Poverty

Greening away poverty

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If the flow of venture capital is any indication, the new green economy is not just coming, it’s about to boom. There’s good reason to be excited about capitalists pouring money into saving the planet. But is it really the panacea that true believers say it is?

The idea behind "social uplift environmentalism" is that the new green economy is strong enough to lift people out of poverty. The argument: millions of "green-collar jobs" — defined as living-wage, career-track jobs that contribute directly to improving or enhancing environmental quality — will be created as the need for green energy, transportation, and manufacturing infrastructure grows.

If green is the new black, eco-populism is the new environmentalism.

But the pesky realists out there question whether the private sector will work quickly or efficiently enough to solve crises as massive as global warming. And many Bay Area activists say they have good reason to be wary of green solutions to problems like inner-city poverty.

In early April, the San Francisco–based Center for Political Education (CPE) brought in prominent environmental and social justice activists to discuss some of these issues. One of the primary concerns about turning blue collars green has to do with doubts about job training programs, which don’t have a great track record.

"People are getting trained for nothing — for an old economy, for jobs that don’t exist," activist Oscar Grande of People Organizing for Environmental and Economic Rights (PODER) told the Guardian.

At the gathering Ian Kim, director of the Green Collar Jobs program at Oakland’s Ella Baker Center, agreed that there have been major problems in job training programs but said that this shouldn’t doom future programs to failure. "Workforce development has been on a starvation diet for the last 10 to 15 years," he said at the CPE event. "It’s easy to do job training really badly. But when done well, it can work."

In a conversation with the Guardian, Jennifer Lin, research director for the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, cited Solar Richmond as an example of a small but successful green-jobs program. Lin also acknowledged that it took a while for the first 18 trainees to find employment in solar panel installation.

Another hot topic at the CPE event concerned land use — a scorching topic in our housing-strapped city. Grande said one of the struggles PODER has taken on in the Mission District is preserving industrial lands, the breadbasket for low-income communities. San Francisco’s industrial base has eroded due to factors such as offshoring jobs and dotcom-era condo developments in areas formerly zoned for industry, he said.

One of the biggest questions raised at the CPE event concerned the limits of green capitalism: can an environmental solution be successful if it doesn’t challenge the constant-growth philosophy that created the problem?

"There is a lot of feel-good energy being put in by politicians about this really good [green jobs] program. But they’re not addressing how incredibly enormous the challenges are and the kinds of shifts — like getting all of us out of cars, providing local foods that don’t have to be shipped from thousands of miles away — that need to happen," the CPE’s Fernando Martí told the Guardian.

Kim says that while the climate crisis allows us to critique capitalism in a way that has not been possible for decades, he acknowledges that the work the Ella Baker Center is doing is within a constant-growth framework.

"While it’s important in the radical left to have conversations about capitalism and powering down, that’s not where we’re starting out with green jobs," Kim told the CPE audience.

Mateo Nube, training director for the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, suggested that both short- and long-term goals are important. "We need to build an infrastructure for the transition. We need to rebuild our food production systems in a way that actually takes care of everybody and is sustainable. From that vantage point, the idea of green jobs and a New Deal makes a lot of sense. But in that process, we have to incorporate an understanding that a constant-growth model is suicide."

Promises and reality

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› sarah@sfbg.com

The Lennar-financed "Yes on G" fliers jammed into mailboxes all across San Francisco this month depict a dark-skinned family strolling along a shoreline trail against a backdrop of blue sky, grassy parkland, a smattering of low-rise buildings, and the vague hint of a nearly transparent high-rise condo tower in the corner.

"After 34 years of neglect, it’s time to clean up the Shipyard for tomorrow," states one flier, which promises to create up to 10,000 new homes, "with as many as 25 percent being entry-level affordable units"; 300 acres of new parks; and 8,000 permanent jobs in the city’s sun-soaked southeast sector.

Add to that the green tech research park, a new 49ers stadium, a permanent home for shipyard artists, and a total rebuild of the dilapidated Alice Griffith public housing project, and the whole project looks and sounds simply idyllic. But as with many big-money political campaigns, the reality is quite different from the sales pitch.

What Proposition G’s glossy fliers don’t tell you is that this initiative would make it possible for a controversial Florida-based megadeveloper to build luxury condos on a California state park, take over federal responsibility for the cleanup of toxic sites, construct a bridge over a slough restoration project, and build a new road so Candlestick Point residents won’t have to venture into the Bayview District.

Nor do these shiny images reveal that Prop. G is actually vaguely-worded, open-ended legislation whose final terms won’t be driven by the jobs, housing, or open-space needs of the low-income and predominantly African American Bayview-Hunters Point community, but by the bottom line of the financially troubled Lennar.

And nowhere does it mention that Lennar already broke trust with the BVHP, failing to control asbestos at its Parcel A shipyard development and reneging on promises to build needed rental units at its Parcel A 1,500-unit condo complex (see "Question of intent," 11/28/07).

The campaign is supported by Mayor Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and District 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell, as well as the Republican and the Democratic parties of San Francisco. But it is funded almost exclusively by Lennar Homes, a statewide independent expenditure committee that typically pours cash into conservative causes like fighting tax hikes and environmental regulations.

In the past six months, Lennar Homes has thrown down more than $1 million to hire Newsom’s chief political strategist, Eric Jaye, and a full spectrum of top lawyers and consultants, from generally progressive campaign manager Jim Stearns to high-powered spinmeister Sam Singer, who recently ran the smear campaign blaming the victims of a fatal Christmas Day tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo.

Together, this political dream team cooked up what it hopes will be an unstoppable campaign full of catchy slogans and irresistible images, distributed by a deep-pocketed corporation that stands to make many millions of dollars off the deal.

But the question for voters is whether this project is good for San Francisco — particularly for residents of the southeast who have been subjected to generations worth of broken promises — or whether it amounts to a risky giveaway of the city’s final frontier for new development.

Standing in front of the Lennar bandwagon is a coalition of community, environmental, and housing activists who this spring launched a last minute, volunteer-based signature-gathering drive that successfully became Proposition F. It would require that 50 percent of the housing built in the BVHP/Candlestick Point project be affordable to those making less than the area median income of $68,000 for a family of four.

Critics such as Lennar executive Kofi Bonner and Michael Cohen of the mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development have called Prop. F a "poison pill" that would doom the Lennar project. But its supporters say the massive scope and vague wording of Prop. G would have exacerbated the city’s affordable housing shortfalls.

Prop. F is endorsed by the Sierra Club, People Organized to Win Employment Rights, the League of Conservation Voters, the Chinese Progressive Association, St. Peter’s Housing Committee, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, the Grace Tabernacle Community Church, Green Action, Nation of Islam Bay Area, the African Orthodox Church, Jim Queen, and Supervisor Chris Daly.

Cohen criticized the coalition for failing to study whether the 50 percent affordability threshold is feasible. But the fact is that neither measure has been exposed to the same rigors that a measure going through the normal city approval process would undergo. Nonetheless, the Guardian unearthed an evaluation on the impact of Prop. F that Lennar consultant CB Richard Ellis prepared for the mayor’s office.

The document, which contains data not included in the Prop. G ballot initiative, helps illuminate the financial assumptions that underpin the public-private partnership the city is contemputf8g with Lennar, ostensibly in an effort to win community benefits for the BVHP.

CBRE’s analysis states that Lennar’s Prop. G calls for "slightly over 9,500 units," with nearly 2,400 affordable units (12 percent at 80 percent of area median income and 8 percent at 50 percent AMI), and with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency "utilizing additional funding to drive these affordability levels even lower."

Noting that Prop. G. yields a "minimally acceptable return" of 17 to 18 percent in profit, CBRE estimates that Prop. F would means "a loss of $500 million in land sales revenue" thanks to the loss of 2,400 market-rate units from the equation. With subsidies of $125,000 allegedly needed to complete each affordable unit, CBRE predicts there would be a further cost of "$300 million to $400 million" to develop the 2,400 additional units of affordable housing prescribed under Prop. F.

Factoring in an additional $500 million loss in tax increments and Mello-Roos bond financing money, CBRE concludes, "the overall impact from [the Prop. F initiative] is a $1.1 to $1.2 billion loss of project revenues … the very same revenues necessary to fund infrastructure and community improvements."

Yet critics of the Lennar project say that just because it pencils out for the developer doesn’t mean it’s good for the community, which would be fundamentally and permanently changed by a project of this magnitude. Coleman’s Advocates’ organizing director Tom Jackson told us his group decided to oppose Prop. G "because we looked at who is living in Bayview-Hunters Point and their income levels.

"Our primary concern isn’t Lennar’s bottom line," Jackson continued. "Could Prop. F cut into Lennar’s profit margin? Yes, absolutely. But our primary concern is the people who already live in the Bayview."

Data from the 2000 US census shows that BVHP has the highest percentage of African Americans compared to the rest of the city — and that African Americans are three times more likely to leave San Francisco than other ethnic groups, a displacement that critics of the Lennar project say it would exacerbate.

The Bayview also has the third-highest population of children, at a time when San Francisco has the lowest percentage of children of any major US city and is struggling to both maintain enrollment and keep its schools open. Add to that the emergence of Latino and Chinese immigrant populations in the Bayview, and Jackson says its clear that it’s the city’s last affordable frontier for low-income folks.

The problem gets even more pronounced when one delves into the definition of the word "affordable" and applies it to the socioeconomic status of southeast San Francisco.

In white households, the annual median income was $65,000 in 2000, compared to $29,000 in black households — with black per capita income at $15,000 and with 14 percent of BVHP residents earning even less than $15,000.

The average two-bedroom apartment rents in San Francisco for $1,821, meaning households need an annual AMI of $74,000 to stay in the game. The average condo sells for $700,000, which means that households need $143,000 per year to even enter the market.

In other words, there’s a strong case for building higher percentages of affordable housing in BVHP (where 94 percent of residents are minorities and 21 percent experience significant poverty) than in most other parts of San Francisco. Yet the needs of southeastern residents appear to be clashing with the area’s potential to become the city’s epicenter for new construction.

San Francisco Republican Party chair Howard Epstein told the Guardian that his group opposed Prop. F, believing it will kill all BVHP redevelopment, and supported Prop. G, believing that it has been in the making for a decade and to have been "vetted up and down."

While a BVHP redevelopment plan has been in the works for a decade, the vaguely defined conceptual framework that helped give birth to Prop. G this year was first discussed in public only last year. In reality, it was hastily cobbled together in the wake of the 49ers surprise November 2006 news that it was rejecting Lennar’s plan to build a new stadium at Monster Park and considering moving to Santa Clara.

As the door slammed shut on one opportunity, Lennar tried to swing open another. As an embarrassed Newsom joined forces with Feinstein to find a last-ditch solution to keep the 49ers in town, Lennar suggested a new stadium on the Hunters Point Shipyard, surrounded by a dual use parking lot perfect for tailgating and lots of new housing on Candlestick Point to pay for it all.

There was just one problem: part of the land around the stadium at Candlestick is a state park. Hence the need for Prop. G, which seeks to authorize this land swap along with a repeal of bonds authorized in 1997 for a stadium rebuild. As Cohen told the Guardian, "The only legal reason we are going to the voters is Monster Park."

As it happens, voters still won’t know whether the 49ers are staying or leaving when they vote on Props. F and G this June, since the team is waiting until November to find out if Santa Clara County voters will support the financing of a new 49er stadium near Great America.

Either way, Patrick Rump of Literacy for Environmental Justice has serious environmental concerns about Prop. G’s proposed land swap.

"Lennar’s schematic, which builds a bridge over the Yosemite Slough, would destroy a major restoration effort we’re in the process of embarking on with the state Parks [and Recreation Department]," Rump said. "The integrity of the state park would easily be compromised, because of extra people and roads. And a lot of the proposed replacement parks, the pocket parks … don’t provide adequate habitat."

Rump also expressed doubts about the wisdom of trading parcels of state park for land on the shipyard, especially Parcel E-2, which contains the landfill. Overall, Rump said, "We think Lennar and the city need to go back to the drawing board and come up with something more environmentally sound."

John Rizzo of the Sierra Club believes Prop. G does nothing to clean up the shipyard — which city officials are seeking to take over before the federal government finishes its cleanup work — and notes that the initiative is full of vague and noncommittal words like "encourages" that make it unclear what benefits city residents will actually receive.

"Prop. G’s supporters are pushing the misleading notion that if we don’t give away all this land — including a state park — to Lennar, then we won’t get any money for the cleanup," Rizzo said. "But you don’t build first and then get federal dollars for clean up! That’s a really backwards statement."

The "Yes on G" campaign claims its initiative will create "thousands of construction jobs," "offer a new economic engine for the Bayview," and "provide new momentum to win additional federal help to clean up the toxins on the shipyard."

Michael Theriault, head of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades, said his union endorsed the measure and has an agreement with Lennar to have "hire goals," with priority given to union contracts in three local zip codes: 94107, 94124, and 94134.

"There will be a great many construction jobs," Theriault said, though he was less sure about Prop. G’s promise of "8,000 permanent jobs following the completion of the project."

"We endorsed primarily from the jobs aspect," Theriault said. The question of whether the project helps the cleanup effort or turns it into a rush job is also an open question. Even the San Francisco Chronicle, in a January editorial, criticized Newsom, Feinstein, and Pelosi for neglecting the cleanup until "when it seemed likely that the city was about to lose the 49ers."

All three denounced the Chronicle‘s claims, but the truth is that the lion’s share of the $82 million federal allocation would be dedicated to cleaning the 27-acre footprint proposed for the stadium. Meanwhile, the US Navy says it needs at least $500 million to clean the entire shipyard.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi said the city should wait for a full cleanup and criticized the Prop. G plan to simply cap contaminated areas on the shipyard, rather than excavate and remove the toxins from the site.

"That’s like putting a sarcophagus over a toxic wasteland," Mirkarimi told us. "It would be San Francisco’s version of a concrete bunker around Chernobyl."

Cohen of the Mayor’s Office downplays the contamination at the site, telling us that on a scale of one to 10 among the nation’s contaminated Superfund sites, the shipyard "is a three." He said, "the city would assume responsibility for completing the remaining environmental remediation, which would be financed through the Navy."

But those who have watched the city and Lennar bungle development of the asbestos-laden Parcel A (see The corporation that ate San Francisco, 3/14/07) don’t have much confidence in their ability to safely manage a much larger project.

"Who is going to take the liability for any shoddy work and negligence once the project is completed?" Mirkarimi asked.

