept of peaceful civil resistance by the middle class was pioneered by Felipe Calderon’s own party, the PAN, after it had been cheated out of elections in the 1980s by the then-ruling PRI. The PANistas uncharacteristically blocked highways and went on hunger strikes, and even imported Philippine trainers, veterans of Corazon Aquino’s civil resistance campaign against Ferdinand Marcos, to teach their supporters new tricks.

Recently AMLO’s party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD, stole a page from the PANista bible by holding a rally at a Mexico City statue of the right-wingers’ father figure, Manuel Clouthier. During the stolen 1988 presidential election, Clouthier demanded a ballot-by-ballot recount and coined the now ubiquitous phrase “voto por voto.” The PRD gathering around the statue of “Saint Maquio” left Calderon and the PAN speechless for once.

The PRD crusade could be labeled “civil resistance lite.” Led by Poniatowska, opera singer Regina Orozco, and comic actress Jesusa Rodriguez, public demonstrations have been more showbiz than eruptions of mass outrage. Nonetheless, Televisa and TV Azteca, Calderon and the PAN relentlessly rag Lopez Obrador for “fomenting violence,” purposefully ignoring the real daily violence that grips Mexico’s cities as brutal narco gangs behead rivals and massacre their enemies in plain public view.

Act Two: Bad Gas

Hundreds of steaming AMLO supporters pack the cavernous Club de Periodistas in the old quarter of the capital, where computer gurus will diagnosis the complexities of the cybernetic fraud Lopez Obrador is positive was perpetrated by IFE technicians this past July 2nd and 5th during both the preliminary count (PREP) and the actual tally of 130,000 precincts in the nation’s 300 electoral districts.

The experts are as convinced as the audience that the vote was stolen on the IFE terminals, but have many theories as to how. They speak of arcane algorithms and corrupted software. Juan Gurria, a computer programmer who has dropped in on his lunch hour to audit the experts, recalls the 1988 election which was stolen from leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas by the long-ruling (71 years) PRI in the nation’s first cybernetic computer fraud. “In 1988, they had to shut down the computers and say the system had crashed to fix the vote – but in 2006, the IFE kept the system running and we watched them steal it right before our eyes” Gurria contends, “the difference is they have better computers now.”

18 years ago, with computer fraud still in its infancy, the PRI had to resort to hit men to carry out its larceny. Three nights before the election, Cardenas’s closest aide, Francisco Xavier Ovando, and his assistant, Ramon Gil, were executed blocks away from the Congress of the country after reportedly obtaining the password to the PRI computer system, upon which the results were being cooked in favor of its candidates, the now universally reviled Carlos Salinas de Gortari. So far, Computer Fraud 2006 has been less messy.

Although the subject is dry and technical – at one point excerpts of an abstruse Guardian of London analysis by University of Texas economist James Galbreath (son of John Kenneth) was read into the record in English – AMLO’s supporters mutter and grumble and nod their heads vigorously. “Asi es!” – that’s just the way it happened! “Voto por Voto” they rumble, “Casilla por Casilla!” after each expert scores a point. Whether or not the fix is in, they are convinced that they have been had.

The PRD is trying to keep a lid on the bad gas seeping from down below. A few days after July 2nd, Felipe Calderon, who AMLO’s people have derisively dubbed “Fe-Cal,” came to this same Club de Periodistas to receive the adulation of a gaggle of union bosses. When he tried to leave the club, he was assailed by street venders howling “Voto por Voto!”

Calderon was quickly hustled into a bullet-proof SUV by his military escort, but the angry crowd kept pounding on the tinted windows. One young man obscenely thrust his middle finger at the would-be president, The scene is replayed over and over again on Televisa and Azteca, sometimes five times in a single news broadcast, graphic footage of the kind of violence AMLO is supposed to be inciting.

Act Three: In Defense of the Voto

Lopez Obrador fervently believes he has won the presidency of the United States of Mexico. He says it often on television just to needle Calderon. The proof, he is convinced, is inside 130,000 ballot boxes that he wants recounted, voto por voto.

