Prisons

Who is the brick thrower?

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Who is the brick thrower?

Yael@sfbg.com

The brick-throwing man whose projectiles hit two protesters at the Occupy San Francisco takeover of a Turk Street building on May Day has helped spark intense internal debates in the movement about the use of violence.

But nobody has heard the alleged hurler’s side of the story.

Jesse Nesbitt, 34, was arrested on the scene, and is accused of felony assault, assault on a police officer, and vandalism. I interviewed Nesbitt in San Francisco County Jail May 3. He spoke of his associations with drug addicts and revolutionaries; his previous stints in jails, prisons and psych wards; and his countless arrests on the streets of San Francisco for illegal lodging.

What emerged was a picture of a homeless Army veteran who suffers from untreated mental illness and substance-abuse issues — someone who found a degree of help and solace in the Occupy movement but has never fully escaped his problems. His story is, unfortunately, not unusual — there are many thousands of vets who the system has utterly failed.

Nesbitt told me he was diagnosed as schizophrenic at 16. “From bad things happening, my mental illness has snowballed since then,” he explained.

Nesbitt said he grew up in the projects outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the 1980s. “It wasn’t too nice,” he explained. When he was 18, he joined the Army.

“I wanted to join the military all my life. That’s what I wanted to do,” he said. The schizophrenia could have stopped him — but “I lied my way in.”

His tour in Korea was during peace time, but he says he still saw combat. “We were supposed to be at peace with North Korea, in a ceasefire. But whenever they got a chance, they shot at us. And whenever we got a chance, we shot at them.

“It hardened my heart. And it gave me a sense of duty to uphold our Constitution.”

Nesbitt returned from South Korea in 1996. Afterward, “I hitchhiked from coast to coast twice. I got married three times. I have a kid in Pennsylvania. I went to jail in Pennsylvania for — being young and stupid,” he said.

Later in the interview, he expanded on his prison time in Pennsylvania. “I did four years and eight months for aggravated assault, theft, and possession of an instrument of crime,” said Nesbitt. “I also did time in Georgia for assault. And I did time in Alameda County for vandalism and weapons.”

In fact, as he tells it, Nesbitt’s time in Berkeley was spent mainly in jail, before he got involved with Occupy Berkeley.

“I don’t know how much time I did in total in Alameda County. I’d be in jail two, three weeks, get out five, six days, then get arrested again. That was from last April to July,” he says.

On the days when he was free, “I was doing what I normally do,” said Nesbitt. “I’d squat somewhere. In the daytime I’d panhandle, go to the library. I was doing a lot of drinking. Then I started getting arrested a lot when I started doing meth.”

That was his life before joining Occupy. “A friend of mine who was shooting heroin at the time said, let’s go join the revolution. It will help clean you up. It helped pull me out of a drug addiction and keep me healthy,” said Nesbitt.

But that wasn’t the only reason he joined.

“I’ve always had revolutionary beliefs,” he says. He spoke of his friends in Pittsburgh. They wouldn’t let him go the G20 protests in 2009, fearing he would be incited to violence.

“I’ve been involved with anarchists for a long time. They pointed out documentaries I should watch, things I should read,” said Nesbitt.

But the example he gave me isn’t your classic Emma Goldman. Nesbitt remembered “The Esoteric Agenda” — a conspiracy-theory film that connects stories about corporate greed with apocalyptic prophecies.

“The education was getting me ready for something,” he said.

At Occupy Berkeley, even while Nesbitt recovered from his meth addiction, he continued to live in a cycle of violence.

“It was in Berkeley out at the Occupy camp. I got into a fight with somebody, I was in a black out. It took six cops to hogtie 135-pound me, so I was talking shit. While I was hogtied, they dropped me on my head. I went from talking shit to unconscious. I slept for the next two weeks,” Nesbitt told me.

His involvement with Occupy San Francisco increased after the Occupy Berkeley encampment was taken down.

Occupy San Francisco, however, didn’t quite progress the way he had hoped. “When they started raiding us in December, I was hoping the numbers would go up. Instead they dwindled,” said Nesbitt.

He was part of a small group of people continuing the “occupation” tactic outside the Federal Reserve Building at 101 Market St. Back in the fall, that sidewalk was a spot where dozens of people held protest signs and meetings all day and many slept throughout the night. After a series of police raids, and as most of those organizing with Occupy moved on to different tactics and projects, some decided to remain there.

Even when the Justin Herman Plaza camp was in full functional form, it was derided as “nothing but a homeless camp.” There were homeless people there, but many found food and other resources, as well as security from both police and other people they feared on the street, leading many to devote themselves to the goals of the protest movement.

The 101 Market camp that emerged in February was mostly a homeless camp — and, although the people there remained fiercely political in their convictions, they certainly didn’t enjoy the safety that the Justin Herman camp once provided.

Nesbitt was one of those people. “The SFPD not letting us sleep, telling us sitting on cardboard was lodging, sitting under a blanket to stay warm was lodging, you can only take so much of it,” he said. “They slammed my head against the back of a paddy wagon last time they arrested me for sitting underneath a blanket.”

His story is not unusual.

“Veterans continue to lead the nation in homelessness,” explained Colleen Corliss, spokesperson for the veterans-aid nonprofit Swords to Plowshares. “There are a lot of factors at play. Those who go to war have a higher instance of mental illness and substance abuse, which ultimately can lead to a vicious cycle of homelessness,” she said. “Even if you serve during peace time, you can still have really traumatic experiences.”

Nesbitt’s experience with the city’s mental health facilities wasn’t enough to break this cycle. “I did get 5150-ed,” he said, describing the term for involuntary psychiatric commitment. “I was in the hospital less than 24 hours, they kicked me out.”

Why? “I threatened to kill a doctor,” said Nesbitt.

Nesbitt’s 24-hour stay was in the overburdened, short-staffed psych ward at San Francisco General Hospital. When the psych wards began closing beds in 2007, it was comprised of four units, each with 30 beds; it is now down to one unit, according to Ed Kinchley, a social worker in the medical emergency department at General.

There’s also a floor in the behavioral health center for psychiatric patients with 59 beds, but “they told the staff last week that they’re planning to close 29 of those beds.”

“Since [the beds] are full almost every day, the bar or the standard for who stays there or who goes in-patient is a lot higher than it used to be,” said Kinchley.

Whatever the reason, Nesbitt was not getting treatment the day of the alleged brick-throwing — and he was having problems. “I was getting an episode the day before it all happened,” he said. “I was afraid to go by myself to sleep because I was hearing voices. Normally those voices tell me to hurt people. I try to keep around people I love and trust that wouldn’t let me do anything.”

Mixed with his schizophrenia is a brand of Constitutionalism that’s not common on the left.

“When you join the military or the police department, you take an oath swearing to defend the United States Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic,” Nesbitt said. “Now they’re passing the NDAA, Patriot Act, and other bills I don’t know about. They’re intentionally taking away our constitutional rights. We’re supposed to defend those rights, not lie down and take it.

“I think Abraham Lincoln said, if the government betrays us, we’re supposed to take them out.” Nesbitt insists he’s “not a terrorist. No matter what they might say about me in the Chronicle or whatnot, I’m not a terrorist. What is he, then? “I’m a freedom fighter,” said Nesbitt. “I’m fighting for the freedom of everyone.”

An absolute must-read on taxes (by Stephen King)

Zelda Bronstein
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An absolute must-read on taxes (by Stephen King)

A lot of things drive me crazy (people making a left turn on 16th and Bryant at 5 p.m., backing up traffic for an entire block; people who get to park in the midde of the street on Sunday because the cops don’t ticket churchgoers; politicians who say “I’ll take a look at that” as a way to duck a question, dog owners who leave piles of shit in the middle of the sidewalk… don’t get me started). But one of the worst, on top of my list, is the claim that wealthy people who think the rich don’t pay enough taxes should just write the government a check.

George W. Bush loved that one. Every time taxes on the rich came up, he’d say: “If you think your taxes are too low, the IRS takes checks and money orders.” You can pay online, too.

So what’s wrong with that argument? Why doesn’t Warren Buffett just pay the taxes he thinks he ought to, and stop complaining? Because taxes don’t work that way, that’s why. And one of the best essays on this critical point just appeared on the Daily Beast. The author of this gem, called “tax me, for F@%&’s sake” is an author, Steven King, who is also part of the 1 percent, a man whose knack for telling horror stories has made him very wealthy. And he has harsh words for just about everyone who tries to get away with suggesting that high taxes ought to be voluntary:

I’ve known rich people, and why not, since I’m one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing “Disco Inferno” than pay one more cent in taxes to Uncle Sugar. It’s true that some rich folks put at least some of their tax savings into charitable contributions. My wife and I give away roughly $4 million a year to libraries, local fire departments that need updated lifesaving equipment (Jaws of Life tools are always a popular request), schools, and a scattering of organizations that underwrite the arts. Warren Buffett does the same; so does Bill Gates; so does Steven Spielberg; so do the Koch brothers; so did the late Steve Jobs. All fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.