Lennar has yet to settle with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District over asbestos dust violations at Parcel A, which could add up to $28 million in fines, and investors have been asking questions about the corporation’s mortgage lending operations as the company’s stock value and bond rating have plummeted.

To secure its numerous San Francisco investments, including projects at Hunters and Candlestick points and Treasure Island, Lennar recently got letters of intent from Scala Real Estate Partners, an Irvine-based investment and development group.

Founded by former executives of the Perot Group’s real estate division, Scala plans to invest up to $200 million — and have equal ownership interests — in the projects, which could total at least 17,000 housing units, 700,000 square feet of retail and entertainment, 350 acres of open space, and a new football stadium if the 49ers decide to stay.

Bonner said that, if completed, the agreement satisfies a city requirement that Lennar secure a partner with the financial wherewithal to ensure the estimated $1.4 billion Candlestick Point project moves forward even if the company’s current problems worsen.

Meanwhile, Cohen has cast the vagaries of Prop. G as a positive, referring to its spreadsheet as "a living document, a moving target." Cohen pointed out that if Lennar had to buy the BVHP land, they’d get it with only a 15 percent affordable housing requirement.

"Our objective is to drive the land value to zero by imposing upon the developer as great a burden as possible," Cohen said. "This developer had to invest $500 million of cash, plus financing, and is required to pay for affordable housing, parks, jobs, etc. — the core benefits — without any risk to the city."

But Cohen said the Prop. F alternative means "nothing will be built — until F is repealed." He also refutes claims that without the 49ers stadium, 50 percent affordability is doable.

"Prop G makes it easier to make public funds available by repealing the Prop D bond measure," Cohen explained. "But Prop. G also provides that there will be no general fund financial backing for the stadium, and that the tax increments generated by the development will be used for affordable housing, jobs, and parks."

But for Lennar critics like the Rev. Christopher Mohammad, who has battled the company since the Islamic school he runs was subjected to toxic dust, even the most ambitious promises won’t overcome his distrust for the entity at the center of Prop. G: Lennar.

In a fiery recent sermon at the Grace Tabernacle Community Church, Mohammad recalled the political will that enabled the building of BART in the 1970s. "But when it comes to poor people, you can’t build 50 percent affordable. That will kill the deal," Mohammad observed.

"Lennar is getting 700 prime waterfront acres for free, and then there’ll be tax increment dollars they’ll tap into for the rebuild," he continued. "But you mean you can’t take some of those millions, after all the damages you’ve done? It would be a way to correct the wrong."

Cleaning up the shelter mess

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EDITORIAL Shelters aren’t a solution to homelessness. Everybody knows that; everyone agrees. But in San Francisco the shelter system that was set up as a short-term patch to address the growing number of homeless people on the streets in 1982 has, over a quarter century, become a fixture of city life. And as long as the federal government continues to abandon cities and affordable housing and create poverty, this is not likely to change any time in the immediate future. Even the most ambitious local housing program — and there will be a fairly ambitious one on the November ballot — isn’t going to create an immediate and permanent place for all of the 8,000 or so people in this city who can’t afford a place to live.

So shelters are going to be with us for a while — and it’s inexcusable that the city continues to operate them under such horrible conditions.

As Amanda Witherell reports in this week’s cover story, the shelter network is a bureaucratic nightmare. Clients get bounced all over town, it’s almost impossible to reach any of the shelters by phone, and the directions you have to follow to get a bed are complicated and confusing. Although everyone knows that shelters are now more than temporary housing, it’s hard at some shelters to get a bed for more than one night; lots of homeless people spend four or five hours per day waiting in lines for a shot at a bed (and even after that, some wind up not getting a place to sleep). The shelters — mostly run by nonprofits under city contracts — have the feel of prisons; they are strictly regimented and often unsafe and lack even basic amenities like soap. Clients often have to ask for toilet paper.

In 2006 the city’s Shelter Monitoring Committee found that only 6 of the 19 San Francisco homeless facilities met even basic standards for hygiene and sanitation. Fifty-five percent of shelter clients who participated in a May 2007 survey by the Coalition on Homelessness reported some kind of physical, sexual, or verbal abuse. One-third had no access to information in their native language. Thirty-five percent had nothing to eat.

It’s no surprise that many homeless people would rather sleep in Golden Gate Park — and as long as the abysmal conditions persist, that problem will continue.

The city’s not in the position to create luxury hotels, but it can make the shelters a lot less degrading, dehumanizing, and unpleasant. Sup. Tom Ammiano has already vowed to introduce legislation that would mandate minimal standards of care, and the Board of Supervisors needs to pass a tough bill as soon as possible.

Among the things that need to be addressed:

• Basic public health The Department of Public Health is concerned that the shelters can be breeding grounds for disease, and that’s a serious problem: there have been some close calls with tuberculosis, and bedbugs are a chronic issue. Many of the shelters lack such basic supplies as hand sanitizer, soap, rubber gloves, and clean towels. For just $15,000, public health nurses from the city’s Tom Waddell Health Center, working on a pilot project, were able to make significant inroads in hygiene and sanitation in two shelters. They’re now moving on to attack bedbugs and scabies. That approach should immediately be expanded to every shelter in the city.

• Safety Some of the shelters, particularly the men’s shelters, are lacking in basic security measures. It would be nice to have full-time security staff in every facility, but that might be expensive. At the very least, the staffs need more security and violence-deescalation training, the centers need to have operating and functional locks, and the city needs to mandate that the places are safe enough that clients aren’t afraid to stay there.

• A ridiculous bureaucratic labyrinth and lack of coordination Nobody should have to stand in line for three hours per day just to get a reservation for a shelter bed. Nobody should have to trek across town (on foot or on Muni, without the bus vouchers that the shelters ought to be giving out) from one shelter or homeless service center to another just to find out where to stay. There ought to be a one-stop shop (or a series of them) where a person can check in anytime during the day, find a shelter, line up a bed, get a ticket, and be on his or her way. City officials don’t talk much about this, but many of the shelter residents have jobs; they go to work all day but still can’t afford a place to live in San Francisco. The hoops they have to jump through make the system brutally unfair.

• A lack of reality Mayor Gavin Newsom says he wants to get beyond the shelters, to use them only as entry points into a system that will find treatment, counseling, job training, and permanent housing for all homeless people. We want that too. So does just about everyone who cares about this issue.

But the mayor also talks about getting rid of aggressive panhandling, and he and his supporters complain about the people on the streets who hassle tourists. And nobody seems to want to admit that many of the folks who are typically lumped under the term homeless actually have homes.

The city has managed to lease, renovate, and otherwise make available hundreds of single-room-occupancy rooms, and quite a few formerly homeless people have found long-term residences there. But the mayor’s Care Not Cash policy ensures that most of the modest welfare payments these people get are seized by the city for their housing, leaving them with nowhere near enough to survive. So they panhandle — is anyone surprised?

It may sound radical, but if the city, state, and federal cash grants to people who for whatever reason can’t find work were increased to a level that would support a tolerable lifestyle in one of the world’s most expensive cities, a lot of the quality-of-life problems Newsom bemoans — and that the city spends millions trying to mitigate with law enforcement resources — might go away.

Meanwhile, the shelter residents who do have jobs or who are looking for jobs spend so much of their lives trying to navigate a Byzantine system that they have little in the way of waking hours to improve their economic prospects.

The disaster that is San Francisco’s shelter system is the legacy of many years of public policy that allowed the interests of developers, landlords, and speculators to trump the needs of the city as a whole. The housing crisis isn’t going away tomorrow — but the victims have a right to a basic level of human decency. The supervisors need to make that happen, with dispatch.

Climate change teach-in

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GREEN CITY For Van Jones, going green is not just about buying a Prius, putting a solar panel on a vacation home, or purchasing groceries at Whole Foods, which he calls Whole Paycheck. It’s also about training former gangsters in green-collar jobs, equitably distributing toxic waste sites, and bringing organic produce into urban ghettos.

According to the Oakland activist, who cofounded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (see "Redefining Radicalism," 9/19/06), there is a serious social injustice on the horizon, and the fight against it may just be the next great political movement in the United States.

Speaking Jan. 30 at San Francisco State University’s teach-in on climate change, Jones called on students to be the next great generation by recognizing that the environmental crisis presents the biggest opportunity for poor people and minorities since the New Deal. Today it seems such grandiose statements calling an entire generation to action tend to lack an inspired audience. However, no one could deny Jones was onto something big after the packed crowd in Jack Adams Hall erupted in an ovation after his challenge to students to make history by addressing poverty and the environment together.

Green pathways out of poverty was just one topic discussed during the SFSU segment of "Focus the Nation" — billed as the nation’s largest-ever teach-in, with more than 1,500 schools and universities participating. The nationally coordinated event aimed to create one day of focused discussion on global warming solutions for the US. Throughout the day expert panels at SFSU discussed green efforts in their respective fields with an underlying message of public involvement.

Keynote speaker Michael Glantz of the National Center for Atmospheric Research jumped on the generational bandwagon, predicting the 21st century would be remembered as the climate century. However, Glantz stressed public pressure would be crucial, as lessons learned about the environment are generally not used during policy making. He cited detailed studies conducted in the early 1970s of melting arctic sea ice due to anthropogenic causes.

When asked how he would reply to arguments that humans aren’t causing climate change, Glantz noted the success of the environmental movement in marginalizing these beliefs: "I don’t think we need to spend time now dealing with the skeptics when Exxon and Shell are worried about global warming."

Faculty from the SFSU geography and geosciences departments presented new trends in climate change data and modeling, focusing on predictions for California. The panel reported the state’s average temperature is on the rise. Even with the best estimates for halting global warming, the Sierra Mountains are expected to lose 40 percent of their snowpack over the next 100 years. Agricultural production and quality in the Central Valley are also expected to decline, as some plants will not get the chill period they need.

Geography professor Andrew Oliphant worked with students to create a carbon footprint calculator for attendees to use throughout the day. Oliphant said the calculator was tailor-made specifically for the event so attendees could analyze their daily habits.

Students were also present throughout the event to answer questions on an informative poster display. The posters depicted breakdowns of greenhouse gases, rising sea levels in the Bay Area, and the formation of acid rain.

Erin Rodgers, an environmental advocate with the California Union of Concerned Scientists, discussed green policies at the state level. Rodgers focused on California’s groundbreaking initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a cut of about 30 percent from current levels.

Experts have established detailed plans on how to reach the target reduction, with a large focus on transportation, although the California Air Resources Board has yet to embrace a comprehensive plan that will get anywhere close to the goals it is charged with meeting.

Cal Broomhead, climate programs manager at the San Francisco Department of the Environment, spoke on local green efforts. He praised the city for keeping the same levels of greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 and its continued use of the "Fab 3" composting and recycling program.

Broomhead also stressed the importance of furthering environmental education efforts: "Through education we can get people to adopt pro-green technologies and behaviors. Once you have the last remaining stragglers, then you can require them to participate through law."

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Brad Will and the politics of oil

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MEXICO CITY – Flash back to October 27th, 2006. American photojournalist Brad Will is splayed out on a sidewalk in Oaxaca, Mexico, mortally wounded by the pistoleros of rogue governor Ulisis Ruiz during tumultuous street battles in that southern city. His killers have never been prosecuted.

Now fast forward to this past January 10th. Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the unctuous leader of the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party faction in the Mexican Senate, announces to a gaggle of reporters that the PRI is prepared to back President Felipe Calderon and his right-wing PAN in passing an “energy reform” package that would permit transnational corporations to generate 49% of the nation’s electricity and open PEMEX, the state petroleum monopoly expropriated from its Anglo-American owners in 1938 and nationalized by President Lazaro Cardenas, to such oil titans as Exxon, British Petroleum, and Shell. Beltrones’ personal preference to initiate the proposed “association of private capitals”: Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company which opened itself to private investment back in 1997 and which has extensive experience in deep water drilling.

What is the connection between these two apparently unconnected events? Just this: the cover-up of Brad Wills’ death smoothed the way for the PRI-PAN partnership to privatize PEMEX.

Although his killers were plainly identified as plainclothes police on Ulisis’s payroll, Wills’ inconvenient death was ignored by then-president Vicente Fox despite demands by human rights and journalist protection organizations for a full investigation of the killing, one of 26 perpetrated by Ruiz’s death squads between August and October of 2006. Fox’s successor, Felipe Calderon, followed suit and stonewalled an inquiry into Wills’ murder. Similarly, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico never sought justice for a slain citizen despite the personal pleas of the dead man’s family.

Why such studied indifference?

Because holding Governor Ruiz, a prominent PRIista, accountable for the killing(s) would have upset the burgeoning alliance between the PRI and the PAN to ratify Calderon’s legislative agenda, the most pertinent item of which was “energy reform” i.e. the privatization of PEMEX.

Embassy inaction on Brad Wills’ murder followed the same logic. As U.S. ambassador, Bush crony Tony Garza is charged with representing U.S. interests in Mexico and Washington’s interest in opening up Mexican oil to U.S. transnationals far outweighs its interest in bringing the killers of a freelance anarchist reporter to justice. The U.S. has long contemplated a North American Energy Alliance that would guarantee access to Mexican and Canadian reserves.

To this end, Washington has played an active role in facilitating the impending privatization of Petrolios Mexicanos. Over the past months, U.S. transnationals and their associates in government have orchestrated an extraordinary campaign to hoodwink Mexicans into swallowing the lie that PEMEX is hopelessly broken and must be opened to private capital forthwith for the salvation of the Fatherland.

Last July, ex-Federal Reserve czar Alan Greenspan was beamed into Mexico for a teleconference with the nation’s most exalted business council to deliver an ultimatum: if PEMEX was not fixed quickly, the country faced fiscal crisis. Indeed, the petroleum giant (the 11th largest on the planet) generates 40% of Mexico’s total budget and 100% of a social budget that keeps 70,000,000 Mexicans who live in and around the poverty line, in relative quiescence. By “fixing” PEMEX, Greenspan meant privatizing it.

It should be noted that Alan Greenspan is an expert on fiscal crises – his monetary policies just helped to tripwire such a crisis in his own country, the sub-prime disaster.

The Greenspan game plan was echoed December 13th in a memo issued by the International Monetary Fund urgently counseling legislation to allow private capital into PEMEX before the government went broke. Garza’s embassy chimed in the next day, warning of massive capital flight if the Mexican Congress did not pass Calderon’s “energy reform” package. On December 19th, The Economist, which ironically was founded on the fortune reaped by Anglo oil companies in Mexico that eventually became British Petroleum, opined that “the obvious solution to the disaster of PEMEX is to privatize.” Finally, the U.S. Department of Energy delivered the death knell on January 9th: the lack of investment in PEMEX’s Exploration and Exploitation (PEP) division spelled energy catastrophe – not a good sign for Washington’s North American Energy Alliance strategy. On January 10th, the PRI came on board to back Calderon’s “energy reform.”