The ballot boxes are now stored in the Federal Electoral Institute’s 300 district offices under the protection of the Mexican army. Nonetheless, in Veracruz, Tabasco, and Jalisco among other states, IFE operators have broken into the ballot boxes under the pretext of recovering lost electoral documentation. AMLO is suspicious that the officials are monkeying with the ballots, adding and subtracting the number of votos to make them conform to the IFE’s incredible computer count. Hundreds of ballot boxes contain more votes than voters on the registration lists, and more ballots have been judged null and void than the 243,000 margin of Calderon’s as-yet unconfirmed victory.

To this end, Lopez Obrador has strengthened encampments of his supporters outside the 300 electoral districts. In Monterrey, a PANista stronghold, thugs attack the encampment, beating on AMLO’s people and tearing down their tent city. Rocks are thrown at his supporters in Sinaloa; drivers speed by hurling curses and spitting on them.

Outside the Mexico City headquarters of the TRIFE, the seven-judge panel that will have the ultimate word as to whether or not the votos are going to be counted out one by one, a hunger strike has been ongoing since the PRD submitted documentation of anomalies in 53,000 out of the nation’s 130,000 polling places. Each night a different show business personality joins the fasters, eschews dinner and camps out in the guest pup tent overnight.

From Carlos Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska to painters like Jose Luis Cuevas and master designer Vicente Rojo, the arts and entertainment world has lined up behind Lopez Obrador. An exhibition by Cuevas and 50 other top line graphic artists and writers has been installed on the Alameda green strip adjacent to the Palace of Fine Arts here. After midnight, Calderon supporters slash and savage the art work, leaving a broken jumble behind.

The next day brigades of AMLO’s people from the surrounding neighborhoods rescue what they can of the exhibit, reassemble the broken shards, sew the torn art back together, and prop up the display panels. This is what democracy looks like in Mexico in the summer of 2006.

Act Four: Se Busca Por Fraude Electoral

The integrity of the Federal Electoral Commission is in the eye of Hurricane AMLO. Lopez Obrador accuses the IFE of fixing the election for Felipe Calderon and then defending his false victory. The PRD has filed criminal charges against the nine members of the IFE’s ruling council, most prominently its chairman, the gray-faced bureaucrat Luis Carlos Ugalde, for grievous acts of bias against Lopez Obrador, including refusing to halt Calderon’s hate spots in the run-up to July 2nd.

The IFE is mortally offended by the allegations that it has committed fraud and is using its enormously extravagant budget (larger than all of the government’s anti-poverty programs combined) to run spots protesting the slurs on its integrity that are every bit as virulent and ubiquitous as Calderon’s toxic hit pieces. Actors have been hired to impersonate irate citizens who allegedly were chosen at random as polling place workers July 2nd. “The votes have already been counted” they scoff. “We did not commit fraud” they insist. The idea is preposterous, an insult to their patriotism and to one of the pillars of Mexican “democracy,” the IFE.

Luis Carlos Ugalde, the president of the IFE council, has not been seen in public for several weeks except in large Wanted posters pasted to the walls of the inner city – SE BUSCA POR FRAUDE ELECTORAL! Ugalde and two other IFE counselors are protégés of powerful teachers union czar Elba Esther Gordillo, who joined forces with the PAN to take revenge on failed PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, a mortal enemy. The nine-member council is composed entirely of PRI and PAN nominees – the PRD is, of course, excluded.

Despite rumors that he had fled the country, Ugalde shows up July 27th at the first IFE meeting since the district tallies three weeks previous where he is confronted by the PRD delegate to the Institute (each party has one delegate.) During an acrimonious seven-hour meeting, Horacio Duarte keeps waving 30 partially burnt ballots, most of them marked for AMLO, that he has just been handed by an anonymous source. Duarte wants to know where Ugalde lives so he can nail one of the ballots to his front door to expose the “shame” of the fraud-marred election. The gray-faced bureaucrat grows even grayer and threatens to suspend the session. OK, OK, Duarte concedes, I’ll just hang it on your office door.

Just then a score of protestors push their way past the IFE guards at the auditorium’s portals – the meeting is a public one. They are chanting “Voto por Voto” and carrying bouquets of yellow flowers, AMLO’s colors. A PRD deputy tries to hand one to Luis Carlos Ugalde who turns away in horror. A bodyguard snatches up the blossoms as if they were a terrorist bomb, and disposes of them post-haste.