What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “OK, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.

More:

Most rich folks paying 28 percent taxes do not give out another 28 percent of their income to charity. Most rich folks like to keep their dough. They don’t strip their bank accounts and investment portfolios. They keep them and then pass them on to their children, their children’s children. And what they do give away is—like the monies my wife and I donate—totally at their own discretion. That’s the rich-guy philosophy in a nutshell: don’t tell us how to use our money; we’ll tell you. The Koch brothers are right-wing creepazoids, but they’re giving right-wing creepazoids. Here’s an example: 68 million fine American dollars to Deerfield Academy. Which is great for Deerfield Academy. But it won’t do squat for cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where food fish are now showing up with black lesions. It won’t pay for stronger regulations to keep BP (or some other bunch of dipshit oil drillers) from doing it again. It won’t repair the levees surrounding New Orleans. It won’t improve education in Mississippi or Alabama. But what the hell—them li’l crackers ain’t never going to go to Deerfield Academy anyway. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

He skewers the idea that giving the rich more money creates jobs (“At the risk of repeating myself, here’s what rich folks do when they get richer: they invest. A lot of those investments are overseas, thanks to the anti-American business policies of the last four administrations.”) He explains why the GOP tries so hard to defend tax cuts (“They simply idolize the rich. Don’t ask me why; I don’t get it either, since most rich people are as boring as old, dead dog shit. The Mitch McConnells and John Boehners and Eric Cantors just can’t seem to help themselves. These guys and their right-wing supporters regard deep pockets like Christy Walton and Sheldon Adelson the way little girls regard Justin Bieber … which is to say, with wide eyes, slack jaws, and the drool of adoration dripping from their chins.”) And he warns that life might not be so pretty for the uber-rich if this trend continues:

Last year during the Occupy movement, the conservatives who oppose tax equality saw the first real ripples of discontent. Their response was either Marie Antoinette (“Let them eat cake”) or Ebenezer Scrooge (“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”). Short-sighted, gentlemen. Very short-sighted. If this situation isn’t fairly addressed, last year’s protests will just be the beginning. Scrooge changed his tune after the ghosts visited him. Marie Antoinette, on the other hand, lost her head.

Think about it.

Yes, think about it: A society that gets more and more economically unequal is a society that won’t be stable for long.

 

Pissed off shareholders, homeowners, and taxpayers converge on Wells Fargo meeting

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Wells Fargo managed to hold its shareholder meeting April 24, but not without difficulty. A protest against the bank’s ongoing part in the foreclosure crisis, investments in the private prison industry, and record of tax dodging brought some 2,000 people to the West Coast Wells Fargo headquarters at 465 California St. for the meeting.

A broad coalition, including more than 180 Wells Fargo shareholders, as well as organized labor, students, immigrant rights advocates, and Occupy protesters, swarmed the building. Many entered the building, and others blocked its entrances and set up a stage on California, turning the block between Montgomery and Sansome into a combination alternative “stakeholders meeting” and block party.

Streets surrounding the headquarters were closed for more than four hours, as both protesters and some 200 police in riot gear stood their ground; there were 24 arrests, mostly for trespassing.

Participants hailed from across the country, from students from the University of Minnesota to steel workers from Redding, Penn. Demonstrators were explicitly and enthusiastically “non-violent.” One local organizer from the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) announced, “This is a non-violent direct action,” to an eruption of cheers from the crowd, at a rally preceding the march.

Police say organizers stuck to their tactical intentions. “I think it was a successful event,” said Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a spokesperson for the SFPD. “They have followed through with their stated objective: to have a peaceful protest.”

The organizers were somewhat less successful in a stated objective to get a large number of discontent Wells Fargo shareholders into the meeting to ask tough questions. More than 180 attended a training to prepare for the meeting on the night of April 23, but less than 30 made it inside.

However, the meeting was cut short, and organizers claim that in barring a number of shareholders, Wells Fargo acted illegally and the result of votes from meeting may be invalid.

Many shareholders were particularly incensed about public subsidies that the company took advantage of in 2008. In an amendment to the tax code that lasted only three months before Congress revoked it, the IRS gave tax breaks to healthy banks that acquired banks that were faring more poorly; Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia during the three month window. As a result, the company received $17.96 billion in tax breaks between 2008 and 2012, significantly more than the cost of the Wachovia deal.

Protesters hoped to disrupt the meeting to demand that the bank pay more taxes. Wells Fargo announced record profits this year, as well as a $19.8 million pay package for CEO John Stumpf. Stumpf has earned $60 million in the past three years.

“If they were paying their taxes, we wouldn’t have to do this” said Al Haggett, a retired San 911 worker who trained dispatchers and police.

Ron Colbert, another shareholder and a worker for Sacramento’s school district, also attempted to enter the meeting. “My sisters and brothers are suffering from foreclosure and they are pocketing our money instead of paying their taxes,” said Colbert.

“Tuition keeps going up every year. I have loans like you wouldn’t believe: $15,000, and it’s just my first year. But I pay my taxes, so why can’t they?” said Andrew Contstas, a psychology major at the University of Minnesota who traveled to San Francisco for the protest.

Determined to shut down the meeting, many groups of protesters entered the building at different times.

Around 10:30 am, about 75 were able to get in and sit down in the lobby, refusing to leave. “They said if we dispersed, they would let the shareholders in,” said SEIU Local 1021 organizer Gabriel Haaland, referring to the shareholders who came to protest and air their grievances. “They still didn’t. But they let shareholders in from either side.”

Many non-protester shareholders were able to enter through back entrances, escorted by police.

Workers from several unions who are currently locked in labor disputes, including janitors with SEIU Local 87 and AT&T technicians with local Communication Workers of America chapters, were also present at the protest. A stage set up in front of Wells Fargo turned California into an arena in which worker, student, homeowners, and immigrants told their stories.

Chris Drioane of CWA Local 9410 said that he is fed up after he worked 80-90 hours per week with no days off though the 2011 holiday season. “I worked from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day with no days off,” said Drioane.

The SFPD made 20 arrests, six for “chaining themselves to an object” and 14 for “some form of trespassing” after Wells Fargo asked them to make the arrests. Four were arrested by the Sheriff’s Department for interfering with an officer.

Ruth Schultz, a shareholder who was arrested inside the meeting, said that those who entered were able to speak. Several stood up and spoke individually before they were escorted out; afterward, the remaining protester-shareholders mic-checked the meeting and expressed their desire that Wells Fargo cease investment in private prisons, give principal reduction to all underwater homeowners, and pay “their fair share” of taxes. Police handcuffed them, and they were cited and released after spending 30 minutes in a room inside the Wells Fargo headquarters.

Schultz says the meeting lasted only 15 minutes after the group was detained, and was “ceremonial at best…They went on about their profits this year, how they’re sitting on the most capital they’ve ever had before.”

She says she was particularly frustrated from one statement made by CEO John Stumpf. “He said, ‘we’re proud of our mortgage business. In fact, I love our mortgage business.’”

A press releases from organizers explained that the protest was part of “99% Power, a national effort to mobilize well over 10,000 people, from all walks of life and representing the diversity of the 99%, to engage in nonviolent direct action at more than three dozen corporate shareholder meetings across the country.”

The national group plans to create similar chaos at a Bank of America shareholder meeting in Charlotte, NC May 6.

Justice for Trayvon organizers react to Zimmerman murder charges

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Justice for Trayvon organizers react to Zimmerman murder charges

The Bay Area joined cities across the country in holding protests and rallies demanding justice for Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old shot and killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida Feb. 26. 700 wore hoodies and marched downtown March 21. An “emergency scream-out” held March 26 outside of the Hall of Justice and jail at 850 Bryant called for justice for Martin as well as victims of police violence such as Ramarley Graham, an unarmed 18-year old Bronx man who was killed in his home by police. A “hoodies and hijabs” march last week in Oakland commemorated Martin’s death alongside the death of Shaima Al-Awadi, a 32-year old mother of five who was killed in a potential hate crime in her El Cajon home last month.

Speakers at these protests expressed outrage that Zimmerman had not been charged with any crime.

Now he has. On April 11, Zimmerman was charged with murder in the second degree.

I asked local activists- is this justice?

“I’m not jumping up for joy that this murderer has finally been arrested. I hope we can question what took so long,” said Tiny Gray-Garcia, creator of POOR magazine, who helped organize the scream-out.