Despite the Jeremiads, the putsch for privatization has lost considerable steam globally. In fact, a moderate swing to nationalization seems to be in process. Amidst prognoses of irreparable damage to the Venezuelan economy, Hugo Chavez renationalized sectors of PDVSA, the state oil company, and ran a 12% surge in domestic growth in 2007 in spite of it. Bolivia has renationalized natural gas production and Ecuador is on the brink of doing so. The most successful renationalization has been in Putin’s Russia where Gazoprom and Yukos became major world players overnight.

According to Mexican strategic resource writer Alfredo Jalife, 32% of the world’s petroleum supply is in the hands of private transnationals, 20% is nationalized or in the process of being renationalized, and the rest is held by mixed state-private corporations.

But despite their exaggerated anguish at an energy meltdown if PEMEX is not privatized, the doomsayers do have a point: Petrolios Mexicanos is in deep doo-doo. Daily accidents such as the unquenchable fire that took 21 workers’ lives on a Caribbean oil platform and contaminated surrounding waters last fall, pipeline bombings by the guerrilla Popular Revolutionary Army, and the failure to modernize infrastructure – no new refinery has been built in 20 years – is stark evidence of corporate corrosion.

Despite 100-weak-dollar-a-barrel prices (Mexican light crude tops out around $80 USD these days) that generated $2.3 billion in enhanced revenues during the first ten months of 2007, lack of refining capacity forces PEMEX to shell out $5 billion Yanqui dollars each year to import 40% of its gasoline needs – which is to say that for every $1 of the increased revenues PEMEX takes in, two bucks go out for gas.

Calderon’s solution? The so-called “Gasolinazo”, the President’s gift to the driving public on January 6th, the Day of the Kings (Mexican Christmas), that will increase prices at the pump incrementally each month indefinitely. Increased transportation costs are expected to impact food prices across the board.

But the bad news doesn’t stop there. The big battle over Mexican oil is really a battle over crumbs. If U.S. Department of Energy calculations are on target, Mexico only has 12.9 billion barrels in proven reserves, depletion of which could turn PEMEX into a net importer by 2018 if no new petroleum sources are uncorked before then – although Mexico is the sixth largest international oil producer, it has only 1% of the planet’s proven reserves.

With the Cantarell field in the Sound of Campeche, the magnum star of offshore production that has motored PEMEX since the 1990s, just about tapped out, the clock is ticking. To exacerbate this doomsday scenario, Mexico is pumping out what it has left at a record clip to capitalize on the booming barrel price – PEMEX now produces about 3.2 million barrels daily, fully 1.7 million of which are sent up the Gulf to the U.S., an export platform that is accelerating depletion and subsidizing Washington’s wars around the world.

Given this bleak picture, most experts concur that the only place PEMEX can go to drill for new reserves is deep water, five miles down in the Gulf of Mexico. The only catch is that Petrolios Mexicanos does not have deep water drilling capacity. That’s where Petrobras, as contemplated in the PRI/PAN privatization scheme, would come in handy.

What exactly constitutes privatization? Auctioning off the corporation from the top

to the highest bidder or selling it off piece by piece from the bottom? During 35 years of oil boom and bust, PEMEX has systematically dismantled its Exploration & Exploitation division and handed it over to transnational subcontractors, emphasizes Autonomous National University researcher John Saxe- Fernandez who heads up the UNAM’s Strategic Resources Institute. At the top of Saxe-Fernandez’s list of prominent subcontractors is Halliburton with 159 PEMEX contacts since 2000 worth $1.2 billion USD – Halliburton moved into Mexico in the 1990s during the development of Cantarell when Dick Cheney was CEO.

But subcontracting out choice contracts goes back generations. George Bush pere partnered with PEMEX director Jorge Serrano (who later went to jail) in Zapata Offshore, a drilling outfit that operated in the Sound of Campeche in the 1970s. Today, virtually every major transnational driller has a piece of the Mexican action.

A recent daily La Jornada investigation by energy reporter Israel Rodriguez revealed the signing of a series of secret “pre-privatization” covenants to exploit Mexican fields with Shell (the mysterious “Project Margarita”), Exxon, Petrobras, Nexen (Canada), and StatsOil (Norway.) The contracts, accessed through Mexico’s Freedom of Information Act, contained clauses whose contents cannot be divulged for the next five years.

The PRI/PAN energy scam is currently being hatched in the Mexican Senate’s Energy Commission chaired by Francisco Labastida, a former secretary of energy (as is Calderon) and the PRI’s losing presidential candidate in 2000. Those who have gotten a peek at the details label the energy reform legislation “privatization lite” with foot-in-the-door measures that will allow for the “association of private capital” in such areas as pipelines and refineries. The legislation stops short of amending the Mexican Constitution’s Article 27, which stipulates that the petroleum belongs to the nation.

Skirting a constitutional amendment will deny ammo to AMLO – leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who many believe was swindled out of the presidency in 2006 and who has emerged as the leader of the fight against privatization. This January, Lopez Obrador announced formation of a cross-party Movement In Defense of Petroleum whose battle cry is “Mexico is not for sale!”

The ex-presidential candidate proposes that PEMEX can raise sufficient revenues without opening itself up to private investment by simply cleaning house – the corporation has long been riddled with corruption, bribe-taking, kickbacks and rampant dirty dealing. For decades, the PRI siphoned off millions to finance its electoral campaigns – in 2000, $110 million USD in PEMEX funds were funneled through the gangster-ridden petroleum workers union into Labastida’s campaign coffers, the so-called “PEMEXgate” scandal.

AMLO has also long advocated the construction of three new refineries to offset the escautf8g cost of importing gasoline which he tags “an absurd situation” for the world’s sixth largest oil producer.

In the opposite corner, Lopez Obrador’s archrival Felipe Calderon insists that opening PEMEX to private capital will somehow make Petrolios Mexicanos “more Mexican” (“more productive, more competitive, more Mexicano.”)

“To hand over our natural resources to foreign powers is an act of treason,” AMLO responds, quoting the man who expropriated and nationalized Mexico’s petroleum in 1938, President Lazaro Cardenas. Lopez Obrador’s defense of Mexican oil will be a first test for the grassroots base the leftist has been cultivating since the tainted 2006 election and is sure to frame the next round of his ongoing bout with Calderon and his allies. AMLO, who in the past has been able to mobilize millions, is calling for nationwide protests this March 18th, the 70th anniversary of Cardenas’s expropriation.

Petroleum is a patriotic fluid here. Expropriation of the oil industry from the “extranjeros” (foreigners, literally “strangers”) was the high point of revolutionary nationalism in Mexico. But in a globalized world, the coming battle around the privatization of PEMEX is not just a Mexican matter anymore and, indeed, has far-reaching implications for the future of neo-liberalism in the Americas.

Sprawled in the Oaxaca street, the life blood leaking from him, the last thing Brad Will could have imagined is that in death he would become an accidental pawn to the transnationals’ ambitions to privatize Mexican oil. Tragically, in the end, that may be Wills’ most significant legacy.

“Blindman’s Buff” has opened it lists to new subscribers. Contact the Blindman (his vision is improved) at johnross@igc.org for your lifetime subscription. Warning: there is no way to get off these lists. You will receive BMB until either you or I croak.

Endorsements

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President, Democrat

BARACK OBAMA


This is now essentially a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, and no matter how it comes down, it’s a historic moment: neither of the front-runners for the White House (and by any standard, the Democratic nominee starts off as the front-runner) is a white man. And frankly, the nation could do a lot worse than either President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama.

But on the issues, and because he’s a force for a new generation of political activism, our choice is Obama.

Obama’s life story is inspirational, and his speeches are the stuff of political legend. He can rouse a crowd and generate excitement like no presidential candidate has in many, many years. He has, almost single-handedly, caused thousands of young people to get involved for the first time in a major political campaign.

The cost of his soaring rhetoric is a disappointing lack of specific plans. It can be hard at times to tell exactly what Obama stands for, exactly how he plans to carry out his ambitious goals. His stump speeches are riddled with words like change and exhortations to a new approach to politics, but he doesn’t talk much, for example, about how to address the gap between the rich and the poor, or how to tackle urban crime and poverty, or whether Israel should stop building settlements in the occupied territories.

In fact, our biggest problem with Obama is that he talks as if all the nation needs to do is come together in some sort of grand coalition of Democrats and Republicans, of "blue states and red states." But some of us have no interest in making common cause with the religious right or Dick Cheney or Halliburton or Don Fisher. There are forces and interests in the United States that need to be opposed, defeated, consigned to the dustbin of history, and for all of Obama’s talk of unity, we worry that he lacks the interest in or ability to take on a tough, bloody fight against an entrenched political foe.

Still, when you look at his positions, he’s on the right track. He wants to raise the cap on earnings subject to Social Security payments (right now high earners don’t pay Social Security taxes on income over $97,000 a year). He wants to cut taxes for working-class families and pay for it by letting the George W. Bush tax cuts on the rich expire (that’s not enough, but it’s a start). He wants to double fuel-economy standards. His health care plan isn’t perfect, but it’s about the same as all the Democrats offer.

And he’s always been against the war.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of that. Obama spoke out against the invasion when even most Democrats were afraid to, so he has some credibility when he says he’s going to withdraw all troops within 16 months and establish no permanent US bases in Iraq.

Hillary Clinton has far more extensive experience than Obama (and people who say her years in the White House don’t count have no concept of the role she played in Bill Clinton’s administration). We are convinced that deep down she has liberal instincts. But that’s what’s so infuriating: since the day she won election to the US Senate, Clinton has been trianguutf8g, shaping her positions, especially on foreign policy, in an effort to put her close to the political center. At a time when she could have shown real courage — during the early votes on funding and authorizing the invasion of Iraq — she took the easy way out, siding with President Bush and refusing to be counted with the antiwar movement. She has refused to distance herself from such terrible Bill Clinton–era policies as welfare reform, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and don’t ask, don’t tell. We just can’t see her as the progressive choice.

We like John Edwards. We like his populist approach, his recognition that there are powerful interests running this country that won’t give up power without a fight, and his talk about poverty. In some ways (certainly in terms of campaign rhetoric) he’s the most progressive of the major candidates. It is, of course, a bit of a political act — he was, at best, a moderate Southern Democrat when he served in the Senate. But at least he’s raising issues nobody else is talking about, and we give him immense credit for that. And we’ve always liked Dennis Kucinich, who is the only person taking the right positions on almost all of the key issues.

But Edwards has slid pretty far out of the running at this point, and Kucinich is an afterthought. The choice Californians face is between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And Obama, for all of his flaws, has fired up a real grassroots movement, has energized the electorate, and is offering the hope of a politics that looks forward, not back. On Feb. 5, vote for Barack Obama.

President, Republican

RON PAUL


We have a lot of disagreements with Ron Paul and his libertarian worldview. He opposes the taxes that we need to make civil society function and the government regulations that are essential to protecting the most powerless members of society. From its roots in the Magna Carta and Adam Smith’s economic theories to the Bill of Rights, it’s clear the United States was founded on a social compact that libertarians too often seem to deny. And Paul compounds these ills in the one area in which he departs from the libertarians: he doesn’t support federal abortion rights. He’s been associated with some statements that are racially insensitive (to say the least). He clearly shouldn’t be president.

But he won’t — Paul isn’t going to win the nomination. So it’s worthwhile endorsing him as a protest vote for two reasons. His presence on the ballot serves to show up some of the hypocrisies of the rest of the GOP field — and he is absolutely correct and insightful on one of the most important issues of the day: the war.

Paul is alone among the Republican candidates for president in sounding the alarm that our country is pursuing a dangerous, shortsighted, hypocritical, expensive, and ultimately doomed strategy of trying to dominate the world militarily. He opposed the invasion of Iraq and thinks the US should pull out immediately. It’s immensely valuable to have someone like that in the GOP debates, speaking to the conservative half of our country about why this policy violates the principles they claim to hold dear.

Paul is absolutely correct that if we stopped trying to police the world, ended the war on drugs, and quit negotiating trade deals that favor multinational corporations over American families and workers, we would be a far more free and prosperous nation.

President, Green

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY


We endorsed Ralph Nader for president in 2000, in large part as a protest vote against the neoconservative politics of the Bill Clinton administration (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, welfare "reform," etc.). And Nader’s Green Party campaign had a place (particularly in a state the Democrats were going to win anyway). We’ve never been among those who blame Nader for Al Gore’s loss — Gore earned plenty of blame himself. But four years later we, like a lot of Nader’s allies and supporters, urged him not to run — and he ignored those pleas. Now he may be seeking the Green Party nomination again. Nader hasn’t formally announced yet, but he’s talking about it — which means he still shows no interest in being accountable to anyone. It’s too bad he has to end his political life this way.

Fortunately, there are several other credible Green Party candidates. The best is Cynthia McKinney, the former Georgia congressional representative, who has switched from the Democratic to the Green Party and is seeking a spot on the top of the ticket. McKinney has her drawbacks, but we’ll endorse her.

The real question here is not who would make a better president (that’s not in the cards, of course) but who would do more to build the Green Party and promote the best course for a promising third party that still hasn’t developed much traction as a national force. We’ve been clear for years that the Greens should be working from the grass roots up: the party’s first priority should be electing school board members, community college board members, members of boards of supervisors and city councils. Over time, leaders like Mark Sanchez, Jane Kim, Matt Gonzalez, and Ross Mirkarimi can start competing for mayor’s offices and posts in the State Legislature and Congress. Running a presidential candidate only makes sense as part of a party-building operation. (That’s what Nader did in 2000, and for all the obvious reasons he’s incapable of doing it today.)

But the Greens insist on running candidates for president, so we might as well pick the best one.

McKinney has a lot to offer the Greens. She’s an experienced legislator who has won several tough elections and taken on a lot of tough issues. As an African American woman from the South, she can also broaden the party’s base. She was a solid progressive in Congress, where she was willing to speak out on issues that many of her colleagues ducked (she was, for example, one of the few members to push for an impeachment resolution).

McKinney has her downside — in recent years she’s been flirting with the loony side of the left, getting a bit close to some Sept. 11 conspiracy theories that hurt her credibility (although she’s also made some very good points about the attacks and the lack of a serious investigation into what happened). And some of her supporters have made alarmingly anti-Semitic statements (from which, to her credit, she has attempted to distance herself). But she has to come out now, strongly, to denounce those sorts of comments and show that she can build a real coalition.