Act Five: We Shall Not Be Moved

The clock is ticking. The TRIFE must declare a new president by September 5th. The seven judges, all in the final year of their ten-year terms (three will move up to the Supreme Court in the next administration) have just begun to dig their way into the slagheap of legal challenges that impugn the results in about half of the 130,000 polling places in the land, the ham-handed bias of the IFE prior to the election, and the strange behavior of the Federal Electoral Institute’s computers on election day and thereafter.

The TRIFE, which has sometimes struck down corrupted state and local elections and ordered recounts in a handful of electoral districts, can either determine that the legal challenges would not affect enough votes to overturn the IFE’s determination that Calderon won the election, annul the entire election if it adjudges that it was illegitimately conducted, or order a recount. If the judges determine that annulment is the only way to fix the inequities, a new election would be scheduled 18 months down the pike.

In the meantime, the Mexican Congress would name an interim president, an unprecedented resolution in modern political history here – just the fact it is being discussed is, in itself, unprecedented.

Among those mentioned for the post are National Autonomous University rector Juan Ramon de la Fuente, former IFE director Jose Woldenberg, and three-time presidential loser Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of beloved depression-era president Lazaro Cardenas. For Cuauhtemoc, who was defrauded out of the presidency in 1988 by the same kind of flimflam with which the PAN and the IFE seek to despoil Lopez Obrador of victory in 2006, an interim presidency would be a perfect solution. Fixated on fulfilling the destiny of following in his father’s footsteps, moving back into his boyhood home Los Pinos – the Mexican White House – would be sweet revenge against his former protégé and now bitter rival on the left, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

But AMLO does not want the election annulled and an interim appointed. He is obsessed with proving his triumph at the polls and is not going to sit on his hands waiting for the TRIFE to reach its learned conclusions. A gifted leader of street protest, he has summoned his people to the capitol’s Tiananmens-sized Zocalo square three times since July 2nd, each time doubling the numbers of the masses who march through the city: 500,000 on July 8th, 1.1 million on July 16th, and 2.4 million this past Sunday, July 30th (police estimates) – Sunday’s gathering was the largest political demonstration in the nation’s history.

The “informative assemblies” as AMLO tags them, have been festive occasions but underneath there is palpable anger. Lopez Obrador’s people come in family, arm babies and grandpas, often in wheelchairs are on canes. Some come costumed as clowns and pirates. dangling grotesque marionettes, lopsided home-made heads of Fe-Cal, or pushing a replica of the Trojan Horse (“El Cabellito Trojanito.”) They look like they are having fun but their frustrations can well up to the surface in a flash, say when the hated Televisa and TV Azteca appear on the scene. “QUE SE MUERE TELEVISA!” (THAT TELEVISA SHOULD DIE!), the people the color of the earth snarl and scream, pounding fiercely on the television conglomerate’s vehicles.

At the July 30th “informative assembly,” Lopez Obrador ups the ante considerably in his high stakes poker game to pry open the ballot boxes. Now instead of calling for yet another monster gathering in the Zocalo (4.8 million?), he asks all those who had come from the provinces and the lost cities that line this megalopolis to stay where they sre in permanent assembly until the TRIFE renders a decision. 47 encampments will be convened extending from the great plaza, through the old quarter, all the way to the ring road that circles the capital, snarling Mexico City’s already impenetrable traffic, raising the level of greenhouse gases and urban tempers to the point of combustion.

When Lopez Obrador calls for a vote on his proposal, 2,000,000 or so “SI’s” soared from the throats of the gargantuan throng, followed by the now obligatory roars of “No Estas Solo” (“you are not alone”) and “Voto by Voto, Casilla by Casilla.” As if on cue, AMLO’s people began assembling the encampments state by state and Mexico City neighborhood by neighborhood.

For a correspondent who once wrote a novel fictionalizing the stealing of the 1988 election (“Tonatiuh’s People,” Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso, 1999), in which the people the color of the earth march on Mexico City and vote to stay in permanent assembly in the Zocalo, fantasy has turned into the actualities of daily reporting. I am not surprised by this startling turn of events.

When I first arrived here in the old quarter days after the 8.2 earthquake that devastated this capital, the “damnificados” (refugees) were encamped in the streets, demanding relief and replacement housing and liberation from the ruling PRI and their movement from the bottom reinvigorated a civil society that today infuses AMLO’s struggle for electoral democracy. This morning, the damnificados of the PAN and the IFE, Calderon and the fat cats, are again living on these same streets.