She compared the case to that of Oscar Grant and his killer, Johannes Mehserle. After protest erupted demanding that Mehserle be charged with Grant’s killing, he became the first police officer in the history of California to be charged with murder. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served eleven months in prison. 

“In the same way that Mehserle was finally charged, will Zimmerman eventually get a slap on the wrist?” asked Gray-Garcia. 

The March 26 scream-out was “not only for our young brother Trayvon. It was for Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham, it was for Idress Stelley, Aiyana Jones, all the victims of police terror,” said Gray-Garcia

Unlike Graham, Stelley, and Jones, Martin was not killed by a police officer. But Gray-Garcia believes that his death can be atttibuted to “police culture.”

“Trayvon was murdered by a volunteer vigilante,” said Gray-Garcia of the neighborhood watch captain who had aspirations of becoming a police officer. “He was part of a violent police culture.”

If police and prison culture is a problem, is Zimmerman’s arrest- by police- justice?

In the media storm that followed the incident, some writers, such as this one at the Crunk Feminist Collective, have grappled with the question.

“How can I demand a criminal conviction for Zimmerman when I am opposed to prisons?” asks the Crunk Feminist Collective writer. “How do I reconcile these things?  I’m not sure yet.  But what I do know is that this really is not about the prison, but about a prison state that targets black and brown bodies in problematic ways.  It’s about a system of policing and surveillance, in which some bodies are always under the eye of the state.”

Isaac Ontiveros of the Oakland-based Critical Resistance, a group whose “vision is the creation of genuinely safe, healthy communities that respond to harm without relying on prisons and punishment,” has also struggled with this issue.

“That’s a challenging question for everybody,” said Ontiveros. “Part of it is, how can we start to dislodge the logic of neighborhood watches? You look at neighborhood watch associations and who are they watching, what do they mean by neighborhood, and who is considered suspicious?”

After Martin’s death, protests across the country were unrelenting calling for Zimmerman’s arrest. Days before the arrest and charge were made, a group of students who had marched 40 miles to Sanford from Daytona Beach “occupied” the Sanford police station, condemning how the case had been handled and demanding the termination of Sanford police Chief Bill Lee Jr. Police had declined to press charges against Zimmerman, saying that he had acted in self-defense.

On March 23, almost a month after the Feb. 26 shooting, Florida governor Rick Scott appointed special prosecutor Angela Corey to investigate the case. Zimmerman was charged with murder and taken into custody April 11.

“We do not prosecute by public pressure or petition. We prosecute based on facts and the laws of Florida,” said Corey at the time.

“She contends that neither petitions or media pressure influenced her decision, when we know too well that without it, nothing would have happened to Zimmerman,” said Mesha Irizarry, another scream-out organizer. Irizarry’s son, Idriss Stelley, was killed by police in 2001. 

The incident has put a national spotlight on racism in the United States. In Sanford, the NAACP held a town hall meeting for African American residents to air their frustrations with profiling in their own lives; hundreds attended. 

“If you’re black and you’re shot, particularly by someone who’s not black, that it is not viewed as seriously,” Sanford City Manager Norton Bonaparte told Reuters.

He added: “that’s why some feel that Mr. Zimmerman was allowed to just go on his way while Mr. Martin went to a morgue. And certainly if it was reversed, and Zimmerman had been black, he would have been detained and arrested.”

The same sentiment was expressed by protesters in San Francisco March 21. The speakers that day were family members of black teens who had been killed and whose murders had, they said, not been thoroughly investigated.

“Personal justice would be to open up all these other cases,” said Gray-Garcia.

Of Monsters, Men, and Me

Sasha Cuttler
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Of Monsters, Men, and Me

Editor’s Note: California is transferring many prison inmates to jails in their counties of origin, a process known as Realignment that will impact the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. Mayor Ed Lee removed the elected head of that department last week, and the process for determining whether Lee acted appropriately could take months. With that context in mind, we present this inside look at Realignment by Eugene Alexander Day, a third strike inmate at Soledad Prison who will be writing occasional articles about prison life for the Guardian.

A perfect storm is brewing. An unparalleled crisis in corrections is exacerbated by an even worse economy. As a reform-minded inmate buried under a life sentence, it feels like hope is on the horizon. Judicial oversight is the cornerstone.

Due to a murderous and unconstitutional medical department, the Supreme Court implemented a population cap on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). December marked the first of four benchmarks. By mid-2013, the prison population must be brought down by 33,000 inmates.

In response, the Legislature passed Prison Realignment (AB 109), which started in October. Once the dust of Realignment settles, state facilities will become the sole domain of real criminals. Serious and violent offenders, called “strikers,” must serve 80 to 85 percent of their sentences. The rest of us are serving life sentences for third strikes, murders, or other violent crimes.

Under Realignment, the counties will maintain custody of those eligible for day-for-day time credits, called “half-timers,” which includes parole violators. For years, experts have been calling for such a shift. Stemming the flow of parole violators and nonviolent, non-serious, and non-sexual offenders, called the three “nons,” is the first real attempt by the state to do the right thing.

By ignoring the evidence for so long, austerity measures and public safety are extremely difficult to reconcile due to judicial oversight. In 2007, Gov. Schwarzenegger convened an expert panel that crafted a road map of rehabilitative recommendations to address overcrowding. The state’s other expert panel, the socially irresponsible Legislature, instead chose to double-down on a bad bet.

Under the banner of building more prisons, underscored by sending inmates out-of-state, some of Schwarzenegger’s panel’s rehabilitative recommendations were codified as unfunded mandates. When the economy took a dive in 2008, the state lawyered up – and got its ass kicked in court.

It took some of the sting off my life sentence when the Supreme Court smashed the CDCR in 2011. Systemic mismanagement corrupted a generation of salvageable prisoners. As someone who lives, breathes, and sleeps the politics of justice, the Legislature didn’t simply kick the can down the road – it pushed the state closer to the precipice. State leaders have set a poor example. By failing to follow the evidence in 2007, all 58 counties had Realignment shoved down their throats in 2011.

This lens through which I see the world is depicted as “synchronized drowning” by Attorney General Kamala Harris. For the last 13 years, I’ve struggled to keep my wits in this sea of despair. Deviants need structured treatment, not more of the same. Shifting the responsibility of tens of thousands of offenders away from CDCR is an idea of brilliant simplicity.

Local law enforcement, prosecutors, and the courts are better suited to solve local problems. These offenders are members of your community. The next time the task force stomps through the ghetto snatching up people of color, they must think about how to house all of these people of imperfection. Good. Most need help, not a jackboot.

To continually be considered part of this particular problem is unacceptable. In her book Monster Factory, Sunny Schwartz opined that everyone from civilians to officers to prisoners “were collaborators in a system that accepted and invested in failure.” No one is exempt. Everyone is to blame. Lives are at stake.

Both Schwartz and Harris describe jails and prisons as crime colleges. I feel like I received tenure in the worst-performing school district in the nation. Untreated criminogenic factors give serious offenders the artistic license to develop unholy subsocietal norms. We sow the seeds of recidivism when low-risk offenders are subjected to our gangbanger, dope-fiend bullshit. Parole violators and the three “nons” are low-hanging fruit: easy to treat and even easier to corrupt.

The counties might hate Realignment, but I hate the fact it took so long. Marking a happy day in this collaborator’s miserable life, a whole class of offenders have been diverted away from the Monster Factory. Excellent. Realignment is not some hug-a-thug program. It’s basic math. So used to being treated like shit, I will die before I advocate for mollycoddling prisoners. Using offenders as earmarks to maintain an unsustainable status quo is a feeling worse than death. Fix the problem.

My dreams are skewed. In my way of thinking, prisons should become factories that turn monsters into advocates for social justice. Offenders need to learn the difference between pro-social and antisocial behavior, not how to shove dope up their asses or participate in a riot.

Cannabis’ unlikely new crusader: Pat Robertson?

Andrew Lam
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File this one under #OKsure: Televangelist and all-around dubious individual Pat Robertson has come out in support of the decriminalization of marijuana.

Of course, it’s all the liberals’ fault. Robertson made the following comments on the March 1 episode of the 700 Club. (Many thanks to Tom Angell of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition for providing us with the link fest, lookit this hilarious retraction his network posted when Robertson made similar comments in December!)

Even though these prisoners may have been sentenced by some court for some offense, should they be behind bars? Here’s the thing, we have over 3,000 – the number must be much higher than that, but over 3,000 federal crimes.