With those (serious) reservations, we’ll give her the nod.

Proposition 91 (use of gas tax)

NO


Prop. 91 is essentially an effort to ensure that revenue from the state’s gas tax goes only to roads and highways. It’s a moot point anyway: Proposition 1A, which passed last year, did the same thing, and now even proponents of 91 are urging a No vote.

But we’re going to take this opportunity to reiterate our opposition to Prop. 1A, Prop. 91, and any other ridiculous effort to restrict the use of gasoline tax revenues.

It should be clear to everyone at this point that the widespread overuse of automobiles is having far bigger impacts on California than just wear and tear on the roads. Cars are the biggest single cause of global warming, and they kill and injure more Californians than guns do, causing enormous costs that are borne by all of us. Driving a car is expensive for society, and drivers ought to be paying some of those costs. That should mean extra gas taxes and a reinstatement of the vehicle license fee to previous levels (and extra surcharges for those who drive Hummers and other especially wasteful, dangerous vehicles). That money ought to go to the state General Fund so California doesn’t have to close state parks and slash spending on schools and social services, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing.

Proposition 92 (community college funding)

YES


Prop. 92 is another example of how desperate California educators are and how utterly dysfunctional the state’s budget process has become.

The measure is complicated, but it amounts to a plan to guarantee community colleges more money — a total of about $300 million a year — and includes provisions to cut the cost of attending the two-year schools. Those are good things: community colleges serve a huge number of students — about 10 times as many as the University of California system — many of whom come from lower-income families who can’t afford even a small fee increase. And, of course, as the state budget has gotten tighter, community college fees have gone up in the past few years — and as a result, attendance has dropped.

Part of the way Prop. 92 cuts fees is by divorcing community college funding from K–12 funding — and that’s created some controversy among teachers. Current state law requires a set percentage of California spending (about 40 percent) to go to K–12 and community college education, but there’s no provision to give more money to the community colleges when enrollment at those institutions grows faster than K–12 enrollment.

Some teachers fear that Prop. 92 could lead to decreased funds for K–12, and that’s a real concern. In essence, this measure would add $300 million to the state budget, and it includes no specific funding source. This worries us. In theory, the legislature and the governor ought to agree that education funding matters and find the money by raising taxes; in practice, this could set up more competition for money between different (and entirely worthy) branches of the state’s public education system — not to mention other critical social services.

But many of the same concerns were voiced when Prop. 98 was on the ballot, and that measure probably saved public education in California. The progressives on the San Francisco Board of Education all support Prop. 92, and so do we. Vote yes.

Proposition 93 (term limits)

YES


This is pathetic, really. The term-limits law that voters passed in 1990 has been bad news, shifting more power to the governor and ensuring that the State Assembly and the State Senate will be filled with people who lack the experience and institutional history to fight the Sacramento lobbyists (who, of course, have no term limits). But the legislature isn’t a terribly popular institution, and the polls all show that it would be almost impossible to simply repeal term limits. So the legislature — led by State Assembly speaker Fabian Núñez, who really, really wants to keep his job — has proposed a modification instead.

Under the current law, a politician can serve six years — three terms — in the assembly and eight years — two terms — in the senate. Since most senators are former assembly members, that’s a total of 14 years any one person can serve in the legislature.

Prop. 93 would cut that to 12 years — but allow members to serve them in either house. So Núñez, who will be termed out this year, could serve six more years in the assembly (but would then be barred from running for the senate). Senators who never served in the assembly could stick around for three terms.

That’s fine. It’s a bit better than what we have now — it might bring more long-term focus to the legislature and eliminate some of the musical-chairs mess that’s brought us the Mark Leno versus Carole Migden bloodbath.

But it’s sad that the California State Legislature, once a model for the nation, has been so stymied by corruption that the voters don’t trust it and the best we can hope for is a modest improvement in a bad law. Vote yes.

Propositions 94, 95, 96, and 97 (Indian gambling compacts)

NO


We supported the original law that allowed Indian tribes to set up casinos, and we have no regrets: that was an issue of tribal sovereignty, and after all the United States has done to the tribes, it seemed unconscionable to deny one of the most impoverished populations in the state the right to make some money. Besides, we’re not opposed in principle to gambling.

But this is a shady deal, and voters should reject it.

Props. 94–97 would allow four tribes — all of which have become very, very wealthy through gambling — to dramatically expand the size of their casinos. The Pechanga, Morongo, Sycuan, and Agua Caliente tribes operate lucrative casinos in Southern California, spend a small fortune on lobbying, and convinced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to give them permission to create some of the largest casinos in the nation. Opponents of this agreement have forced the issue onto the ballot.

The tribes say the deals will bring big money into the state coffers, and it’s true that more gambling equals more state revenue. But the effective tax rate on the slot machines (and this is all about slot machines, the cash engines of casinos) would be as little as 15 percent — chump change for a gambling operation. And none of the other tribes in the state, some of which are still desperate for money, would share in the bounty.

The big four tribes refuse to allow their workers to unionize. While we respect tribal sovereignty, the state still has the right to limit the size of casinos, and if the tribes want the right to make a lot more money, they ought to be willing to let their workers, not all of them Indians, share in some of the rewards. We’re talking billions of dollars a year in revenue here; paying a decent salary is hardly beyond the financial ability of these massive operations.

The governor cut this deal too fast and gave away too much. If the tribes want to expand their casinos, we’re open to allowing it — but the state, the workers, and the other tribes deserve a bigger share of the revenue. Vote no on 94-97.

Proposition A (neighborhood parks bond)

YES


This $185 million bond has the support of a broad coalition of local politicians and activists, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and every member of the Board of Supervisors. It would put a dent in the city’s serious backlog of deferred maintenance in the park system.

The measure would allocate $117.4 million for repairs and renovations of 12 neighborhood parks, selected according to their seismic and safety needs as well as their usage levels. It would also earmark $11.4 million to replace and repair freestanding restrooms, which, the Recreation and Park Department assures us, will be kept open seven days a week.

The bond also contains $33.5 million for projects on Port of San Francisco land, including a continuous walkway from Herons Head Park to Pier 43 and new open spaces at regular intervals along the eastern waterfront. While some argue that the Port should take care of its own property, it’s pretty broke — and there’s a growing recognition that the city’s waterfront is a treasure, that open space should be a key component of its future, and that it doesn’t really matter which city agency pays for it. In fact, this bond act would provide money to reclaim closed sections of the waterfront and create a Blue Greenway trail along seven miles of bay front.

One of the more questionable elements in this bond is the $8 million earmarked for construction and reconstruction of city playfields — which includes a partnership with a private foundation that wants to install artificial turf. There’s no question that the current fields are in bad repair and that users of artificial turf appreciate its all-weather durability. But some people worry about the environmental impact of the stuff, which is made from recycled tires, while others wonder if this bond will end up giving control of 7 percent of our parkland to the sons of Gap founder Don Fisher (their City Fields Foundation is the entity contributing matching funds for city-led turf conversions). Although the Rec and Park Department has identified 24 sites for such conversions, none can take place without the Board of Supervisors’ approval — and the supervisors and the Rec and Park Commission needs to make it clear that if neighbors don’t want the artificial turf, it won’t be forced on them.

Prop. A also earmarks $5 million for trail restoration and $5 million for an Opportunity Fund, from which all neighborhoods can leverage money for benches and toilets through in-kind contributions, sweat equity, and noncity funds.

And it includes $4 million for park forestry and $185,000 for audits.

With a 2007 independent analysis identifying $1.7 billion in maintenance requirements, this is little more than a start, and park advocates need to be looking for other, ongoing revenue sources. But we’ll happily endorse Prop. A.

Proposition B (deferred retirement for police officers)

YES


We’ve always taken the position that relying exclusively on police officers to improve public safety is as useless as simply throwing criminals behind bars — it’s only part of the solution and will never work as an answer all on its own.

But we’re also aware that the city is suffering a dramatic shortage of police officers; hundreds are expected to retire within a few short years, and those figures aren’t being met by an equal number of enrollees at the academy.

So we’re supporting Prop. B, even if it’s yet another mere stopgap measure the police union has dragged before voters, and even though the San Francisco Police Officers Association is often hostile to attempted law enforcement reforms and is never around when progressives need support for new revenue measures.

Prop. B would allow police officers who are at least 50 years of age and who have served for at least 25 years to continue working for three additional years with their regular pay and benefits while the pension checks they’d have otherwise received collect in a special account with an assured annual 4 percent interest rate.

The POA promises Prop. B will be cost neutral to taxpayers, and the city controller will review the program in three years to ensure that remains the case. Also at the end of three years, the Board of Supervisors, with a simple majority vote, could choose to end or extend it.

POA president Gary Delagnes added during an endorsement interview that department staffers in San Francisco who reach retirement age simply continue working in other police jurisdictions. If that’s the case, we might as well keep them here.

No other city employees are eligible for such a scheme, which strikes us as unfair. And frankly, one of the main reasons the city can’t hire police officers is the high cost of living in San Francisco — so if the POA is worried about recruitment, the group needs to support Sup. Chris Daly’s affordable-housing measure in November.

But we’ll endorse Prop. B.

Proposition C (Alcatraz Conversion Project)

NO


We understand why some people question why a decaying old prison continues to be a centerpiece of Bay Area tourism. A monument to a system that imprisoned people in cold, inhumane conditions doesn’t exactly mesh with San Francisco values.

But the Alcatraz Conversion Project, which proposes placing a half–golf ball–like Global Peace Center atop the Rock, is a wacky idea that looks and sounds like a yuppie tourist retreat and does little to address the island’s tortured past. People don’t have to support everything with peace in the title.

The proposal includes a white domed conference center for nonviolent conflict resolution, a statue of St. Francis, a labyrinth, a medicine wheel, and an array of what proponents call "architecturally advanced domed Artainment multimedia centers."

We agree with the ideal of dedicating the island to the Native Americans who fished and collected birds’ eggs from this once guano-covered rock for thousands of years and whose descendants carried out a bold occupation at the end of the 1960s. But this proposal seems based on wishful thinking, not fiscal or environmental realities.

The plan is backed by the Global Peace Foundation, which is a branch of the San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, a Mill Valley nonprofit founded by Marin resident and Light Party founder Da Vid. It’s just goofy. Vote no.

Next week: Alameda County endorsements.

Year in Music: Long walk home

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Years ago I ended up at a San Francisco Water Department dinner with my father and an old neighborhood friend, eating in the back hall of a half-century-old Italian restaurant in the Excelsior. The room spilled over with thick-armed men who were union, white, and not bad-off and from whom I learned a thing or two about old San Francisco family names and accents that tell you if someone is from the Richmond, the old Castro, or Balboa. It was a return to the blue-collar ‘Frisco that I was raised in: a posthippie, pre-dot-com city with a ubiquitous — and at one time iconic — KFOG, 104.5 FM, playlist composed of harder rockers by the Stones, Creedence, and the Beatles. My earliest memories of the city are tied to those songs, moaning from tiny car speakers, rattling empty cans of Bud, and wafting over garages that smelled of grease.

Yet there was one member of this blue-collar pantheon I could never get too close to. He was too bombastic. His character was too huge. Even before ingesting punk rock ideology via Maximumrocknroll and Epicenter, I felt in opposition to the stadium and the spectacle. Somehow I had internalized a belief that the Boss was my enemy.

Yet this year I found myself buying Magic (Sony), Bruce Springsteen’s latest album, literally on sight. My teenage self would have been horrified to know that at 30 I would be purchasing a Springsteen record not in spite of the E Street Band but because of it, and that after listening to it again and again, my greatest criticism would be that it has too few Clarence Clemons sax solos. The truth is that I’ve moved well past being appreciative of the man and into the realm of the fan — the kind who marks his Slingshot planner with the date and time tickets go on sale for Springsteen’s latest tour.

As with many young men with elitist tastes, it was Nebraska (Sony, 1982) that broke me. With its high-contrast cover, four-track production, and the slap-back reverb echoing of Suicide, the album suggested an almost punk quality, and it subverted all of my assumptions about Springsteen’s gross theatrics. Here was a serious songwriter with compassion for working people, concern for their dignity, and a subtle hint of darkness. Suddenly, I was listening, and, as I began to discover, so were my friends.

What surprised me most was the nonlinearity and consistency of his politics. Springsteen isn’t partisan, pro-union, antiwar, or above it all. He’s for ordinary people and their battles with life, injustice, and the institutions that seem set on killing their dreams, if not destroying the dreamers. It turns out that "Born in the U.S.A." isn’t a nationalist anthem but an indictment. He takes on police, poverty, and racism with "American Skin (41 Shots)," whose title pointedly refers to the slaying of Amadou Diallo by the New York Police Department. Springsteen is a humanist who never wanted to choose sides in the process of choosing between right and wrong. Perhaps for good reason — it’s hard not to wonder whether Clear Channel radio stations’ boycott of Magic isn’t linked to his fateful decision to openly oppose George W. Bush during the 2004 election.

My slow-burning appreciation for Springsteen’s moral and political iconoclasm wasn’t what really set my obsession with him into high gear. It was the unexpected but inevitable emotional connection that grew. Before I knew it, I was sitting in the dark listening to The River (Sony, 1980) and crying to its titular masterpiece. Conversion is strange, and when a person goes from being outside the church pews to singing in the choir it’s a hard thing to explain to anyone. I can listen to "Atlantic City," "The Promised Land," or even Magic‘s "Long Walk Home" and feel the agony of every person who’s ever loved or lost. I realize I’m willing to give up being aesthetically correct, intellectually above it all, and emotionally safe just to have something I can share with people who seem to live such different lives. Certainly it’s worth it to be transported back home, which makes Magic less like a throwback and more like a time machine. *

TOP 5 MUSIC TOPPERS


1. Top return to shitty form: Siltbreeze

After many years languishing in the land of the giant question marks, Philly scuzz-and-fuzz merchants Siltbreeze not only have begun releasing new records but also happen to be releasing some of the best records in the American (and Australian?!) underground. Harry Pussy, Charlambides, and the Dead C meet US Girls, Ex-Cocaine, and xNoBBQx.

2. Top new band from my new hometown, Portland, Ore.: Eat Skull

What we’ve got is ear-bleeding garage punk that makes up for a lack of speed with a heavy hand on the treble knob. Presented by members of the Hospitals, Gang Wizard, and Hale Zukas, this is the kind of pop violence that hasn’t hurt this good since Henry’s Dress.