On the first evening of the taking of Mexico City, AMLO spoke to thousands crowded into the Zocalo in a driving downpour and invoked Gandhi: “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they beat you, and then you win.” And then Gabino Palomares, a troublemaking troubadour who has been up there on the stage at every watershed event in recent Mexican history from the slaughter of striking students at Tlatelolco (1968) to the Zapatistas’ March of the Those the Color of the Earth (2001) took the mic to lead the mob in that old labor anthem, “We Shall Not Be Moved” and AMLO’s people thundered back in a roar that drowned out the weeping sky, “NO NOS MOVERAN!”

To be continued.

John Ross’s “ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible – Chronicles 2000-2006” will be published by Nation Books this October and Ross is hunting possible venues for presentations. All suggestions will be cheerfully accepted at johnross@igc.org

More on the Case of the Uncovered Bay Area Newspaper Monopoly

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1. It was good to see today’s Chronicle run a big front page, above the fold story on a 24-year-old freelance cameraman (Josh Wolfe) upholding journalistic principle and going to jail rather than disclosing unaired tapes of a 2005 anarchist demonstrations in which protestors clashed with police. This once again shows the power a daily paper can wield in punching up a serious Freedom of Information/First Amendment issue. Wolfe’s courageous decision as an individual contrasts nicely with the institutional moves by the nation’s biggest newspaper chains to impose quietly on the Bay Area a Singleton/Hearst regional monopoly conglomerate, with McClatchy, Gannett and Stephens aiding and abetting, no competition allowed, for the duration. (See Bay Guardian editorials and my previous blogs).

Since these publishers have mangled and blacked out the coverage of this story, let me lay out the documents below in the Clint Reilly court filings for you to judge for yourself. Pay particular attention to the Alioto filings, which detail the real monopolizing strategy of the publishers:

Read the Alioto Legal Documents:
Complaint.pdf

Gannett-Stephens_Opp_to_ TRO.pdf

Hearst_Opp_to_TRO.pdf

McClatchy_opp_to_TRO.pdf

MediaNews-Calif_Newspaper_Partnership_Opp_to_TRO.pdf

Memo-Supp_of_Mtn_for_TRO.pdf

Order_denying_TRO.pdf

Plaintiff’s_Reply_to_Mtn_for_TRO.pdf

2. Just in: A breathless editorial in today’s Contra Costa Times (“Times’ bright future”), welcoming Dean Singleton and his brand of journalism, by some folks who want to keep their jobs. Click here. Their line is presented without blushing: “…the joining of these suburban newspapers under the Media/News flag creates a Bay Area publishing constellation that makes each paper stronger by giving it access to the best that the others have to offer. This is another chapter in a classic American success story: how MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton grew his enterprise from a single, small daily newspaper in New Jersey to the fourth largest publishing company in the country.” The rousing conclusion: “As we said, it has been a difficult eight months for everyone at the Times, but all of that is about to be behind us which allows us to turn our attention fully to the job at hand. Creating informative, entertaining and compelling content for the Times dailies, our weeklies and Contra Costa Times.”

Impertinent question: we always thought the CCT was a damn good community newspaper, so recognized by the California Newspaper Publishers Association with its 2002 and 2003 General Excellence awards. Does anyone over there really think the paper will get better under Singleton? Which Bay Area paper has Singleton made better after he took it over? Let me say for the record: I like Dean Singleton personally and have had some dealings with him and I would like to hope for the best but…Keep me posted on developments in Singletonland.

3. The nation’s journalism and mass communications professors are communing this week at the Marriott Hotel under the banner of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Will any of the professors or panels take up the issue of accelerating media concentration, perhaps the most serious problem in the newspaper business, and in particular the issue of the emerging Hearst/Singleton conglomerate right here in San Francisco? This is a tough one for journalism/mass com departments who depend on newspaper and broadcast companies for money and jobs. B3

Josh Wolf in jail

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A federal judge has thrown video journalist Josh Wolf in jail for refusing to turn over material subpoenaed by a grand jury.

Judge William Alsup ordered Wolf incarcerated Tuesday afternoon, and denied bail, meaning Wolf could be stuck behind bars until either the grand jury finishes its investigation or Wolf chooses to turn over a video tape recorded during a demonstration last summer. Investigators believe footage from Wolf’s tape – material that was edited out before Wolf released the tape publicly — contains evidence of protestors torching a police car.