And every time the liberals pass a bill, I don’t care what it involves! They stick criminal sanctions on it. They don’t feel that there’s any way that people are going to keep a wall unless they can put them in jail. And so we have the jails that are filled with people who are white collar criminals and I’ve became sort of a hero of the hippie culture I guess when I said I think we ought to decriminalize the possession of marijuana.

I just think it’s shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of controlled substance. I mean, the whole thing is crazy! And we’ve said, we’re conservatives, we’re tough on crime – that’s baloney! It’s costing us billions and billions of dollars.

Look at California. California is spending more money on prisons than it spends on schools! I mean there’s something wrong about the equation, there’s something wrong. 

Here’s the video itself (start at 20:40 and go until 29:25) — the comments precede a pretty interesting segment on how the NAACP, the Tea Party, and a group called Prison Fellowship, a faith-based counseling group for prisoners and families founded by a Watergate ex-con and one-time Nixon aide.

Despite his classist assertion that white collar criminals shouldn’t get jail time, we’re with ya, homeslice. Hero of the hippie culture, yes you are. 

And so, our nominally-progressive president now has a less tenable position on the War on Drugs than one of our country’s head crazies (who — let us not forget despite his newfound stoner ways — was the one who announced that Haiti was hit by those earthquakes in 2010 because it was “cursed” by a “pact to the devil.”)

Holler back, President Obama? Personally, we’d be happy if his attorneys would just stop shutting down our local dispensaries. 

 

Occupy 4 Prisoners hits San Quentin

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Occupy 4 Prisoners hits San Quentin

About 800 protesters marched to San Quentin’s East Gate in a day to protest what they called inhumane conditions in prison Feb. 20

Protesters called for an end to the practice of trying children as adults, three strikes laws, life sentences, life without the possibility of parole, and the death penalty.They did not call for the dismantling of the prison system or an end to the practice of incarceration, as Chip Johnson implies here.

In San Quentin– and in prisons across the country—inmates are subjected to solitary confinement, sometimes for decades. Kids as young as 13 are tried as adults and sometimes sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. In three-strikes states, people are sentenced to decades in prison for non-violent crimes that sometimes amount to less than a couple hundred dollars in damages. And in death penalty states, state-sponsored execution means that lives, sometimes innocent, are thrown away.

Twenty-four US states do not have three strikes laws, many countries cap prison sentences at 15 years regardless of the severity of the crime, and only one European country- Belarus- continues to impose the death penalty. The United States incarcerates its citizens at a rate that far surpasses any other country in the world; second on the list in Rwanda.

Conditions and laws like these have spurred decades of prison reform and prison abolition activism, both from inmates and supporters on the outside. Feb. 20, this movement joined with Occupy Oakland to protest outside San Quentin prison and demand that these issues be addressed.

As protesters arrived, organizers blasted music, hoping to reach the ears of prisoners. Dozens of prison guards and representatives from the Marin County sheriff’s department were stationed in front of the prison gate, and well as on hills looking down on the protest group.

The loud music continued with a performance from the Brass Liberation Orchestra, and subsequently a drumming ritual.

“As First Nations people, we’re no strangers to occupation. We’re also no strangers to prison. The first prisons were the reservation and the slave plantation,” said George Galvis, Executive Director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice.

“We have post-colonial stress disorder in our communities,” added Galvis.

Author, film producer (Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story) and 2006 California gubernatorial candidate Barbara Becnel helped facilitate the event.

In her opening statements, Becnel praised the crowd, packed with Occupy activists, family members of incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, and others.

“We should really be proud of ourselves today. Because today, we are history makers. We have merged the prison rights movement with the Occupy movement,” said Becnel to an eruption of applause.

Throughout the program, speakers read solidarity statements addressed to Occupy Oakland from prisoners across the country, including Mumia Abu Jamal, Leanard Peltier, Kevin Cooper, and group statements from Pelican Bay human rights organizers, and those involved in state-wide prison strikes in Georgia.

A movement has coalesced around the claim that Cooper, a death row inmate at San Quentin since 1985, is innocent. Cooper was denied an appeal in 2009 in a ninth-circuit court case in which five judges dissented, declaring that, “the state of California may be about to execute an innocent man.” Their 103-page dissent statement includes descriptions of evidence tampering leading to Cooper’s conviction.

Cooper helped call for the Occupy 4 Prisoners day of action.

Speakers at the rally called for Cooper’s freedom, and for the end of death row entirely.

Becnel related a story about some prisoners, charged with life without the possibility of parole, that she had met while campaigning against the death sentence for Stan “Tookie” Williams.

The men, Becnel said, told her: “We only leave here in a casket also. We are also dead men walking.”

Speakers also decried the use of solitary confinement as a punishment in prisons.

Sarah Shourd, known for her imprisonment in Iran after accidentally crossing the border during a hike, spoke along with fellow imprisoned hikers Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer.

Shourd, who was held in solitary confinement for 14 months, related her experiences.

“After just two months my mind began to slip. I would spend large portions of my day crouched down by a small slot in my door, listening for any sounds from the outside that might distract me from the sheer terror of my isolation.”

A statement from a Texas prisoner, read by an Occupy Wall Street organizer, also addressed solitary confinement.

“We tend to think of man as a collection of individuals, each complete in himself, who just happen to come together to satisfy certain needs. Actually, however, there is nothing distinctly human that can be exhibited by an individual in isolation,” said the philosophical letter.

The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike last year highlighted solitary confinement, and prisoners demanded an end to the practice, in which inmates are held in isolated rooms with no sunlight for 23 hours a day, often for years on end. Some inmates at Pelican Bay have been held in these conditions for over 30 years.

Organizers of the hunger strike called it off when the California Department of Corrections promised to investigate the issue, but started to strike again several months later when no changes had been made to any of the conditions that they were protesting.

Kelly Turner, 42, who was sentenced to 25 years to life for writing a bad check for $146.16 in 1997, was also placed in solitary confinement for one year. However, she focused her speech at the rally on California’s three strikes law, the legislation that turned what would have been a three-year sentence for forgery into a possible life sentence for Turner. Turner said she was lucky that good pro bono lawyers defended her, and would likely still be in prison had they not; she now owns her own business.

Turner, who advocates for Families to Amend California Three Strikes (FACTS), urged the crowd to vote for an initiative to amend the law that is slated to appear on the California ballot this November. 

In her speech, Turner described meeting women in the Central California Women’s Facility is Chowchilla that were also serving decades-long sentences after having been charged with a third strike.

“I am here today for the woman that was on my dorm that had 27 years to life for drinking a 99 cent lemon line soda out of a store. Or the woman who stole a jar of Vaseline, a bottle of vitamins, two pairs of boxers,” said Turner.

Tatiana, a young prisoners rights advocate who spent time in juvenile hall, read a statement from incarcerated youth Veronica Hernandez.

Hernandez, 20, has been imprisoned since age 16.

She was tried as an adult, an outcome that she attributes to a public defender who did not do his best to fight for her.

“There are no law libraries or legal services at juvenile hall, so a juvenile, for better or for worse, is entirely dependent on his or her court-appointed attorney, and must trust that he or she will lead them in the right direction. Unfortunately for me, that direction was to adult court. I now face a life sentence should I be convicted,” said Hernandez in her statement.

No speaker argued for the dismantling of the prison system, instead focusing on what they saw as unjust sentencing and inhumane treatment in prisons.

In a statement calling for Occupy 4 Prisoners, Kevin Cooper connected a call to end the death penalty with struggle for correct racial and economic justice and an end police brutality:

“America has a deep-seeded philosophy in which it only allows for the execution of its poorest people. These seeds have taken root and have grown in such a way that no person who this system sees as a ‘have-not’ is safe from the death machine. Whether they are within (San Quentin) or on a BART platform.”

Bauer also expressed the importance of tying prison rights to the Occupy movement, saying, “This Occupy movement needs to permeate the prisons. God forbid one day some people here will be on the other side of this fence. But when movements get strong, people start getting locked up. We should know this. This happens in every country. Prisons are places where movements are killed. But at the same time, when movements successfully permeate prisons, a space built to break people down, the movement is at its strongest. This is true all over the world.”

Occupy Oakland organizers have already been hit with bizarre and seemingly invalid charges, such as “lyching,” “bike,” “boat,” and umbrella. In one of the most extreme cases, Khali, an Occupy Oakland protester, may face life in prison after being arrested for a allegedly taking a blanket out of a garbage can. Advocates for Khali say that he was denied prescription medications in jail for ten days before allegedly assaulting a police officer; his third strike.

Well-known prison rights advocate and former Black Panther Elaine Brown ended the program. After remarking that “there aren’t enough songs in this movement,” she sang Oh, Freedom as the crowd peacefully exited the site, as several volunteers picked up any trash that was left behind.

“Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my comrades and be free,” sang Brown.

Exporting our brains

Andrew Lam
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0

By Gary Brechin

The chancellor was absent as University of California police, kitted out in battle gear, vigorously beat and arrested students and professors at on the Berkeley campus. Called to account by the academic senate two weeks later, Robert Birgeneau explained that he had been on a trip through Asia at the time. The trip, he said, concluded with a “phenomenally successful,” though unspecified, mission to Shanghai, so he did not hear how badly things went at home until the following day.

What Chancellor Birgeneau and the dean of Berkeley’s College of Engineering did on the trip was sign an agreement to open a 50,000-square-foot building in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang High-Tech Park two days after clubs fell on Cal students agitated by what they perceive as the progressive privatization and commercialization of their university. According to The New York Times, the new branch will give U.C. an Asian beachhead by opening “a large research and teaching facility as part of a broader plan to bolster its presence in China.” Other premier American universities such as Duke, NYU, and Stanford are, for a price, establishing similar “partnerships” that China “hope[s] will form the base of a modern high-tech economy.”

As U.S. funding dries up, college administrators hope that such collaborations will “support fundraising efforts that target wealthy Chinese alumni” — not to mention attracting their children, who are more able to pay ever-rising tuition than American students.

California’s business elite until recently oversaw the establishment and growth of a prestigious 12-campus system that was meant to do for the Golden State what the university now will do for China.

The promise of a virtually free and high quality education for Californians worked well to that end until 1978 when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13 to cut their taxes.

Starved of funding, California’s public schools plummeted from the best to near worst — but many believed that the University of California’s crucial role in the state’s and the nation’s economy would immunize it from the rot consuming the rest of the Golden State’s educational apparatus. But as California piled up multi-billion dollar deficits, U.C inevitably joined the rest of the public sector on the dream factory’s cutting room floor.

As with any organism fighting for its life, available money has moved like blood from regions the university administration considers expendable to those regarded as vital profit centers — like business, biotechnology, sports, and online learning initiatives — as well as lavish executive pay packages.

Last year, for example, the university’s flagship campus at Berkeley quietly divested itself of its outstanding Water Resource Center Archives to save the cost of four clerical positions and thus free space for the expanding College of Engineering. At UC San Diego, three specialty libraries closed altogether while a fourth — the largest oceanographic library in the world — will close in 2012.

Advanced communications and information technology will be among the first areas of research undertaken by the College of Engineering’s new partnership with Chinese industries seeking to overtake California’s fabled Silicon Valley.

For centuries, city states and nations jealously guarded their home industries to the point of sending assassins to dispatch those trading secrets with rivals. Decades of neoliberalism have encouraged today’s elites to do the opposite. Availing themselves of the deregulation and lowered trade barriers for which they paid and the communications technology they developed, they exported their industries and jobs to wherever labor costs are lowest and environmental constraints absent. Derelict factories, ruined towns, failing infrastructure, and prisons now pock those countries still imagining themselves members of the First World.

The screams of students belabored for asking where their university is going and for whom raises the question whether intelligence will be our last export, or whether it was among our first.

Gray Brechin is a three-time U.C. Berkeley alumnus and visiting scholar in the UBC Department of Geography. He is the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. A version of this piece ran first in the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

Protesters climb on Wells Fargo roof to protest evictions

Zelda Bronstein
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9
Protesters climb on Wells Fargo roof to protest evictions

Activists held a massive banner and pitched a tent on the roof of the Wells Fargo branch at 16th and Mission Jan 14, while 150 supporters watched from the parking lot. Seven were arrested.

Organizers say the demonstration was meant to draw attention to the bank’s complicity in unfair foreclosures and evictions.

The protest was planned by a coalition of Bay Area housing rights and homelessness advocacy groups, along with organizers from Occupy San Francisco.

Sarah Shortt, Executive Director of the San Francisco Housing Rights Committee, says that abuses by corporate banks are inextricably linked to issues that her group has been working on for years; “evictions, displacement, affordable housing, and tenants rights.”

After rallying at 16th and Mission, protesters looked up to see that six had climbed to the roof. They unfurled a banner reading “Banks: No Foreclosures/Evictions for Profit!”

A fire truck arrived ten minutes later, and put up a ladder to give the police and firefighters access to the roof.

The Police Department cooperated with protesters, assisting a negotiation with the bank branch’s manager. A letter detailing their demands, including a moratorium on foreclosures and an end to predatory and speculative loans, was apparently faxed to Wells Fargo spokeswoman Holly Rockwood.

Protesters said that they would not leave the roof until they had a meeting scheduled with Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf. Six were arrested.
According to an SFPD statement, “A bank employee signed a private person’s arrest (citizens arrest) for trespassing.”

After those arrested were painstakingly shuttled down the ladder and into a police van, protesters blocked the van from leaving Hoff street between 16th and 17th for about ten minutes until it sped out through the parking lot. Protesters then marched to the nearby Mission Police Station, where a drummer from the Brass Liberation Orchestra, which often accompanies protest events in the city, was arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer with her drum.

Those arrested on the roof were cited for trespassing and released within hours. Supporters have put up money to release the drummer, known as Montana; bail was set at $8,100.

While the drama on the roof unfolded, Shortt, along with organizers from Causa Justa: Just Cause and the San Francisco Tenants Union, spoke about abuses committed against tenants and homeowners. They also spoke about Wells Fargo’s investment in private prisons. 

In a press release, organizers said that the protest was meant to call attention to “predatory equity scams, Ellis Act evictions, and immoral home loans.”

The Ellis Act allows landlords to evict tenants for any reason, if they don’t re-rent the units at a higher price in the next five years. The act hasno restrictions on selling the units as tenancies in common — a backdoor way to create condos — and that’s a lucrative and common practice in the Mission.

Ellis Act evictions increased by 8% in 2011, According to the San Francisco Rent Board Annual Report.

Jose Morales, a tenant who was evicted based on the Ellis Act and activist with the San Francisco Tenants Union, spoke to the crowd Saturday. Said Morales, “I have osteoporosis, I’m 82 and a half years old, but you still see me walking around with my sign.”

He displayed protest signs declaring that housing is a human right and urging single-payer health care.

Mesha Irizarry also told her story to the protesters. Her Bayview home was sold to Bank of New York, then transferred to Bank of America on September 1, but says that she refuses to leave and is fighting the foreclosure.

“We do not play the blame-the-victim game. We are not alone. We are not ashamed to sat ay what has happened to us. We are fighting back, and we are going to win” said Irizarry, who named several other women who are resisting foreclosures in Bayview. 

Irizarry began a San Francisco chapter of Occupy the Hood, a group dedicated to confronting problems that disproportionately affect the poor and people of color within the Occupy Movement. In San Francisco, the branch has focused mainly on defending homes from foreclosure and eviction. Saturday’s protest was part of that effort.

This demonstration was also a part of a series targeting banks, that protesters plan to top off with a day-long “occupation of the financial district” January 20th.

Said Occupy SF Housing Coalition media spokesman Gene Doherty, “The banks and the development companies that have gotten us all into (the foreclosure crisis) are a major part of the problem…it is their ethical duty, moral duty right now to be fixing this. And if that means it’s going to eat into their profit, that means it eats into their profit.”

 

OccupyOakland rings in the new year with protests against police

Sasha Cuttler
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21
OccupyOakland rings in the new year with protests against police

Occupy Oakland kicked off the year with two marches protesting police and prisons. A march to the Oakland City Jail on New Year’s Eve was followed by a march against police brutality on New Year’s Day, ending with a rally against police violence. Speakers at the rally indicated that the Bay’s most radicalized Occupy group may focus on an anti-police repression theme in the new year.

About 300 people attended a nighttime demonstration in Oakland City Center on Dec. 31. Protesters left Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza at 9:45 and marched to the city jail. About 20 Occupy Oakland protesters remain in jail after several different incidents of arrest in the past weeks.

At the jail, protesters spoke about police repression, set off fireworks, and chanted “inside or outside, we’re all on the same side.” Many reported seeing solidarity fists sticking out from between bars on the jail’s windows.

The demonstration was part of a national call for New Year’s Eve jail solidarity protests, and similar “noise demonstrations,” in which protesters made noise outside jails to show solidarity with inmates. Similar protests took place in 25 cities around the world.

The march featured a giant banner stating “Fuck the police.”

Around 11:30 pm, protesters marched back for a dance party on the plaza. “At midnight, we did the countdown like everyone else,” said Patrick, who has been involved in OccupySF and Occupy Oakland.

A banner dropped in the plaza read, “Out with the old. Occupy 2012.”