3. Top new band from my old hometown, Oakland: Zeroth

Just when I thought I couldn’t be surprised by anything anymore. A trio of smarter than average weirdos, they’ve produced the kind of strangeness that lends itself to nonsense descriptors like "electric ovarian space prog." My butt shook.

4. Top trend: pop noise albums

Though this is really a trend that started a few years ago with records like Burning Star Core’s The Very Heart of the World (Thin Wrist, 2005) and Prurient’s Black Vase (Load, 2005), 2007 saw some of America’s noise heavyweights releasing major statements with actual production values. Mouthus, John Wiese, and Religious Knives all brought great records, but perhaps most startling were the sweet clarity and depth of Sighting’s Through the Panama (Load/Ecstatic Peace).

5. Top label A&R: Southern Lord

They’ve made a pretty clean sweep of the best of left-field cult metal: OM, Wolves in the Throne Room, Velvet Cacoon, Abruptum, and Striborg. My only question is, where’s WOLD?

For more from Saloman, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Young journos doomed to poverty and pink slips

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axe4.jpg

Cub reporters are finding it increasingly difficult to climb out of bed each day.

The pay sucks, everyone’s eager to inform you of the real story you’re failing to cover, and no matter how many late nights you put in, opportunities for advancement throughout the biz are slimming down with every new round of announced layoffs.

Spend each waking moment learning how to navigate Byzantine government bureaucracies so you can write a few cool stories, and the thanks you’ll get in return is the axe to help save expenses in the short term for the paper’s media parent. Here’s what management might say these days as an explanation:

“We are not trying to make any other statement here other than it is a competitive world out there and we are doing what we can to make sure we are putting out an excellent paper in the communities we serve.”

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

OK: a 26-year-old German exchange student was stabbed in the Outer Sunset two weeks ago by a man who appeared to be homeless. It was a terrible incident, an awful crime; we’ll all stipulate that. And although C.W. Nevius, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, splashed it all over the front page of the Sunday paper Dec. 2, it really shouldn’t have anything to do with how the city sets homeless policy.

But it’s got me thinking.

Nevius is apparently shocked that there’s been a sudden increase in the number of homeless people living in the Sunset. I could have told him and the mayor and the police department a month ago that this was going to happen.

See, thanks to a series of Nevius columns about homeless encampments in Golden Gate Park, Mayor Gavin Newsom got election-year tough this fall and created special teams to go into the park and roust the residents. The mayor, of course, said that all he wanted was to get people into shelters, to get them treatment, to provide them the support that he insists his administration is delivering.

But the fact is, there aren’t enough decent places for all of these people to live. Some day, I still believe, the people in San Francisco (and the people who run the country and the state) will come to their senses and realize that it’s entirely possible to end urban poverty, but that it will take big chunks of money, multiple billions of dollars, and that the wealthy people who like to complain about the folks on the streets will have to pay higher taxes to make it happen. We live in a rich city and a rich country; we can afford to build housing and create jobs and fund welfare programs. We just don’t want to — because we’re Americans and we’ve been told for a couple of generations now that we don’t have to sacrifice for social progress.

In the meantime, no law-enforcement crackdown or Care Not Cash program or shelter system is going to end homelessness in San Francisco. There are going to be people living on the streets because they can’t afford to pay rent on even a nasty single room and they don’t want to deal with the rules and structure of the shelter system.

And I have to wonder:

Weren’t we all better off when we let them sleep in the park?

I know that’s not a terribly satisfying approach to public policy; I know there were and are problems (dirty needles, human waste, befouling of valuable and rare public space) associated with the camps. I know that in theory nobody should be camping in Golden Gate Park; as one city resident reminded me at a neighborhood forum not long ago, the park isn’t a wilderness — it’s a garden.

But nobody should be sleeping in doorways or on sidewalks or in makeshift shelters in industrial areas either. I refer you to paragraph five above.

I ask you (and Newsom and Nevius): where are these people supposed to sleep? No, the park isn’t a home, but a camp hidden in a rarely used corner is more of a home than a bed in a nasty, crowded shelter where you have no rights at all, not even the right to come and go when you want. I know where I’d rather sleep.

Maybe, in the spirit of harm reduction, we should just leave the park campers alone.

City Hall’s budget myopia

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom goes before the TV cameras and announces, grimly, that the city faces a massive budget deficit ($229 million) and all departments will have to tighten their belts. There’s an immediate City Hall hiring freeze, and every agency has to prepare for budget reductions of as much as 13 percent. Things are bleak, the mayor insists, and everyone in the city should be prepared for service cuts.

If it feels like you’ve heard this song before, you have. It happens almost every year, and it’s been that way since the 1980s. And it’s not going to get any better until the city takes a hard look at how it brings in revenue and how that matches annual expenses. Before everyone starts lining up behind the mayor’s budget cuts, that’s what the supervisors need to do.

It’s still early in the budget cycle, and the shortfall numbers are still tentative. So the deficit is really a moving target, and it’s way too soon for anyone to start talking about specific numbers for specific cuts. It’s also entirely possible that the doom-and-gloom budget talk is aimed in part at derailing efforts by Sup. Chris Daly to put a charter amendment on the June 2008 ballot that would set aside $30 million per year for affordable housing.

But we’ll stipulate that the numbers aren’t good and that once again the city will have an unpleasant budget season with worthy causes, organizations, and agencies fighting one another over small bits of available money.

It’s also clear that Newsom’s first response to the problem is entirely wrong. "Although he wants to trim the fat," Newsom’s spokesperson, Nathan Ballard, told reporters, "the mayor made it abundantly clear he doesn’t want to see a reduction in people sweeping streets or police officers walking beats."

In other words, it’s fine if poor people can’t get treated at San Francisco General Hospital or mental health and substance abuse services get eliminated or funds for homeless housing disappear — but the streets will still be squeaky-clean. And for the record, the mayor resisted all efforts to get cops to walk beats and was only forced into approving it after the supervisors overrode his veto.

The hiring freeze is a gimmick: you can’t possibly run an operation the size and complexity of San Francisco city government with critical positions unfilled. What’s actually happened is that Newsom told department heads they can’t hire anyone without getting approval from his office first. So in effect, Newsom has given himself a direct veto over all personnel decisions at City Hall. He’ll simply make sure that the jobs he wants filled and the agencies he wants to continue operating properly will be spared, and others will get squeezed.

It’s a way to set policy without ever publicly discussing it, a way to shift money around without public hearings or input from the supervisors. It’s not a way to solve budget problems.

In fact, balancing San Francisco’s books — now and next year and the year after that and into the future — requires something that’s in short supply at the Mayor’s Office: direct and honest communication.

Here’s the problem: San Francisco, because it’s a city and a county, does a lot more than most other municipalities. And because it’s a city with active groups pushing for humane policies, it’s a city that tries to provide services that ought be paid for by the federal or state governments. In a rational system, San Francisco wouldn’t have to come up with $30 million per year for affordable housing; billions of dollars would be coming out of Washington DC to address poverty, homelessness, and the housing crunch in American cities. San Francisco shouldn’t be setting aside cash from the General Fund for the public schools; the state of California ought to be funding the schools at a level that would make local support unnecessary. And wealthy people in the United States (including in California and San Francisco) would be paying higher taxes to fund those things.

But that’s not the real world. Right now San Francisco has to find local money for pressing needs — and the city is both unable and unwilling to raise that revenue from its wealthiest residents and businesses. So the city budget is perpetually out of whack.

There are only two choices, really: the city can stop trying to do what the feds and state won’t, can back down on its commitment to something resembling a livable community and some form of social justice — or the folks at City Hall can start talking seriously about bringing in another $250 million per year in revenue.

It’s tough to raise taxes in a California city; state law sets high barriers. But it’s not impossible, and if the mayor and the supervisors came up with and campaigned for a comprehensive and progressive overhaul of the city’s tax system — with the goal of making the local rich people who have benefited from the George W. Bush tax cuts pay their fair share — San Francisco could get out of these constant and painful budget problems.

We’re getting sick of waiting.

An Appeal to Barack Obama

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“The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam, which means that either you’re a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you’re a Tom Hayden Democrat and you’re suspicious of any military action. And that’s just not my framework.” – Sen. Barack Obama.

Barack, I thought Hillary Clinton was known as the Great Triangulator, but you are learning well. The problem with setting up false polarities to position yourself in the “center”, however, is that it’s unproductive both politically and intellectually.

Politically, it is a mistake because there last time I looked there were a whole lot more “Tom Hayden Democrats” voting in the California primary and, I suspect, around the country, than “‘Scoop’ Jackson Democrats.” In fact, they are your greatest potential base, aside from African-American voters, in a multi-candidate primary.

More disturbing is what happens to the mind by setting up these polarities. To take a “centrist” position, one calculates the equal distance between two “extremes.” It doesn’t matter if one “extreme” is closer to the truth. All that matters is achieving the equidistance. This means the presumably “extreme” view is prevented from having a fair hearing, which would require abandoning the imaginary center. And it invites the “extreme” to become more “extreme” in order to pull the candidate’s thinking in a more progressive direction. The process of substantive thinking is corroded by the priority of political positioning.

I have been enthused by the crowds you draw, by the excitement you instill in my son and daughter-in-law, by the seeds of inspiration you plant in our seven-year old [biracial] kid. I love the alternative American narrative you weave on the stump, one in which once-radical social movements ultimately create a better America step by step. I very much respect your senior advisers like David Axelrod, who figured out a way to elect Harold Washington mayor of Chicago. You are a truly global figure in this age of globalization.

But as the months wear on, I see a problem of the potential being squandered. Hillary Clinton already occupies the political center. John Edwards holds the populist labor/left. And that leaves you with a transcendent vision in search of a constituency.

Your opposition to the Iraq War could have distinguished you, but it became more parsed than pronounced. All the nuance might please the New York Times’ Michael Gordon, who helped get us into this madness in the first place, but the slivers of difference appear too narrow for many voters to notice. Clinton’s plan, such as it is, amounts to six more years of thousands of American troops in Iraq [at least]. Your proposal is to remove combat troops by mid-2010, while leaving thousands of advisers trying to train a dysfunctional Iraqi army, and adding that you might re-invade to stave off ethnic genocide. Lately, you have said the mission of your residual American force would be more limited than the Clinton proposal. You would commit trainers, for example, only if the Iraqi government engages in reconciliation and abandons sectarian policing. You would not embed American trainers in the crossfire of combat. This nuancing avoids the tough and obvious question of what to do with the sectarian Frankenstein monster we have funded, armed and trained in the Baghdad Interior Ministry. The Jones Commission recently proposed “scrapping” the Iraqi police service. Do you agree? The Center for American Progress, directed by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, is urging that all US troops, including trainers, be redeployed this year. Why do you disagree? Lately you have taken advantage of Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness on Iran to oppose bombing that country without Congressional authorization. But you carefully decline to say whether you would support bombing Iran when and if the time comes.

This caution has a history:

– you were against the war in 2002 because it was a “dumb war”,
but you had to point out that you were not against all wars, without
exactly saying what wars you favored;

– then you visited Iraq for 36 hours and “could only marvel at
the ability of our government to essentially erect entire cities
within hostile territory”;

– then as the quagmire deepened, you cloaked yourself in the
bipartisan mantle of the Baker-Hamilton Study Group, which advocated
leaving thousands of American troops in Iraq to fight terrorism, train
the Iraqis until they “stand up”, and sundry other tasks of
occupation;

Perhaps your national security advisers are getting to you when it should be the other way around. Their expertise is not in the politics of primaries. If anything, they reject the of populist peace pressure influencing elite national security decisions. The result is a frustration towards all the Democratic candidates for what the Center for American Progress has recently called “strategic drift.” The political result is the danger of returning to John Kerry’s muffled message in 2004. The policy result may be a total security disaster for our country, draining our young soldiers’ blood and everyone’s taxes on the continuing degradation of our national honor in a war which cannot be won.

Just for the record, let me tell you my position on Iraq. I think the only alternative is to begin a global diplomatic peace offensive starting with a commitment to withdraw all our troops as rapidly as possible. That is the only way to engage the world, including the Iraqi factions, in doing something about containing the crises of refugees, reconciliation and reconstruction. It means negotiating with Iran rather than escautf8g to a broader war. If you want to “turn a new page”, it should not be about leaving the Sixties behind. It will be about leaving behind the superpower fantasies of both the neo-conservatives and your humanitarian hawks. And yes, it is to be “suspicious”, as Eisenhower and John Kennedy came to be suspicious, of the advice of any Wise Men or security experts who advocated the military occupation of Iraq. Is that position as extreme as your rhetoric assumes?

Your problem, if I may say so out loud, and with all respect, is that the deepest rationale for your running for president is the one that you dare not mention very much, which is that you are an African-American with the possibility of becoming president. The quiet implication of your centrism is that all races can live beyond the present divisions, in the higher reality above the dualities. You may be right. You see the problems Hillary Clinton encounters every time she implies that she wants to shatter all those glass ceilings and empower a woman, a product of the feminist movement, to be president? Same problem. So here’s my question: how can you say let’s “turn the page” and leave all those Sixties’ quarrels behind us if we dare not talk freely in public places about a black man or a woman being president? Doesn’t that reveal that on some very deep level that we are not yet ready to “turn the page”?

When you think about it, these should be wonderful choices, not forbidden topics. John Edwards can’t be left out either, for his dramatic and, once again, unstated role as yet another reformed white male southerner seeking America’s acceptance, like Carter, Clinton and Gore before him. Or Bill Richardson trying to surface the long-neglected national issues of Latinos. I think these all these underlying narratives, of blacks, women, white southerners and la raza – excuse me, Hispanic-Americans – are far more moving, engaging and electorally-important than the dry details of policy.

What I cannot understand is your apparent attempt to sever, or at least distance yourself, from the Sixties generation, though we remain your single greatest supporting constituency. I can understand, I suppose, your need to define yourself as a American rather than a black American, as if some people need to be reassured over and over. I don’t know if those people will vote for you.

You were ten years old when the Sixties ended, so it is the formative story of your childhood. The polarizations that you want to transcend today began with life-and-death issues that were imposed on us. No one chose to be “extreme” or “militant” as a lifestyle preference. It was an extreme situation that produced us. On one side were armed segregationists, on the other peaceful black youth. On one side were the destroyers of Vietnam, on the other were those who refused to
submit to orders. On the one side were those keeping women in inferior roles, on the other were those demanding an equal rights amendment. On one side were those injecting chemical poisons into our rivers, soils, air and blood streams, on the other were the defenders of the natural world. On one side were the perpetrators of big money politics, on the other were keepers of the plain democratic tradition. Does anyonebelieve those conflicts are behind us?