Wolf has maintained that no such evidence exists, but insists upon his right as a reporter to withhold the material from authorities.

An attorney from the National Lawyers Guild who’s been assisting Wolf with his case, Carlos Villarreal, told us just moments ago that while Judge Alsup seemed considerate of First Amendment concerns, “I think he made it clear he’s not very supportive [of] journalists. He gave the federal government a lot of leeway.”

Villarreal said Alsup argued that existing case law may extend to journalists who decline to testify in court in order to protect confidential sources, but it does not do the same for unpublished materials accumulated by journalists while reporting a story. Villarreal told us he believed the point of such protections was to allow journalists to build relationships of trust with their sources, which means material derived under those circumstances should be protected, too.

“[Alsup] basically said that he has to follow the law, and the law according to him is that a person who is not complying must be found in contempt,” Villarreal said. He added that around 40 states have shield laws designed to protect reporters, but at the federal level, only previous cases exist to guide judges on determining journalist’s privileges.

In addition to the National Lawyers Guild, Wolf has received assistance from the Society of Professional Journalists. The ACLU and the French organization Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press both filed amicus briefs on Wolf’s behalf.

The demonstration that led to the video footage took place in the Mission last summer, while the G8 summit was occurring in Scotland. Wolf himself said in a prepared statement released yesterday, “People protesting or on strike for better wages or marching for amnesty should feel free to do so in front of a journalist’s cameras, just as they should feel free to talk to journalists. A free press benefits all of us.”

Another attorney for Wolf, José Luis Fuentes, has pointed out that the San Francisco Police Department to date has not stepped forward with any description of damages or subsequent costs related to the allegedly vandalized cop car.

A true radical thinker dies at 85

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By Tim Redmond

t’s hard for me to imagine talking about leftist political theory in the early 1980s without the works of Murray Bookchin. His ideas were new, fresh, sometimes to radical for the radicals I hung out with — but always inspiring. Back in the days when I was working with some serious malcontents at the Abalone Alliance, Bookchin referred to our newspaper, It’s About Times, as “the only antinuclear publication that doesn’t make me puke.” We were so proud.

Bookchin, who died July 30 in Burlington, VT at 85, was known as the founder of social ecology, and one of the people who first inspired me (an economics major) to think about economics and ecology as potential partners in a new kind of political theory. (Hazel Henderson and Jane Jacobs were the others.) His base concept, laid out in a book called “Post-Scarcity Anarchism,” went like this: The reason that human beings institute powerful government, with powerful military and police forces, is that we’ve always been engaged in a struggle for survival, fighting each other for scarce resources. In the modern era, for the first time in human history, we have the capability to eliminate scarcity as a basic part of human life — to provide the basics of food, clothing, shelter, education and freedom to all. At some point, Bookchin argued (he was forever an optimist) the entire concept of scarcity would be meaningless — and at that point, the whole idea of a powerful, centralized state would become meaningless, too.

He was often cranky and generally impractical, and never fully accepted by mainstream academia, and I haven’t heard much from him in about a decade, but once upon a time, he was a force in a lot of our lives.

Dufty wants to cancel Halloween

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By Tim Redmond

Yeah, it’s true: Sup. Bevan Dufty wants to cancel the official Halloween celebration in the Castro.

Of course, nobody — not even a district supervisor with the full backing of the Police Department and the mayor — can actually cancel Halloween in the Castro. I doesn’t work that way. But Dufty hopes that if the music, the road closures, and the city sponsorship go away, and the word is put out that Castro Halloween is over, not so many out-of-towners and troublemakers will show up.

“It’s not a draconian, fascist thing,” Dufty aide Rachlle McManus explained to me. “But frankly, we want to make it uncomfortable for people who want to cause trouble.”