At 1 pm on Jan. 1, Occupy Oakland participants gathered once again. They marched to Fruitvale Bart Station in an anti-police brutality march commemorating Oscar Grant. The unarmed young Oakland man was killed on Jan. 1, 2009 by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for the shooting and given a two-year prison sentence.

The march was followed by a rally and speak-out with about 500 in attendance. Several women with sons and grandsons who had been killed by police in San Francisco and Oakland shared their experiences. Adam Jordan, member of the Oscar Grant Committee for Justice, said that Occupy Oakland had helped unify the local community against police brutality.

Several speakers agreed that police violence against the poor and people of color and recent arrests at Occupy Oakland, as well as tear gas and other weapons used against Occupy Oakland protesters, are all connected. “It’s all systemic. It’s the same problem,” Jordan said. “The police that are attacking everyone in Occupy Oakland now have been attacking black people for centuries.”

Members of Oscar Grant’s family, including his mother, his young daughter, his fiancé, his uncle, and several cousins, were also present, and many spoke.

Gerald Smith, an organizer with Occupy Oakland and member of the Oscar Grant Committee Against Police Brutality and Repression, read aloud a message from Angela Davis, who has proposed nationwide demonstrations to free political prisoners on Feb. 20. He also talked about several proposals to continue to protest against police violence in the East Bay, including picketing the Alameda County District Attorney’s office and emergency meetings the following day every time an Oakland resident is killed by a police officer.

In a reference to the leaderless, “horizontal” structure that has defined Occupy groups around the world, Smith said to the crowd, “How much will we do this? It’s up to you. I hope you know by now, you decide everything.”

Breaking free

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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20
Breaking free

rebeccab@sfbg.com

An ordeal that began with a hiking trip on July 31, 2009 in Northern Iraq came to a close Sept. 21 when Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal were released from Tehran’s Evin Prison. They’d languished in an 8-by-13-foot cell for 781 days while their friends and supporters waged a creative, behind-the-scenes campaign to free them.

Bauer and Fattal were ferried out in a convoy with Swiss and Omani officials and flown to Oman, where news cameras captured their joyful reunion with loved ones. Waiting on the tarmac with their family members was Sarah Shourd, Bauer’s fiancée, who’d been arrested with them and was released last September after spending 410 days in solitary confinement. It was the first time since their arrest that “the hikers” — as the trio came to be labeled in the campaign calling for their release — were together outside prison walls, free at last.

Watching their reunion from Seattle, their friend Shon Meckfessel — who went to Northern Iraq with them but hadn’t felt up to hiking that day — was overjoyed. “It’s like I’ve collapsed from relief,” he told us by phone. “I just feel like I’ve been asphyxiated for the last two years, and suddenly I remember what air smells like.”

In the Bay Area, friends who’d pulled together to work toward their release breathed a huge, collective sigh of relief. “It was just a crazy, amazing adrenaline rush of happiness,” said Jennifer Miller, who befriended Shourd years earlier while doing human rights work focused on violence against women in Juarez.

Bauer and Fattal had stood trial only weeks earlier in an Iranian court, on charges of espionage and illegally crossing an unmarked border between Iraq and Iran. They were found guilty and sentenced to eight years each in prison. Their release coincided with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the United States for the United Nations General Assembly conference.

As Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal remained isolated at the mercy of guards they could barely communicate with, their family and supporters kept up a steady drumbeat calling for their release. They recruited actors, intellectuals, and foreign diplomats to urge the Iranian government — which has not had diplomatic ties with the U.S. Since 1979 — to let the Americans go. Once Bauer and Fattal were free and wandering around New York City, they’d morphed into minor celebrities — strangers approached them in the streets to wish them well.

In the end, nobody can say just what persuaded the Iranian government to release Bauer and Fattal. “Sarah was talking with diplomats in all kinds of countries. The thing is, none of us really knows what the calculus was,” said Liam O’Donoghue, a friend who helped out with the campaign.

The campaign was multi-faceted, with friends and family coordinating parallel efforts from various locales. While Bauer and Fattal’s group of friends in the Bay Area are quick to note that their work reflected just one slice of the overall push for the young men’s freedom, the grassroots organizing effort they created clearly had some effect in the end.

“If Shane, Sarah, and Josh were just three random people who didn’t have this group of friends who were so proficient at organizing, I think they would have still been in jail,” O’Donoghue mused.

Shortly after Bauer and Fattal were freed, Iran’s foreign ministry issued a statement acknowledging the involvement of the Sultan of Oman, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, and — more surprisingly, given his adversarial relationship with the U.S. — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who enjoys a close relationship with Ahmadinejad.

Once reports surfaced emphasizing Chavez’s involvement, the news broke that actor Sean Penn had played a role, too — by flying to Venezuela to encourage Chavez to approach Ahmadinejad about the case.

Yet the stage had already been set by friends of the hiking trio, a small crew of passionate social justice activists based in San Francisco and Oakland. They possessed skills as organizers, but this time the goal was more personal — they wanted nothing more than for their friends to be free.

 

TIME TO ORGANIZE

Based on the 17 alarmed messages on his voicemail, David Martinez knew something terrible had happened involving Bauer and Shourd. An independent filmmaker, Martinez was close to both and had collaborated with Bauer in 2007 to produce a film about Darfur.

Soon after learning that they were being detained in Iran, he found himself swept into a whirlwind, ad-hoc grassroots organizing effort as friends and family of the hikers contacted one another, fired off rapid emails, and organized conference calls to try and determine how to respond.

“We created this working group, this conference group — we wanted everybody’s expertise,” explained attorney Ben Rosenfeld, who has known Shourd for more than a decade and offered free legal representation to Shourd’s mother. “We set out to build a brain trust, essentially, and we did that very, very quickly.”

Shourd and Bauer had been living in Damascus, Syria, at a Palestinian camp when they decided to take a short trip to Iraqi Kurdistan. Shourd was teaching English to Iraqi refugees, and Bauer — a photojournalist — was writing articles about the Middle East. Fattal, an environmental educator, was visiting them. They journeyed along with Meckfessel to Kurdistan, a forested region of Iraq known as a safe destination for U.S. citizens. But once they arrived, Meckfessel felt groggy, so he opted to stay behind while the other three went off in search of a waterfall.

“I was on a bus to meet them and got a call from Shane that they were being arrested by Iranian authorities,” Meckfessel told the Guardian. After notifying their families, he flew to Istanbul to stay with a friend.

Back in the Bay Area, word of the hikers’ plight was starting to make news. “I had producers from morning shows like Good Morning America ringing my doorbell from the beginning,” Rosenfeld said.

Martinez was on a conference call with the core group of organizers when Meckfessel contacted him via Skype from Istanbul — and by that point, the national media was hungry for a statement from the elusive fourth hiker. So the group worked with Meckfessel to craft a statement for the press.

The first challenge they faced was this: Should they emphasize that Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal were humanitarian activists, or should they downplay their political leanings by casting them as adventuresome Americans with a love of the outdoors? Both portrayals were true, but the most important audience, as Rosenfeld pointed out, was ultimately their captors.

Meckfessel said he thought highlighting their politics would help their case. “The first minute after I got the phone call [from Bauer] … I thought that basically our involvement in the region as journalists, as academics, and as educators, and our long public record speaking out for human rights and as critics of US foreign policy in the area … would get them out,” he said.

Meckfessel later created a website, FreeOurFriends.eu, to emphasize the humanitarian and journalistic work that the three were engaged in. In the summer of 2010, he maxed out two credit cards to go on a 30-city European tour to drum up support overseas.

Despite the group’s initial contact with the Committee to Protect Journalists as well as Bauer’s editors at The Nation and Mother Jones, some were opposed to emphasizing the journalism aspect. “Think back to July 2009 in Iran,” Martinez said, referencing the popular uprising known as the Green Revolution that had sent shockwaves through Iran just months earlier. “Our friends were and are journalists involved in social movements and people’s movements. I’m pretty sure if you did a Google search with ‘Iran, July, 2009, activists,’ you’d come up with something like torture, prison. That is why we thought … let’s just say they’re hikers.”

So they came to be known as “the hikers,” and a website was created to go along with the campaign, called Free the Hikers.

“We wanted to make sure we weren’t divulging details about them that they weren’t divulging to their interrogators,” Rosenfeld said. “We wanted to be careful not to piss off the U.S. or the State Department. And, if we seemed too orchestrated, it might feed into Iran’s paranoid theories that they were spies. So we had to try to solve for all of these variables at the same time.”

It began to dawn on them that they were contending not only with the soured relationship between the U.S. and Iran, but an internal power struggle within Iran that had intensified in the wake of mass internal dissent. “The government that grabbed Shane, Josh, and Sarah was at war with its own people,” Martinez reflected. “They were prisoners of the historical moment.”