I can understand, in my old age, someone wanting to dissociate from the extremes to which some of us were driven by the times. That seems to be the ticket to legitimacy in the theater of the media and cultural gatekeepers. I went through a similar process in 1982 when I ran for the legislature, reassuring voters that I wasn’t “the angry young man that I used to be.” I won the election, and then the Republicans objected to my being seated anyway! Holding the idea that the opposites of the Sixties were equally extreme or morally equivalent is to risk denying where you came from and what made your opportunities possible. You surely understand that you are one of the finest descendants of the whole Sixties generation, not some hybrid formed by the clashing opposites of that time. We want to be proud of the role we may have played in all you have become, and not be considered baggage to be discarded on your ascent. You recognize this primal truth when you stand on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, basking in the glory of those who were there when you were three years old. But you can’t have it both ways, revering the Selma march while trying to “turn the page” on the past.

This brings me back to why you want to stand in the presumed center against the “Tom Hayden Democrats.” Are you are equally distant from the “George McGovern Democrats.”, and the “Jesse Jackson Democrats”? How about the “Martin Luther King Democrats”, the “Cesar Chavez Democrats”, the “Gloria Steinem Democrats”? Where does it end?

What about the “Bobby Kennedy Democrats”? I sat listening to you last year at an RFK human rights event in our capital. I was sitting behind Ethel Kennedy and several of her children, all of whom take more progressive stands than anyone currently leading the national Democratic Party. They were applauding you, supporting your candidacy, and trying to persuade me that you were not just another charismatic candidate but the one we have been waiting for.

Will you live up to the standard set by Bobby Kennedy in 1968? He who sat with Cesar Chavez at the breaking of the fast, he who enlisted civil rights and women activists in his crusade, who questioned the Gross National Product as immoral, who dialogued with people like myself about ending the war and poverty? Yes, Bobby appealed to cops and priests and Richard Daley too, but in 1968 he never distanced himself from the dispossessed, the farmworkers, the folksingers, the war resisters, nor the poets of the powerless. He walked among us.

The greatest gift you have been given by history is that as the elected tribune of a revived democracy, you could change America’s dismal role in the world. Because of what you so eloquently represent, you could convince the world to give America a new hearing, even a new respect. There are no plazas large enough for the crowds that would listen to your every word, wondering if you are the one the whole world is waiting for. They would not wait for long, of course. But they would passionately want to give you the space to reset the American direction.

What is the risk, after all? If “think globally, act locally” ever made any sense, this is the time, and you are the prophet. If you want to be mainstream, look to the forgotten mainstream. You don’t even have to leave the Democratic Party. It’s time to renew the best legacy of the Good Neighbor policy of Roosevelt before it dissolved into the Cold War, the Strangelove priesthood, the CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala, the sordid Bay of Pigs, the open graves of Vietnam. It’s time to renew the best legacy of the New Deal before it became Neo-Liberalism, and finally achieve the 1948 Democratic vision of national health care.

May you – and Hillary too – live up to the potential, the gift of the past, prepared for you in the dreams not only of our fathers, but of all those generations with hopes of not being forgotten.

Carbon indulgences

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Airlines from Virgin Blue to Quantas have been touting new ecofriendly programs under which passengers paralyzed by enviroguilt over all of those jet-fueled carbon dioxide emissions can pay an extra carbon offset fee for tickets. The money these passengers pay — sometimes as little as $1 — is supposed to go to renewable energy or unspecified green causes and therefore make airline travel carbon neutral.

Carbon offset fees may be new, but the underlying notion goes back to the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church sold wealthy people indulgences to offset the spiritual cost of their sins and assure a place for them in heaven. And yet at least the kids in 1380 knew that indulgences were bullshit. Geoffrey Chaucer’s classic work The Canterbury Tales, written in the late 1300s, makes fun of the thoroughly corrupt pardoner character, a bombastic weirdo who constantly tries to sell everybody official-looking papers that would pardon them for their sins. Chaucer was just one of many thinkers at the time who criticized the idea that any sin can be forgiven with a little gold.

Polluting the environment isn’t a sin in the Christian sense, and yet carbon offset fees are clearly indulgences for a modern, scientific age.

I don’t mean to say that money doesn’t help ecocauses. But the problem is far more complicated than we want to believe. Our planet is in such sorry shape partly because humans are trying to better themselves. China is industrializing in order to make its citizens richer, but last week the Chinese National Population and Family Planning Commission published a report showing that environmental pollution from coal mining has caused the incidence of birth defects to jump 40 percent in the past six years.

There’s no carbon offset price you could pay to fix that. Nor is there an easy way to prevent such disasters from happening in the future if most of the world agrees that industrialization is the road to wealth. Do we use our carbon indulgence money to fund Chinese populations’ return to preindustrial life, thus dooming that nation to a second-class economic status? Perhaps we could use our money to fund education that teaches Chinese kids about alternative energy. But what kind of energy will they use in their classrooms while waiting for scientists to invent something that combusts cleanly and renewably forever?

Preservationist Marc Ancrenaz and his colleagues get it right in a recent article for PloS Biology in which they argue that preserving biodiversity must go hand in hand with eradicating poverty. "Most traditional conservation efforts were typically designed to exclude human residents," Ancrenaz’s group writes. "This failure to consider the interests of local communities has resulted in a general lack of support for conservation and subsequent degradation of protected areas." In other words, if you don’t help the people in a region, it doesn’t matter how many carbon offsets you buy — the area will still suffer.

Ancrenaz discusses two novel preservation programs that incorporate community development in their biodiversity agendas: the Kinabatangan Orang-utan Conservation Project in Borneo and the Tree Kangaroo Preservation Program in Papua New Guinea. Both programs train and hire locals as researchers who can help preserve the habitats of orangutans and tree kangaroos, respectively. I don’t want to offer programs like these as panaceas. Improperly used, they are no better than carbon indulgences. But at least they aim to address the deep connection between human poverty and environmental suffering. Even better would be programs that help locals develop new sources of wealth without requiring them to engage in logging or factory farming to earn money.

I’m not saying you should quit buying your carbon offsets, because maybe some of that money will make it into the right hands. But you should recognize your actions for what they are: guilt-inspired payouts that assuage your conscience rather than thoughtful remedies for problems that won’t be solved with indulgences alone. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who once paid a Linux sysadmin to forgive her for using Windows.

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (10/30/07)

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For a breakdown of the positions that relevant politicians are taking on the war in Iraq, visit the slate.com link below. 36 U.S. soldiers were killed this month, which means at least one U.S. soldier was killed for every day that passed. Click here to view.

Casualties in Iraq

U.S. military:

3 U.S. soldiers were killed today by a roadside bomb, bringing the total of U.S> soldiers killed this month to 36, according to Reuters.

4,113: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

128 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

To view a breakdown of U.S. military casualties by state of residence, click here.

Iraqi civilians:

654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a Johns Hopkins University study.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

75,971– 82,776: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a list of recent events that have resulted in Iraqi casualties, visit :
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/recent/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Iraq Military:

29 Iraqi policemen were killed by a suicide bomber yesterday, according to the New York Times.

30,000?: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

200 journalists have been killed since the start of the war in March 2003 through August 2007, according to Reporters Without Borders.


Refugees:

Read a first hand account of how Iraqis are being treated when attempting to enter Jordan for a vacation.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

2.2 million: Iraqis displaced internally

2 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Incessant violence across much of Iraq’s central and southern regions has forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes every month, presenting the international community with a humanitarian crisis even larger than the upheaval aid agencies had planned for during the 2003 war, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

28,171: Wounded from 3/19/03 to 8/31/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (10/30/07): So far, $464 billion for the U.S., $58 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

For more information on what the war is costing the United States, visit the American Service Friends Committee website here.

A shot from the Sahel

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Many moons ago, when I moved as a child to Africa, my mother, my sister, and I resided in the Sahel. To be precise: we lived in Bamako, the vibrant capital city of Mali — not to be confused with the medieval empire of the same name. To reside there as a Western black was strange; our Americanness placed us in the novel position of being regarded as de facto aristos, somewhere between such elevated classes as wealthy, regal descendents of the Keita clan and the dispossessed, which included Imazighen exiles. To see beautiful but abject so-called Tuareg women and girls begging in the dusty streets of Bamako from the windows of our funereal Lincoln Town Car — the incongruity of them huddled at roadsides and traffic stops in their indigo or floral clothes, their grace surpassed only by the Wolof women to the northwest in Senegal — was a mind-blowing experience that has stayed with me in the decades since.

The complexities of centuries of intraracial warfare and political mayhem derived from poisonous North African colonial legacies were largely beyond my eight-year-old mind’s grasp. As Madame l’Ambassadeur, my late mother was the one to travel up-country and beyond, nearer the heart of the Sahara, and she worked tirelessly to have any impact on the volatile situation in the country. I was restricted by the quotidian business of school and play, but my far-roving mind began a lifelong romance with Mali’s two most fabled folk of the Western Sudan, the Dogon and the Imazighen. The star-walking Dogon were remote and mysterious at the Bandiagara escarpment, but the grave injustices being done to the proud, rebel Imazighen were plain to see in Bamako rush-hour traffic.

When I listen to the music of Africa’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, Tinariwen (translated from Tamasheq, "the deserts"), from L’Adrar des Iforas, this baggage comes with me, weighted with shame at not following in the career footsteps of my selfless Africanist mother and fear that people of the West will never truly comprehend the vital importance of the many Africas to their own humanity. With or without Tinariwen’s great Amassakoul and current Aman Iman (both World Village; 2004, 2007) on my iPod as I ride the Manhattan subway, when I see disenfranchised people begging down the aisle I am always jolted back to the visceral yet illusory sensation of extending my thin, childish arm through the steel of the Lincoln to help a reddish-brown-skinned Amazigh girl in elegant rags, no different than me in that she was the child of parents who wanted to be free.

Whereas my parents’ generation of young black revolutionaries sought to forge strong pan-Africanist links all the way from DC to Dar es Salaam, and their cult-nat elements experimented in folk, soul, rock, and funk genres to express the hopes and fears of the 1960s era of deliverance from Jim Crow, there in Bamako, as a child at the turn of the ’80s, I was witnessing at a remove the rise of radical culture spawned by Kel Tamasheq ishumaren (unemployed) forced to abandon traditional nomadic ways by poverty and drought. These black folks’ rebel music, tishoumaren, has found its apotheosis in Tinariwen since the group first emerged from a Libyan military camp in 1985, moving from guns to guitars in the process of wresting messages of uplift from chaos. They weave a sound web linking traditional instrumentation (like the tehardant, or lute), Maghrebi music (think Nass el Ghiwane), James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, and even rap ("Arawan" on Amassakoul) — superbad, indeed.

The droning, hallucinatory blues of the Blue Men of the Ténéré may have increasingly wowed exogamous audiences since the acclaim Tinariwen’s Kel Tamasheq musicians received from jamming with Robert Plant at the 2003 Festival in the Desert, but there lies a deep source of crisis beneath the band’s international success. Recorded in Bamako, Aman Iman‘s "Soixante Trois" captures guitarist-singer Ibrahim ag Alhabib recalling the brutally suppressed 1963 Imazighen rebellion against the government of newly independent Mali. Tinariwen’s spare sound brings great joy on purely aesthetic grounds, the masterful harnessing of rolling electricity and overlapping ululation indelibly making a mark on the diasporic continuum stretching from Mali’s Ali Farka Touré to Mississippi’s Otha Turner and back again.

Yet it must never be forgotten that the mysteries of Al Baraka, the hardships of desert life and the hardcore realities of war, inform these songs, and such has been the lot of the aboriginal peoples of Tamazgha from the time of Roman and Islamic imperial incursions onto the North African sands up through current attempts to further disenfranchise the Imazighen in order to appropriate their oil-rich ancestral lands. Aman Iman‘s very title — meaning "water is life" — refers not merely to the primal law of the desert but also to the very real, enduring crisis afflicting the region’s ecology and society. As you rightly enjoy Tinariwen on tour, please remember and act on the fact that for the headliners, the fight continues on every front. *

TINARIWEN

Sun/4, 7 p.m., $20–$55

Palace of Fine Arts theatre

3301 Lyon, SF

1-866-920-JAZZ

www.sfjazz.org

Marginalia

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>paulr@sfbg.com

When the obituary of the Republican Party is written, it will be noted that the GOP died of war wounds, many but not all of them taken during the kamikaze mission in Iraq. For over the past half century, it has gone from being the party of cautious, America-first realism to one of reflexive belligerence; its embrace of militarism has been passionate and, perhaps, fatal. Over the same half century, meanwhile, the world’s great powers, except us, seem to have come to a gingerly understanding that war may not have much of a future on an environmentally brittle, densely interconnected Earth.

As for the obituarist: John W. Dean offers a strong audition. Dean, a self-described "Goldwater Republican," served as legal counsel in the Nixon White House and testified during the Senate Watergate hearings of 1973 that he’d warned the president about "a cancer growing on the presidency." After Nixon’s crash, Dean left political life for several decades, but he has forcefully returned in the past few years as the author of an accidental trilogy about the Republican Party’s long journey into night. The books have raised alarms about the extreme right’s taste for secrecy (Worse than Watergate, 2004), the psychopathology of authoritarian conservatism (Conservatives Without Conscience, 2006), and now the extent of constitutional ruin wrought by a party interested only in power, not governance (Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches, Viking, 352 pages, $25.95).

Dean’s critique carries particular weight because he is, simultaneously, a longtime Republican, a onetime White House insider, and a lawyer who understands that "proper process … produces good policy," while "compromised processes will lead to bad policy." This is a succinct definition of what is sometimes called process liberalism, the idea that if a society’s institutions are established and operated according to a set of rules and customs generally agreed on, those institutions will produce results that most of the population will be able to accept, if not always cheer. Related ideas in America are the rule of law — the notion that individuals, even self-styled wartime presidents and vice presidents, must respect certain institutional constraints — and the separation-of-powers doctrine, which contemplates that each branch of government will try to curb overreaching by the others.

It is beyond dispute that Republican abuses of process in the past 15 years have been unprecedented and calamitous. Dean is particularly interested in the Bush regime’s use of so-called signing statements to change the meaning of laws duly enacted by Congress. Neither the Constitution nor any statute gives the president such a power, and so such statements are, or should be, legally meaningless. But their plain political purpose is to create what Dean calls a "presidential autocracy"; the statements are (in the words of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe) "declarations of hegemony and contempt for the coordinate branches — declarations that [Bush] hopes will gradually come to be accepted in the constitutional culture as descriptions of the legal and political landscape properly conceived and as precedents for later action either by his own or by future administrations."