A reporter in Wolf’s clothing

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
If freelance journalist Josh Wolf goes to jail for refusing to turn over what federal prosecutors say is video evidence of a crime that allegedly took place during a demonstration in July 2005, he’ll no doubt become a bigger cause célèbre in the lefty blogosphere.
But that doesn’t exactly make the prospect of jail time tantalizing. Wolf was hit with civil-contempt charges after refusing to testify before a federal grand jury and turn over video footage he’d obtained at a demonstration last summer in the Mission District against a G8 meeting in Scotland.
Some of the video has appeared publicly and Jeffrey Finigan, a prosecuting attorney involved in the case, saw it and wanted more. Prosecutors believe other portions of the tape, edited out by Wolf, contain evidence of protesters torching a cop car. Wolf denies that but says he’s standing on principle in withholding the tape. At the state level, Wolf is protected by California’s Shield Law, which is designed to protect the news-gathering process, but there is no federal equivalent.
Wolf attended a contempt hearing last week in federal court, where Judge William Alsup extended the issue to a future date, giving Finigan and Wolf’s East Bay attorney, José Luis Fuentes, time to iron out remaining questions about what protection Wolf might be afforded as a journalist. Wolf is also receiving help from the San Francisco office of the National Lawyers Guild and announced at a prehearing press conference that the Society of Professional Journalists recently gave $1,000 to his defense fund.
Wolf’s legal team has regularly lobbied the court to allow documents related to the case to be made publicly available, and several of them have been posted at Wolf’s Web site, Joshwolf.net. “We fought really hard to make all of those documents public,” Wolf said at the press conference. “It’s a situation where we have a lot of public information about it, which we’re lucky to have.”
Even if the contempt charges are tossed, Wolf could still decide to testify and turn over the tape with or without immunity from criminal charges that could be filed against him for any role he may have played in the alleged vandalism. At the press conference, Fuentes insisted the police department still has not stepped forward with any description of damages or subsequent costs reutf8g to the car.
The day of the press conference, Wolf’s story appeared on the blog Huffingtonpost.com via contributor Stephen Kaus. “The fact is that the effectiveness of the press is substantially diminished if every reporter is turned into a ‘surveillance camera’ as Wolf has claimed,” Kaus wrote. “Perhaps with exceptions for genuinely ‘terrible’ situations, the press cannot function if each crime-related story could turn into days of court testimony.” SFBG

First booze, now cops

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“This year, $25,613 for 16 officers. Last year, $4,650 for 7 officers,” fest organizer Robert Kowal told the Guardian. “We just want to put on a free concert, and the public stance toward us has been extremely obstructionist and inflammatory.”
Captain James Dudley told us the bill was a draft based on last month’s North Beach Festival, where the addition of a beer garden to the event scheme actually made their job a little harder because of multiple entrances and a confused private security.
“So we fully staffed it,” said Dudley.
After threatening a lawsuit, Kowal and his co-organizers sat down with Dudley and worked out a plan that would require more private security and volunteers and fewer of the costly badges and billy clubs.
“The police are to be commended for sticking with what keeps them safe, but we’re a much smaller event, and we only have one street closure,” said Kowal. Only in their wildest woodwind dreams would the Jazz Fest organizers hope for a crowd as large as the North Beach Festival’s. And they are hoping. Due to the change in alcohol policy and the additional security, the fest is still expected to cost $15,000–$20,000 more than last year.
“We made a lot of compromises to make sure this festival is still free,” said Kowal. “We’re hoping someone comes forward with a big donation. But we need a miracle. We need a really sunny day and we need to sell a lot of Angel Passes.”
For jazz fans who want to chip in, the fest is offering “Angel Packages” for $100, which include tickets to all four night shows (which are not free) and an “I Saved North Beach Jazz Fest” T-shirt. (Witherell)

Dam telling debate

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By Steven T. Jones
The debate over whether to tear down the O’Shaughnessy Dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley — which a state report this week concluded is possible, but with a prohibitive price tag of up to $10 billion — is interesting for what it says about the power and perils of activist journalism, particularly when the big boys deign to practice it. Despite their current revisionist history, the San Francisco Chronicle pushed hard for the construction of this dam 100 years ago (waging a nasty smear campaign against John Muir and other conservationists in the process — read Gray Brechin’s great book Imperial San Francisco for the whole story). Then, as now, that paper and its downtown allies wanted growth at any cost. But today, it is another newspaper crusade that has propelled forward the riduculous notion of spending needed billions of dollars to undo a historical error. The Sacramento Bee and its associate editorial writer Tom Philip turned the idea of some environmentalists and studies by UC Davis in a full-blown offensive to tear down the dam, in the process winning a Pulitzer Prize and convincing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to order the study that came out this week.
Now, just imagine if we could get the media mega-corporations to put this kind of effort into eliminating poverty, reducing American militarism and police state excesses, creating socialized medicine, or any of a long list of important social and economic justice concerns, rather than pursuing sentimental pipe dreams. Then we might start making real progress.
Instead, we’re left with the latest skirmish in the age-old Sacramento-San Francisco rivalry.