Nor was the trio the first in their circle of friends to stumble into a horrendous situation overseas. Tristan Anderson, of Berkeley, was attending a nonviolent protest of the Israeli occupation in a Palestinian village at the beginning of 2009 when he was hit by a high-velocity teargas projectile fired by Israeli Defense Forces, and sustained serious brain injuries.

“Tristan’s like a minor celebrity in Iran,” Meckfessel noted. “He’s known not only for initially getting shot … but Tristan’s whole case got a lot of sympathetic media in Iran.” When his three friends were captured, “the first thought I had was, we have proof that we’re all friends with Tristan,” he said.

On Feb. 10, 2010, Anderson’s parents, Nancy and Mike Anderson, sent a letter to Ahmadinejad. “It pains us greatly, on top of the tragedy we have already suffered, to see Tristan’s close friends made to bear the burden of grievances between nations,” they wrote.

 

GAME OF DIPLOMACY

The idea to approach the Venezuelan government started when Raymor Ryan, an Irish author who lives in Chiapas, phoned Martinez. “He said, ‘The only thing that’s going to really affect them is state power — this is a game of diplomacy,'” Martinez recounted. He suggested Venezuela — a country that is not only on friendly terms with Iran, but has connections with social movements. Martinez liked the idea, but first he ran it by another friend, famed academic Immanuel Wallerstein.

In an email, Wallerstein summarized for the Guardian the advice he gave. “The Iranians are using this as part of their struggles with the United States,” he wrote. “The least likely way to obtain their release is to allow U.S.-Iranian relations to be the issue, or to allow the virtues of the Iranian regime to be the issue. I suggested that they try to work with various left-of-center governments in Latin America, which have friendly relations with Iran, and see if they will intervene with the Iranian government. I did not single out Venezuela. After that, I was out of the picture.”

In October of 2009, Rosenfeld reached out to an attorney he knew through the National Lawyers Guild, Eva Golinger, who’s authored seven books, lives in Caracas, and occasionally serves as an adviser to Chavez. She agreed to help.

Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s foreign minister, told her he thought Chavez would be open to helping. “The foreign minister went to Tehran, and they told me they were going to broach the subject,” Golinger said. “When they came back, they told me unfortunately, it wasn’t a topic that was received favorably by the Iranians.”

Rosenfeld and Martinez were crazed, but they had another idea. Perhaps Chavez would be more responsive to appeals from lefty luminaries. Thanks to behind-the-scenes arrangements made by campaign organizers working every connection they could muster, a letter dated Feb. 26, 2010 was sent to Chavez on behalf of Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, and Harry Belafonte.

“All three of the hikers are dedicated to improving living conditions for poor and oppressed people throughout the world, and to fostering a better understanding among their fellow citizens of the U.S.’s hegemonic role in global politics and economic privation,” they wrote.

Soon after, Golinger had a chance to speak with Chavez directly, when she was invited to join him on a trip to Uruguay to attend the presidential inauguration. “He said, ‘do you think they’re spies?’ I said, look, I don’t think they’re spies. I think they were gringos in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she recounted. “Chavez said, yeah, no problem. I’ll help.”

Soon after, the campaign recruited anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan to write to Chavez, too. But the months rolled by without word of a trial date, let alone a release. Rosenfeld thought up a new way to reach Chavez — by encouraging actor Sean Penn to speak with him.

Penn enjoyed a good relationship with the Venezuelan president and had been regularly traveling to the region to aid in earthquake relief efforts in Haiti, which Venezuela was deeply involved in. Rosenfeld asked Matt Gonzalez, chief attorney of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office and a friend of Penn’s, to mention it to him.

Within months, Penn discussed the hikers’ case with Chavez, according to Golinger. Then, in September of 2010, Shourd was finally released. Bay Area friends described it as a moment of sheer joy, but also bittersweet, because Bauer and Fattal remained behind bars. Miller invited friends and organizers over to her place in Oakland to join her in the surreal experience of watching their friend deliver a speech on television.

Meckfessel was in Rome as part of his “Free Our Friends” tour through Europe. “I got a text message from somebody that she had been released, and I burst into tears of relief,” he said. “Then, just as I was preparing to do my presentation in Rome, I got a call — and it was Sarah. I just shouted and cried in front of this big group of Romans, and everyone was applauding.”

Upon her return, Shourd wasted no time throwing herself into the campaign. “I just have so much admiration and respect for Sarah,” Miller said. “She went from coming out of prison, and needing time to heal from that, to becoming a full-force, 24/7 international diplomacy worker.”

Shourd, Bauer, and Fattal were unavailable for an interview for this article, but their families emailed a statement. “As Josh and Shane said when they got home, many of their friends put their own lives on hold to fight for their freedom,” they wrote. “We are grateful to the many people who worked in many different ways to help Shane and Josh. Every single effort mattered and made a difference.”

 

INEXCUSABLE ACTS

When the day of their release finally came, Golinger watched in Caracas as television broadcasts showed Bauer and Fattal bounding down the steps of the plane and leaping into the arms of their loved ones. She sent a text to Maduro, the Venezuelan foreign minister, who was in New York for the UN General Assembly. “I asked … were we involved?” Minutes later, she received a text in response. “He said, fundamentally, yes.” The Iranian foreign minister had told him that the release went through because of Chavez’s request.

Days later, in New York, the hikers visited the Venezuelan consulate. And on the same trip, their first time back on U.S. soil, Bauer and Fattal held a press conference.

“The only explanation for our prolonged detention is the 32 years of mutual hostility between America and Iran,” Bauer said. “The irony is that Sarah, Josh, and I oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility. We were convicted of espionage because we are American. It is that simple.”

He went on: “In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would immediately remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay. They would remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world, and the conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S. We do not believe that such human rights violations on the part of our government justify what has been done to us, not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S provide an excuse for other governments, including the governments of Iran, to act in kind.”

Perbacco

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Perbacco

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE In the little gathering of restaurants on the 200 block of California Street deep in the Financial District, Perbacco is one of the middle children, at least physically. Mid-block positions can be awkward for restaurants, since your would-be customers are likely to have to do a bit of searching for you instead of finding you in mighty command of some conspicuous corner. On the other hand, if your nearest neighbors are Michael Mina (née Aqua) and Tadich Grill, the foot-traffic factor could tilt in your favor.

Perbacco, which turns five later this year, is relatively narrow and deep, which is not atypical of mid-block spaces. Within those friendly confines it does offer a few points of topographical interest, including a mezzanine and, at the very rear, an open kitchen that redefines “open kitchen”: a kitchen so open that it has no physical barrier or marker to separate it from the rest of the restaurant. It reminded me in an odd way of those federal prisons without fences — the so-called Club Feds — where Michael Millken and the other high-finance hucksters of the 1980s did their time. It was odd to glance back there and see young chefs just milling around. Even in a star-struck culture like ours, there can be such a thing as overexposure.

It would also be fair to say that the design scheme emphasizes earth tones.

“It’s brown in here” was a pithy observation that reached me from the pithy observer across the table. Some cream tones too, yes, but still. One imagines that the grand men’s clubs of old London, White’s, and the Atheneum, among others, must look something like this inside, not that I’ve ever managed a peek.

If you’ve been to Italy, particularly in the north, you’ll probably agree that Italians eat more meat than is generally supposed, and in this sense, chef-owner Staffan Terje’s menu does reflect a profound Italian aesthetic. (Its principal influences are from the northern regions of Piemonte and Liguria.) The kitchen turns out its own salumi, and an $18 plate of it (the small version) is most impressive in range, flavor, and sheer heft. If you open with this, you should plan accordingly for what you want to follow, because you don’t just get a couple of crostini smeared with paté and some cornichons. You get, instead, a sizable plate dizzyingly arrayed with such treats as testa in cassetta di Gavi, pancetta, several types each of lardo and salame, and — for a bit of crunchy acid — a bouquet of pickled cauliflower florets.

The passion for meat, in particular for cured meat, even insinuated itself into the salads, where we found a witty reimagining of the classic cantaloupe with prosciutto in the form of ripe peach slices ($12) set amid baby lettuces with flaps of smoked goose breast that could easily have passed for speck or pancetta affogata except for their color, which was more of a telltale red. The salad was dressed with a stone-fruit vinaigrette, but this salad was that rare thing, a salad that, laden with juicy ripe fruit and pungent flesh, would have been fine with no dressing at all.