What invading body snatchers have turned the party of Lincoln and abolition into this freak show of power-crazed pod people? Dean doesn’t say, and perhaps he isn’t sure, but he is strangely silent on the military angle. The Constitution grants solely to Congress the power "to raise and support Armies," with the telling proviso that "no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years." The framers did not want a standing army sitting there like a loaded gun, waiting for some president to grab it and start shooting. And for nearly two centuries, the country’s practice was to demobilize after conflicts. As Doris Kearns Goodwin observes in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994), the US Army in 1940 was smaller than Belgium’s. But over the next decade the military was to swell unimaginably, and it remained swollen, even as the "military-industrial complex" a departing President Eisenhower warned us about became a cancer growing on our politics, while its propaganda affiliates assured us that, whether the problem was poverty, drugs, terror, or Manuel Noriega, the answer was war.

The Republican Party chose to dance with this soul-sucking devil at some Mephistophelian ball, only to find later that its throat had been slit and a dagger plunged into its back. For us, the only remaining business is to assign the obituary and then find some way to operate our rickety two-party system with just one party. Unless … some nervy Republican presidential aspirant acknowledges the obvious: that given a choice between democracy and empire, a true Republican — a true American — chooses democracy. A true Republican puts America first by cutting the military budget by 90 percent and redirecting that money into a crash alt-fuel program, into education and health care and environmental protection. Rebuild America. Assuming such a braveheart didn’t soon perish in a mysterious plane crash, next year’s presidential election would immediately become more interesting. *

Door-to-door “education”

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Correction:

In “Door-to-Door Education” [10/24/07], we reported on a group called the San Francisco Homeless Services Coalition. Our story stated that 25 percent of the group’s income goes to overhead and in-kind donations. In fact, Daniel Rotman, the group’s director, says 10 percent of the income goes to overhead, 54 percent to “public education” (which includes door-to-door canvassing and fundraising), 13.5 percent to financial donations to local shelters, and 22.5 percent to in-kind donations. Our article also stated that the San Francisco Police Department was considering revoking the group’s charitable-solicitations permit and that department staff recommended the permit be revoked. In fact, the permit was extended for another six months while a decision on revocation is pending. The literature that the group was handing out early in its operation included the SFHSC name, address, and phone number.

› amanda@sfbg.com

While San Francisco’s problem of homelessness rages in the local streets and broadsheets, a Los Angeles–based organization that raises money for homeless people has set up a new shop in town. Situated in the high-traffic area of Seventh and Market streets, where the down-and-out regularly nap, panhandle, and hawk their wares, the San Francisco Homeless Services Coalition seems perfectly placed to lend a hand.

But a recent afternoon visit to its headquarters found the gate pulled shut, the door locked, and a person inside working at a computer while half a dozen homeless people loitered outside. Nothing, save a small piece of paper reading "SFHSC" posted in the window, indicated this was a place to give money or assist homeless individuals.

During another impromptu visit the gate was open and the room full of people — potential canvassers receiving instructions on going door-to-door to ask for $150 donations, which is how the group’s fellow organization, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Coalition, has raised more than $2 million in two years, according to its Web site.

When we asked for more information about the group, we were told it doesn’t print brochures or any kind of literature, in order to save money. A handmade business card with the phone number and Web site was given with an aside that we were "lucky to be getting that."

Concerns about the SFHSC have reached the San Francisco Police Department, which is investigating whether the door-to-door canvassers are carrying the proper identification and if that form of fundraising violates the group’s city-issued charitable-solicitations permit. The permit forbids soliciting within 10 feet of doors. A certificate of registration issued to the SFHSC on April 11 clearly states, "This does not authorize your organization to go door to door for solicitation. Public property only for charitable solicitation."

But the group has been knocking on doors in San Francisco for the past six months, telling people that "the best way to make a difference is by making a $150 tax-deductible donation," according to the script it gives its canvassers. It’s raised at least $100,000 so far in the name of helping the homeless, but its work has managed to alienate some of the local leaders it intended to support.

"There isn’t a relationship any longer," Erica Kisch, executive director of Compass Community Services, told us when asked about the three-month arrangement between the two groups during which the SFHSC agreed to donate 15 percent of its take to Compass. "We knew nothing about them. We met with the director. They said they were raising money for homeless services," Kisch said. "It was an opportunity, and it seemed aboveboard at the time."

Canvassers solicited with flyers clearly showing Compass’s name, federal tax-exempt identification number, and statistics but lacking the same details about the SFHSC. That caused concerned citizens to call Kisch. "We were getting inquiries from the community about what they were doing, their tactics. They were kind of aggressive, going up to people’s doors asking for a lot of money…. It wasn’t really clear to the people they were soliciting that money was going to direct services," she said.

In fact, most of it wasn’t. The SFHSC says only 15 percent of the money it raises makes it to the shelters and service centers. Most of the money raised goes to raising more money door-to-door — either to canvassers or their support staff — an effort the group calls "education." Kisch did some more research and ultimately decided "it wasn’t worth it to us to be attached to a controversial organization like that." Compass ended up receiving a total of $11,250 from the SFHSC.

Daniel Rotman, founder and executive director of both the SF and the LAHSC, said of the breakup, "Maybe they didn’t realize we’d be reaching so many people. I think we were just too new for them."

Rotman, a 27-year-old LA resident and UC Berkeley graduate with a degree in political science, used to work for the Democratic National Committee but decided politics wasn’t for him. He transferred the grassroots machinery of fundraising for politics to the particular issue of homelessness, he told us, "because I care. I’ve always been taken by the issue."

He confirmed to us that the SFHSC does not interface with needy folks — it just gathers money in their name. Homeless people who stop by the office are referred to other locations in the neighborhood and escorted out. Rotman said 15 percent of the net money raised is given to local groups, 60 percent goes to education, and 25 percent is for overhead, as well as a plan to buy delivery trucks for ferrying donated goods from homes to shelters.

"Our main goal is educating the community," Rotman said. "We don’t just raise money and give it to other groups. It costs money to set up speaking engagements and pay for field managers." But he admitted the SFHSC hadn’t done or set up any speaking gigs yet. The 10 to 11 canvassers employed at the SFHSC are paid minimum wage and earn a 30 percent bonus if they exceed a weekly office average. "They get that for going out into the community and informing people about the issue and about us. At the end we ask them to make a donation," Rotman said.

So the point of the canvassing is to educate, not raise money, but those who have received the pitch are dubious.

"It was not educational at all," one Bernal Heights resident said of her interaction with an SFHSC canvasser. "My husband works in that field, and I was surprised I’d never heard of them." She asked for a business card so she could do more research, but the canvasser had no printed materials. "Just a clipboard with names and addresses and a very vague petition." No envelope, no card, no pamphlet. "Basically, he was just asking for donations. I didn’t know what to think."

Besides the soliciting foot soldiers and an office at 1135 Market that’s so discreet it’s easy to miss, the group’s only public face is its Web site, www.sfhsc.org — a copy of the LAHSC site. "Who is homeless in San Francisco?" the Web site asks, but its answers don’t inspire a lot of confidence — they were clearly imported from our southerly neighbor. "50% of homeless adults are African American, compared to 9% of LA’s total population."

Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project and former head of the Coalition on Homelessness, said he found out about the SFHSC from people who thought its canvassers were from COH. Boden, who’s been working on homeless issues since 1983, said none of his peers in LA had heard of the group, further raising his suspicions. "This group has to have one legitimate provider," Boden said. "One pimp group as the basis for all this funding — it’s a scam that’s as old as poverty."

Boden and Seth Katzman, director of Conard House, filed complaints with the SFPD that the SFHSC was vioutf8g the terms of its charitable-solicitations permit. An SFPD permitting officer confirmed the department had received concerned calls and a revocation hearing was held Aug. 15. Capt. Tom O’Neill said a backlog of work has kept him from releasing the final decision, but his staff has recommended the permit be revoked.

"Find out more before a gift is made," Bennett Weiner, chief operating officer of the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, told us. He said legitimate nonprofits should make their annual report and other financial details publicly available and posted on a Web site.

And at the very least, they should have some flyers. "Not to have any literature available does raise potential concerns in donors’ minds," Weiner said. "It is something we encourage people to ask for."

Rotman told us the lack of literature was a fluke and the SFHSC always sends its canvassers out with four packets of envelopes to give to citizens. They’re required to knock on 75 doors, so it’s easy to imagine they might run out of envelopes.

The BBB also recommends that any such group be overseen by a board that meets three times a year, composed of at least five members, who should not make more than 10 percent of the organization’s total take. Rotman told us his board has three members — the IRS’s minimum legal requirement — and that he makes $36,000 a year. He could not provide annual reports or financial statements, explaining that the SFHSC is new and has had to rely on partnerships with fiscal sponsors.

Lisa Watson, executive director of the Downtown Women’s Center, said her group’s 17-member board of directors decided to terminate its relationship with the SFHSC after receiving $30,000. "Our board decided they didn’t think the canvassing was the way they wanted to go, because a certain percentage went to canvassing. Only a certain percentage went to us."

The LA Youth Network is the LAHSC’s current beneficiary, and director of administration Katherine McMahon expressed satisfaction with the relationship. "We work with homeless teens, and they’ve been an awesome advocate for us." The group has received more than $600,000 during the past two years.

Both Watson and McMahon said one of the benefits of the relationship with the LAHSC had been access to a new pool of donors, something that can be as important to many groups as money. "It’s more than raising money. Its building brand identity," Rotman said. In this case the "brand" is the problem of homelessness. "We have found more than anything that people in the community, based on our canvassing and talking to people one-on-one, there’s a general aggression from citizens and residents in the Bay Area towards the homeless." He wants to "talk to people on a one-on-one basis and say, ‘Hey look, it’s not necessarily what you think.’<0x2009>"

He said they’re raising empathy and support for public policy measures and "try to build up a little support for homeless services themselves." The SFHSC now partners with a different group every month, which will receive 15 percent of the net of its canvassing fruits.

"That specific setup, going door to door … this isn’t the way nonprofits in San Francisco raise money," Kisch said. "They’re pressing people to give $150 off the street. I would never give anyone that kind of money without more background on them. We were getting 15 percent after expenses. Where’s the rest of it going?"

Green City: Saving people and the planet

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The average young person doesn’t pay much attention to things like wind turbines and energy efficiency. Friends and family, yes. School or work, sure. Green technology? Probably not. And for youths in underserved communities, where violence and economic hardship are a backdrop for everyday life, the likelihood of thinking green is even lower.

Enter activist groups like the Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and watch as things begin to change. Under the leadership of cofounder Van Jones, the Ella Baker Center has received widespread attention for its role in the development of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps program, set to begin in early 2008.

The Green Jobs Corps will provide training opportunities for hard-to-employ populations (read: at-risk youths, low-income people, and those formerly incarcerated) while supporting the development of a greener economy. It’s no small task. For decades the environmental community has looked for ways to make green relevant to marginalized communities. And it hasn’t been that successful. Ian Kim, campaign director for the Green Jobs initiative, says the program is significant in that it bridges the gap between the environmental and social justice movements.

"The connections are obvious once you start to look at them," Kim told the Guardian. "Just as there are no throwaway resources or species, there are no throwaway people or communities."

The Ella Baker Center has worked closely with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to anchor a larger coalition of activists called the Oakland Apollo Alliance. Together, these groups are propelling the initiative forward. The collaboration is a significant one. Historically, labor activists and environmentalists have been at odds. The assumption: there can be good jobs or a clean environment, not both. Victor Uno, a spokesperson for the IBEW, says that dynamic is changing.

"We think it’s important to partner with community groups, and we need alliances with environmental groups," Uno said. "Economic growth is going to mean green jobs, and we’re working together to create opportunities for people who have been historically locked out."

The Green Jobs Corps program received $250,000 in seed funding from the Oakland City Council in June — part of $2.3 million of unspent settlement funds the city received after the California energy crisis nearly a decade ago. The program will be administered through Oakland’s Community Economic Development Agency, and job training will focus initially on renewable-energy technology and efficiency — a requirement of the settlement funds. Forty young men and women are expected to participate in the nine-month program, which includes six months of training, a three-month paid internship, and services like case management and job placement. Kim says the likelihood of participants obtaining well-paying jobs afterward is good.

"Green-collar employers have jobs that pay a living wage, have benefits and good working conditions," he said. "They offer career ladders and real pathways out of poverty."

While recruitment for the program has not yet begun, Kim is aware that the initial draw will likely be the word job and not the word green. Still, it’s progress.

"There’s no shortage of people looking for job training," Kim said. "It’s within the course of the program that they’ll receive education about environmental awareness and sustainability. We need to educate people where they’re at."

Late last month the Ella Baker Center took the Green Jobs training initiative to the national arena by launching the Green for All campaign.

"We have definitely realized the green job idea is too big for one organization or one group," Kim said. "It’s turning into a really big movement with a lot of players."

The launch comes shortly after Congress approved the Green Jobs Act of 2007 (HR 2847) as part of the proposed energy package. It is legislation that would direct millions of dollars toward green job training and is now awaiting approval or, more likely, a veto from President George W. Bush. Kim said defeat wouldn’t be a surprise.

"We’ll just come back next year," he said. "We’ll come back with more political will and more ideas. There’s a lot to look forward to."

Stop the homeless sweeps

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EDITORIAL Sister Bernie Galvin and Religious Witness with Homeless People held a press conference Oct. 4 to release some remarkable data: since Mayor Gavin Newsom took office, San Francisco has issued 46,684 citations to homeless people, mostly for what are known as quality-of-life crimes. That’s cost the taxpayers $7.8 million.

Unfortunately, almost no news media showed up — the mayor, it turns out, somehow scheduled his press conference on homelessness at exactly the same time. As Amanda Witherell reports on page 15, Newsom’s staff say it’s all a coincidence — but it reflects how this administration is increasingly treating homeless issues.

Newsom, with the assistance of District Attorney Kamala Harris, is shifting the city back to a model that treats homelessness and poverty as crimes. But years of evidence prove that approach doesn’t work.

Newsom’s plan, outlined in a memo that Sup. Chris Daly made public last week, involves sending a team of social service and outreach workers through the Tenderloin with police officers. Now the cops and the social workers are saying they won’t patrol together, but the message and the impact are the same: people who commit the sorts of offenses that are almost inevitable when you don’t have a place to live — like sleeping on the streets and panhandling — will increasingly be dragged into the criminal justice system.