Make those donuts …

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By Tim Redmond

Wow! A committee chaired by two former police chiefs thinks the police chief should have more power in disciplinary cases. Go figure.

As Joe Pop-O-Pie says, make those donuts with extra grease ….

AMLO Presidente!

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MEXICO CITY (July 19th) – The day before Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the peppery Mexican left leader who insists he is the winner of the fraud-marred July 2nd election, summoned more than a million Mexicans to the great central Zocalo plaza to lay out plans for mass civil resistance to prevent right-winger Felipe Calderon from stealing the presidency, this reporter marched down from the neighboring Morelos state with a group of weather-beaten campesinos the color of the earth.

Saul Franco and his companeros farmed plots in the village of Anenecuilco, the hometown of revolutionary martyr Emiliano Zapata who gave his life to defend the community’s land from the big hacienda owners. “It is our obligation to fix this fraud and kick the rich out of power,” Saul explained. “If Zapata was still alive he would be with us today,” the 52 year-old farmer insisted, echoing the sentiment on the hand-lettered cardboard sign he carried.

But although Saul and his companions admired and supported Lopez Obrador, they were not so happy with AMLO’s party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD. “We had a PRD mayor and things went badly and we lost the next time around,” remembered Pedro, Saul’s cousin. Indeed, many PRD candidates are simply made-over members of the once-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI who have climbed on Lopez Obrador’s coattails to win public office. In 57% of all elections the PRD has won, the party has failed to win reelection.

Yet the farmers drew a clear distinction between AMLO’s “Party of the Aztec Sun” and Lopez Obrador himself. “Andres Manuel will never surrender. He is decided. He will never double-cross us or sell us out.” Saul was adamant.

It is that aura of dedication and combativeness and the belief that, in contrast with other leaders that have risen from the Mexican left, that AMLO cannot be bought or co-opted, that helped draw 1.1 million (police estimates) or 1.5 million (PRD estimates) Mexicans to the Zocalo, the political heart of the nation, July 16th.

The numbers of those in attendance – the line of march extended for 13 kilometers and moved continuously for five hours – are integral to AMLO’s notion that these are historic moments for Mexico. Only if this understanding is impressed upon the seven-judge electoral tribunal (TRIFE) that must decide who won the fiercely-contested July 2nd election will the panel order the opening of all 130,000 ballot boxes and allow a vote-by-vote recount.

Lopez Obrador is convinced that he has won the presidency of Mexico from his right-wing rival, Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party (PAN), who was awarded a severely critiqued 243,000-vote margin by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) on the basis of what now appear to be manipulated computer tallies.

The July 16th outpouring may or may not have been the largest political demonstration in Mexican history. AMLO himself set the previous record back in April 2005, when he put 1.2 million citizens into the streets of Mexico City to protest efforts by President Vicente Fox, a PANista like Calderon, to exclude him from the ballot. But what is most important in this numbers game is not how many were turned out at each event but the exponential growth of the gatherings. Back in 2005, AMLO called a rally in the Zocalo that drew 325,000 supporters. Two weeks later, he tripled the size of the turnout, forcing Fox to drop his scheme to prevent Lopez Obrador from running for president.

Six days after the July 2nd election, AMLO summoned a half million to an “informative assembly” in the vast Tienanmen-Square-sized plaza, and once again, if the PRD figures are to be accepted, tripled participation last Sunday. He is now calling for a third “informative assembly” July 30th which, given the statistical trend, should settle the question of which is the largest mass demonstration in Mexican political history.

The PAN and its now-ex-candidate Calderon consider these enormous numbers to be “irrelevant.” That’s how PAN secretary Cesar Nava labeled them.

What AMLO’s enemies – Fox, Calderon, the PAN, the now dilapidated PRI, the Catholic Church, the Media, Mexico’s avaricious business class, and the Bushites in Washington – do not get yet is that every time they level a blow at the scrappy “Peje” (for Pejelagarto, a gar-like fish from the swamps of AMLO’s native Tabasco) his popularity grows by leaps and bounds. The perception that, despite the vicious attacks of his opponents, he will never sell out is Lopez Obrador’s strongest suit – and he is always at the peak of his game when leading massive street protests.