Frank Jordan, a former police chief, tried that when he was mayor in the early 1990s; he called the program Matrix, and it was an utter failure. The reason is obvious: most homeless people can’t pay the fines for these violations. So either the citation process is a waste of everyone’s time or, if the city pursues the nonpayment and piles on more and more citations, it winds up creating a criminal record for someone who already is going to have trouble finding work. The promise of services implied by the social workers’ involvement in Newsom’s plan means nothing if services aren’t there — and the city still can’t offer, say, substance-abuse treatment on demand or enough housing for all of the people who need it.

Yet despite all the evidence, Harris has now assigned a full-time staffer to do nothing but prosecute these low-level offenses. She and Newsom both say they want to help people use services — but the only service the DA’s Office offers to homeless people who wind up in court is a handout, a single-page list of referrals.

San Francisco has been down this road so many times before that it’s infuriating. Criminalizing homeless people is not only wrong; it’s expensive, inefficient, foolish, and morally offensive. It also clogs the courts and takes the cops even further away from working on serious crimes.

Daly says he’s going to reintroduce his measure allocating an additional $5 million for housing for homeless people. That’s a good move, of course. But the supervisors ought to think about something else: if Harris, Newsom, and the cops want to persist in counterproductive and cruel homeless sweeps, perhaps the supervisors should move to cut funding to those departments by a total of, say, $7.8 million. 2

Obama’s “Turn the Page in Iraq” plan

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Five years ago, Barack Obama stood up in Chicago and spoke out against invading Iraq.
4pt1redux100_2475.JPG

“What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” said Obama on October 2, 2002. “ What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

“What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”

Today, Obama supporters gathered in 18 cities across the United States to rally against the “conventional thinking in Washington, D.C” that led us into that war.

Kamala1redux100_2477.JPG

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (10/01/07)

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For a breakdown of the positions that relevant politicians are taking on the war in Iraq, visit the slate.com link below. This chart gives a brief breakdown of each listed politicians original stance on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, current stance, views on the surge, suggested solution, and whether or not they’ve ever actually been to Iraq. Click here to view.

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

In a review of the misconduct of Blackwater USA, an independent security contractor being employed to do the job of U.S. Soldiers in Iraq, the debate among American officials over how much money Blackwater USA should pay the families of Iraqi civilians murdered by Blackwater employees came up, according to the New York Times. At the end of last year the State Department and Blackwater agreed on a figure of $15,000.

654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a Johns Hopkins University study.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

74,431– 81,119: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a list of recent events that have resulted in Iraqi casualties, visit :
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/recent/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

4,075: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

122 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

To view a breakdown of U.S. military casualties by state of residence, click here.

Iraq Military:

30,000?: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

200 journalists have been killed since the start of the war in March 2003, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Refugees:

Read a first hand account of how Iraqis are being treated when attempting to enter Jordan for a vacation: http://last-of-iraqis.blogspot.com/2007/08/jail.html

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

2.2 million: Iraqis displaced internally

2 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Incessant violence across much of Iraq’s central and southern regions has forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes every month, presenting the international community with a humanitarian crisis even larger than the upheaval aid agencies had planned for during the 2003 war, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

122,000: Wounded from 3/19/03 to 8/31/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (10/01/07): So far, $456 billion for the U.S., $57 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

For more information on what the war is costing the United States visit the American Service Friends Committee website here.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the bright side

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› amanda@sfbg.com

The most masterful crafters of fiction depend on the deliberate omission of details. Ernest Hemingway, in a 1958 interview with the Paris Review, called it the iceberg of a story, an eighth of which pierces the surface, known and visible, while an untold reality remains submerged beneath the narrative. This art of absentia served Hemingway well, layering his stories with nuance and mystery. The icebergs in Bjørn Lomborg’s Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming serve their author’s purposes too, but they’re likely to melt under the glare of critical scrutiny.

Lomborg, a Danish statistician and adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, examines the problem of climate change through the lens of expense, and according to his calculations, the public benefits of cutting carbon dioxide emissions aren’t worth the cost. If we really want to improve future conditions, he contends, we should pay more attention to social problems like hunger and disease, causes that have been relegated to the status of ugly stepchildren by the new hype around saving the climate. Early in the book he concludes that, calculated in purely economic terms, the Kyoto Protocol is a "bad deal." Every dollar spent cutting carbon emissions translates to 34 cents of "good" — a term he neglects to define.

Whatever his definition, it demands investigation. Lomborg is, after all, "the skeptical environmentalist," as he first made plain in 2001’s The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, which was roundly debunked by scientists and Lomborg’s avowed fellow environmentalists. The Union of Concerned Scientists got concerned with his optimism about the state of the natural world and convened a panel of leading experts, including biologist Edward O. Wilson, water expert Peter Gleick, and climate modeler Jerry Mahlman to delve into the details of his data. They determined that his conclusions were drawn from an artful manipulation of facts disguised by a narrative deftly criticizing other artful manipulators of facts.

In Cool It, Lomborg attempts to defame the doomsday scenarios presented by respected environmentalists and thinkers such as Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and James Hansen by focusing on their offal: the potential positive impacts of global warming. He points out that more people die from cold-related deaths than heat-related deaths and wonders why no one’s talking about the fact that fewer people may freeze to death in 2050.

Lomborg never denies that climate change is occurring, but he proffers interesting statistics to show that things aren’t as bad as has been reported, and he blames the media for distorting facts by employing easy iconography — hurricanes, Mount Kilimanjaro, polar bears, Antarctica. And it’s true: the media often go for the easy image — such as Time‘s cover photo of a polar bear bereft on a chunk of ice, which played a role in bringing the term "global warming" into the common vernacular. Lomborg, by the way, made that same magazine’s "100 most influential people" list in 2004.

This influential person writes with cool-headed assurance that global warming will not adversely affect polar bears any more than hunting them does, that some populations of them are actually increasing, and that evolution will equip the fittest for the future. He writes, "Yes, it is likely that disappearing ice will make it harder for polar bears to continue their traditional foraging patterns and that they will increasingly take up a lifestyle similar to that of brown bears, from which they evolved." His back-of-the-book footnote to that statement reads: "The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment finds it likely that disappearing ice will make polar bears take up a ‘terrestrial summer lifestyle similar to that of brown bears, from which they evolved.’ "

And the hawks begin to circle. In a recent interview with Lomborg, Salon.com’s Kevin Berger said, "But you edited the quote. The whole thing goes like this: ‘It is difficult to envisage the survival of polar bears as a species given a zero summer sea-ice scenario. Their only option would be a terrestrial summer lifestyle similar to that of brown bears, from which they evolved. In such a case, competition, risk of hybridization with brown bears and grizzly bears, and increased interactions with people would then number among the threats to polar bears.’ " Lomborg defends himself by saying he talked to a different expert.

While it would be easy to discredit the remainder of the book based on this exposé, there is some worth in Lomborg’s reminder that we’ve been asleep at the wheel on far too many social problems, such as clean water, hygiene, disease prevention, and hunger. He isn’t wrong when he says that solving them would better equip populations for dealing with climate change. But further tugging at the roots of his footnotes is almost unnecessary because Cool It is virtually devoid of fully explored ideas.

For example, at a 2004 meeting the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a consortium of economists headed by Lomborg that think tanks on global challenges, drew up a global priority list of issues we should be addressing rather than shuttling cash toward cutting CO2 emissions. Ranking third is increased trade liberalization — code language for more NAFTA-type agreements, which have proved detrimental to developing countries. And what exactly is meant by number five, "development of new agricultural technologies"? Genetically modified organisms? Newer, stronger, somehow nontoxic pesticides? It’s hard to believe an environmentalist might promote pesticide use, but in his chapter on eradicating malaria Lomborg writes, "Concerns from Western governments, nongovernmental organizations, and local populations make it hard to utilize DDT, which is still the most cost-effective insecticide against mosquitoes and, properly used, has negligible environmental impact."

Such a statement underscores Lomborg’s priorities when it comes to health — both human and environmental. His definition of cost gives primacy to cold, hard cash at the "negligible" expense of humans and their environments. Likewise, when the discussion turns to ratifying Kyoto, which he claims — without much explanation — would cost the US economy $160 billion a year, the price tag refers solely to the cost of disrupting business as usual.

"If we try to stabilize emissions, it turns out that for the first 170 years the costs are greater than the benefits," Lomborg writes. But for the past 200 years we’ve been doing business on the cheap — and that shouldn’t be our baseline cost of existence. What’s the true cost of a species? Do we really know until it’s gone? What about the other negative environmental impacts of business as usual? Or the positive impacts of, say, more public transit to reduce car trips to reduce emissions? Plus, a decrease in the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas means more than just a decrease in carbon emissions. It means less mining, less drilling, less invasion into remote or protected areas questing for new ores. It means fewer oil spills, less mountaintop removal, less ground, water, and air pollution for the communities that have the misfortune of being sited in the backyards of industry.

In the book’s conclusion, Lomborg pushes for a $25 billion investment in research and design for alternative technologies. Seven times cheaper than adopting the Kyoto Protocol or establishing a rigorous carbon tax to encourage less CO2 emission, R&D investments are, in Lomborg’s economic rubric, a better deal.

Of course, there are already operational solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal units, vehicle-to-grid electric cars, and biodiesel recipes that could be more aggressively produced and adopted. But in Lomborg’s eyes they’re too expensive, bound to be replaced by superior technology, and thus a waste of money, to invest in now — he brushes aside economists who contend that prices will drop as demand increases. And beyond offering no ideas on diminishing the use of fossil fuel, he in fact encourages burning more in the communities that aren’t yet — though the sole upside to fossil fuels is economic cost, and the only cap on price is the perception of abundance.

He also fails to acknowledge that we can’t have both. We can’t have an increase in alternative technologies and an unabated use of fossil fuels. To actually deploy alternative technologies in the market — the hoped-for end result of all that R&D — would require the fossil fuels to step aside. This would, in turn, cut CO2 emissions. One must necessarily replace the other. There isn’t room for both. It’s like trying to put ice in a glass that’s already brimming with cold water.

One could argue that any adoption of alternative technologies would cover increased use, but that ignores what numerous researchers have pointed out: we should be universally deploying simple, effective, already established energy-efficiency measures. For the past 30 years California has done this, and despite projections and escautf8g energy use nationwide, the state’s needs have only increased in lockstep with the population — about 1 percent a year. Lomborg doesn’t aggressively push for energy efficiency, despite its cost-savings popularity with the same economically driven corporations, governments, and individuals likely to elevate Cool It to biblical status.

Lomborg criticizes as too extreme and costly proposals by Tony Blair and Gore to slash CO2 emissions by 50 or 80 percent respectively. Similarly he writes, "Restricting transportation will make the economy less efficient. Cutting back on hot showers, plane trips, and car use will leave you less well-off. It will also reduce the number of people being saved from cold, it will increase the number of water stressed [people], and it will allow fewer to get rich enough to avoid malaria, starvation, and poverty."

Is it too bold to ask people to foreswear some of the excesses they’ve enjoyed, to put to bed some creature comforts, to fundamentally change the way they perceive living in the 21st century if they hope for a 22nd century for their children? Lomborg doesn’t ask these questions, so Cool It becomes more of a distraction than a contribution at a time when environmentalists should be busy promoting solutions, not debunking the carefully crafted fables of Lomborg’s dollar-driven theses. *

COOL IT: THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST’S GUIDE TO GLOBAL WARMING

By Bjørn Lomborg

Alfred A. Knopf

272 pages

$21

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (9/24/07)

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For a breakdown of the positions that relevant politicians are taking on the war in Iraq, visit the slate.com link below. This chart gives a brief breakdown of each listed politicians original stance on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, current stance, views on the surge, suggested solution, and whether or not they’ve ever actually been to Iraq. Click here to view.

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

At least 20 Iraqis, including an Iraqi police chief, were killed today in a suicide bombing in Baquba, according to Reuters. In a separate suicide car bombing today, six Iraqi civilians were killed in Northern Iraq.

654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a Johns Hopkins University study.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

73,498– 80,116: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a list of recent events that have resulted in Iraqi casualties, visit :
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/recent/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

A U.S. soldier was killed today during combat in Iraq, according to the Associated Press.
This statistic was easily accessible on news sites in Iran, China, India and the Philippines, who ran the Associated Press story. Look for yourself:
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/
http://www.latimes.com/
http://www.cnn.com/

4,067: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

122 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

To view a breakdown of U.S. military casualties by state of residence, click here.

Iraq Military:

30,000?: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

200 journalists have been killed since the start of the war in March 2003, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Refugees:

Read a first hand account of how Iraqis are being treated when attempting to enter Jordan for a vacation.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

2.2 million: Iraqis displaced internally

2 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Incessant violence across much of Iraq’s central and southern regions has forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes every month, presenting the international community with a humanitarian crisis even larger than the upheaval aid agencies had planned for during the 2003 war, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

122,000: Wounded from 3/19/03 to 8/31/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (9/24/07): So far, $454 billion for the U.S., $57 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

For more information on what the war is costing the United States visit the American Service Friends Committee website here.

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (9/10/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (9/10/07): Gen. David H. Petraeus says the U.S. can reduce troop strength to pre-surge numbers. 9 U.S. soldiers killed today.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq told Congress this afternoon that the United States should be able to reduce its troop strength to what it was before the recent increase and that it could be done without jeopardizing the hard-won progress made in Iraq, according to the New York Times.

U.S. military:

9 U.S. soldiers were killed today in and around Baghdad, all but one were killed in vehicle accidents, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. This wave of U.S. military fatalities occurred on the same day that U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and top commander Gen. David Petraeus began a series of appearances before Congress to report on the situation in Iraq since President Bush ordered nearly 30,000 extra troops to Iraq this year.

4,037: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

122 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraqi civilians:

654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a Johns Hopkins University study.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

71,510– 78,081: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a list of recent events that have resulted in Iraqi casualties, visit :
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/recent/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Iraq Military:

30,000?: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

200 journalists have been killed since the start of the war in March 2003, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Refugees:

Read a first hand account of how Iraqis are being treated when attempting to enter Jordan on vacation. http://last-of-iraqis.blogspot.com/

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

2.2 million: Iraqis displaced internally

2 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Incessant violence across much of Iraq’s central and southern regions has forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes every month, presenting the international community with a humanitarian crisis even larger than the upheaval aid agencies had planned for during the 2003 war, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

122,000: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (9/10/07): So far, $450 billion for the U.S., $57 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

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