Two weeks after the election that Felipe Calderon continues to claim he won, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is the pivotal figure in Mexican politics, dominating public discourse and even the media, which has so brutally excoriated and excluded him for years. Meanwhile, the PANista spends his days accepting congratulations from the world’s most prominent right-wingers including George Bush, an electoral pickpocket who is popularly thought to have stolen the U.S. presidency in 2000 and 2004, and Bush’s Senate majority leader Bill Frist, in addition to Bush poodle Tony Blair and Spain’s former Francisco-Franco-clone prime minister Jose Maria Aznar.

Calderon also enjoys the approbation of such U.S. right-wingers as Fox News commentator Dick Morris (a campaign consultant), the Miami Herald’s decrepit Latin America “expert” Andres Oppenheimer, and Ginger Thompson, the Condoleezza Rice of The New York Times whose estimates of crowd sizes missed the mark by a million marchers July 16th. Virtually every radio and television outlet in Mexico has endorsed Calderon’s purported victory – Televisa, the largest communication conglomerate in Latin America, which dominates the Mexican dial, refused to provide live coverage of the July 16th rally, perhaps the largest political demonstration in the nation’s history.

Although Felipe Calderon has announced his intentions of touring Mexico to thank voters for his disputed “triumph,” insiders report that the PAN brain trust has strongly advised against it, fearing that such a tour could trigger violent confrontations with AMLO supporters.

At this point, 16 days after the election, it is difficult to imagine how Calderon could govern Mexico if the TRIFE denies a recount and accepts the IFE numbers. A Calderon presidency would inherit a country divided in half geographically between north and south. Both the PAN and the PRD won 16 states a piece although AMLO’s turf contains 54% of the population and most of Mexico’s 70 million poor – an angry majority that will refuse to accept the legitimacy of a Calderon presidency for the next six years. Faced with a similar situation after he stole the 1988 election from leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, Carlos Salinas had to call out the army.

Lopez Obrador has encouraged his supporters to reinforce encampments outside the nation’s 300 electoral districts to prevent the IFE from tampering with ballot boxes while the judges sort through the 53,000 allegations of polling place violations filed by AMLO’s legal team. The PRD charges that the IFE has already violated 40% of the boxes in a ploy to match ballot totals to its highly dubious computer count. The leftist’s call for peaceful mass civil resistance is bound to keep this nation’s teeth on edge until a judicial determination is reached in respect to a recount. A new president must be designated by September 6th.

Although tensions are running high, the country has been remarkably violence free since July 2nd — but a decision by the tribunal to uphold the IFE results could well be the point of combustion. Even should a recount be ordered, the question of who will do the counting — given the vehement distrust of the Federal Electoral Institute by AMLO’s supporters — is a potential flashpoint for trouble. Historically, when the electoral option has been canceled as a means of social change by vote fraud, the armed option gains adherents in Mexico.

Despite AMLO’s talents at exciting mass resistance and the number of times he can fill the Zocalo to bursting, the only numbers that really count are those inside the nation’s 130,000 ballot boxes. Will the justices satisfy Lopez Obrador’s demand for a vote-by-vote recount? All seven judges are in their final year on the TRIFE bench and at least three members are candidates to move up to the Supreme Court in the next administration. In the past, the judges, who decide by majority opinion, have been quite independent of political pressures, ordering annulments and recounts in two gubernatorial elections and in whole electoral districts – but have never done so in a presidential election. Forcing that historical precedent is what Lopez Obrador’s call for mass mobilizations is all about.

If AMLO’s foes are counting on a long, drawn-out legal tussle that will discourage the faithful and eventually reduce his support to a handful of diehard losers, they have grievously miscalculated the energy and breadth of the leftist’s crusade to clean up the 2006 election. This past weekend, as this senior citizen trudged the highway down from Zapata country to the big city, two police officers lounging outside the highway tollbooths gently patted me on the back and urged me on. “Animo!” they encouraged, “keep up the spirit!”

When even the cops are in solidarity with Lopez Obrador’s fight for electoral justice, the writing is on the wall for Calderon and his right-wing confederates. Indeed, the wall of the old stone convent around the corner from my rooms here in the old quarter says it quite clearly: “AMLO PRESIDENTE!”

John Ross’s “Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible – Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006” will be published by Nation Books this October.

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