Yet more meat turned up in the pasta courses (many interesting and unusual shapes here), in the form of short-rib ragu ladled over pappardelle ($17), the wide ribbons that look like fledgling lasagne. The ragu was intensely earthy, and horseradish shavings brought some bite, but I did question the addition of a roasted cipolline confit, whose almost jelly-like texture and sweetness seemed to me to disrupt the harmony of the dish. So much of the brilliance of Italian cooking has to do with simplicity — i.e., resisting the temptation to add ingredients and omitting them instead — and this dish would have been better with no onion confit.

Actual short ribs ($24) were also available, cooked long and slow (stracotto is the Italian word), given a bone-marrow crust (rich!), and plated with pea tendrils, chanterelle mushrooms, and more cipolline onions, which for some reason did not wreak the havoc here they did with the pasta and actually might have helped balance the richness of the bone marrow.

The dessert menu, like its savory counterpart, reflects a surprisingly friendly pricing scheme. Everything is $8, except for the sorbetti ($7) and the panforte ($3). And the preparations are complex enough so that you feel you’re actually getting more than one thing. For example, a strawberry semifreddo (a flat pink disk with the consistency of sherbet kept in a too-cold freezer) was festooned with crumbles of pistachio cake and tumbles of zabaglione, the marvelous — and marvelously simple — concoction of egg yolks whipped in a bain marie with sugar and some kind of sweet wine, usually marsala, but flat champagne works well, too. The zabaglione had a faint green sheen; had it been doctored with pistachios, like the cake? Pink plus green beats brown every time.

PERBACCO

Dinner: Mon.-Sat., 5:30-10 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.

230 California, SF

(415) 955-0663

www.perbaccosf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Hunger strike highlights horrible prison conditions

Sasha Cuttler
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14
Hunger strike highlights horrible prison conditions

In a state that’s still floundering for ways to comply with court orders to drastically reduce the number of inmates in a prison system that has long been severely overcrowded, people in prison face unconstitutionally inhumane and degrading treatment on a daily basis. And now a group of inmates is highlighting the problem with a hunger strike that begins this Friday, July 1.

Lawyers for and supporters of the group of inmates from the Secure Housing Unit at the notorious Pelican Bay prison will hold a press conference tomorrow (Thu/30) at 11 am outside the state building at 1515 Clay Street in Oakland to announce the hunger strike to back up a list of demands they have submitted to the warden and Gov. Jerry Brown. Their demands include an end to long-term solitary confinement, collective punishment, and forced interrogation on gang affiliation, and they say they will continue their hunger strike until their demands are met.

“The prisoners inside the SHU at Pelican Bay know the risk that they are taking going on hunger strike,” Manuel LaFontaine of All of Us or None said in a prepared statement. “The CDCR must recognize that the SHU produces conditions of grave violence, such that people lose their lives in there all the time.”

The anti-war group World Can’t Wait is also supporting the hunger strike and calling for a supportive demonstration on Friday at 11 am outside the state building in San Francisco at Van Ness and McAllister streets. California officials have for years defied judges’ orders to reduce the prison population, which is at 180 percent of capacity, and the Supreme Court this year upheld the order and is requiring the state to reduce the prison population to 109,000 inmates, of 137.5 percent of the levels the prisons were designed to house.
The Brown Administration is seeking an extension of the deadline as it wrestles with political gridlock and a budget debacle that has stymied the governor’s efforts to transfer more prison inmates to county jails. But that plan avoids the reality that the U.S. has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, a situation that is both inhumane and fiscally unsustainable.

Jerry’s bad budget

Zelda Bronstein
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19
Jerry’s bad budget

The Democrats in the Legislature did what they had to do, and passed the only budget that the governor would agree to. But Jerry’s Budget — and this will always be Jerry’s budget, since he’s the one who insisted on the terms — is pretty bad news.


I could have told the governor six months ago that he’d never, ever get Republican support for tax extensions. I could have told him that things are very different from the 1970s, when he was last governor. Back then, Republicans were actually interested in governing and would work with Democrats. Now they’re only interested in obstructing — and in sticking to a “no taxes” pledge that has severely damaged the state.


But no: Jerry had to be Jerry, and veto the budget the Democrats passed the first time, because he still thought he’d get his way.


Now he has a budget that (a) won’t work unless the economy continues to pick up and (b) protects prisons at the expense of education.


Imagine: The Democratic governor of California saying that he is willing to cut a week out of the school year — but isn’t willing to make comparable cuts in the state prison system.


Oh, and guess what? It gives Republicans the ability to crow about how California didn’t need those tax extensions in the first place.


Way to go, Guv.

Phantom menaces

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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11
Phantom menaces

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Does anyone actually believe Ghost Adventures is real? Including its hosts? For the uninitiated, this is the Travel Channel show that locks a trio of doucheba — er, paranormal investigators inside an allegedly haunted location overnight, leaving them with an arsenal of high-tech gadgets to record any paranormal happenings.

Inevitably, these goings-on include supernatural “voices” captured by one of their doohickeys (the voice always sounds exactly like garbled static, but is subtitled into meaning — usually a variation of “Get out!”) Main host Zak Bagans employs obnoxious tactics to goad the spirits into responding. Did you see that one where he decided he needed to bare his telegenically pumped-up chest to provoke the phantom that hated tattoos? It was fully necessary, people. For science. Also, it was 24-karat unintentional comedy gold.

Ghost Adventures and similar shows (main ingredient: shaky, sickly-green night vision) are ripe for parody, but they’re also au courant. As anyone with a pair of eyes and a thirst for blood can attest, there’s been a trend in “I am filming myself at all times” horror since ye olden days of The Blair Witch Project (1999), sure to be buoyed along for another decade-plus thanks to the monster success of 2007’s Paranormal Activity. (Last year’s The Last Exorcism being a prime example.) If these films are fake-real, then shows like Ghost Adventures, which follow regular people through actual abandoned prisons, sanitariums, and the like, are real-fake.

Which brings us to Grave Encounters, a fake-real movie that does a number on Zak Bagans types and delivers some pretty decent scares in the process. (Don’t be put off by the directors’ corny nom de screen, “the Vicious Brothers.” Although, dudes — really?) The film, which closes out the 2011 Another Hole in the Head Film Festival, is introduced by a slick production-company type who assures us that what we are about to see is undoctored video from a ghost-hunting reality show. Seems the crew of Grave Encounters, including lead investigator Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), have vanished from the crumbling confines of their latest filming location, a decrepit mental hospital with a sinister past.

With this Blair Witch-y setup, the found footage rolls, including outtakes that let us know Lance and company are skeptics not above manipulating circumstances to get the shots they need. The faux-show apes Ghost Adventures‘ title sequence, low-angle shots, and jumpy editing. There’s even a slightly unhinged caretaker on hand to lock the Grave Encounters folks in for the night. And this wouldn’t be a horror movie (as opposed to a highly questionable reality show) if creepy critters didn’t end up coming out to play. It’s not a spoiler to disclose that once doors start slamming by themselves, full-scale shit-hitting-fannage (shades of 2001’s excellent Session 9) is not far behind.

In a similar vein, but with a more succinct running time and more likeable characters, is Haunted Changi, one of HoleHead’s opening-night films. A group of young filmmakers (portrayed by actors who have the same names as their characters) set out to make a documentary about Singapore’s Old Changi Hospital, a vacant structure troubled by the lingering fragments of World War II-era prisoners of war and their decapitation-happy Japanese captors. Plus, the occasional vampire. Old Changi Hospital is apparently a bona fide ghost-hunting hotspot, which makes the fake-real Haunted Changi a little more real than it probably ought to be.

After the four-person crew’s initial visit to the hospital, director Andrew (Andrew Lau, also credited as Haunted Changi‘s director) becomes obsessed with the place, returning again and again to shoot more footage and hang out with a mysterious woman he encounters there. Meanwhile, uptight producer Sheena (Sheena Chung), dreadlocked sound guy Farid (Farid Azlam), and “I am filming myself at all times” camera guy Audi (Audi Khalis) feel the after-effects in different ways — all of them bad.

Haunted Changi features a scene where a group of paranormal investigators use a little kid as their supernatural-activity barometer, like a canary in a coal mine. Way creepy, and one of the few novel ideas in a film that’s solid without being particularly original. Still, Old Changi Hospital has plenty of built-in atmosphere; a real-real documentary on its history would probably be just as scary as Haunted Changi‘s paranormal fantasy.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD FILM FESTIVAL

June 2–17, $11

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

www.sfindie.com

 

NUGGETS OF GUTS: SHORT TAKES ON ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD 2011

Absentia (Mike Flanagan, U.S., 2010) Daniel has been missing for seven years. His wife, Tricia (Courtney Bell), has dutifully done all the right things, distributing missing-person posters, mourning, seeking therapy, and filling out the paperwork to have him declared dead in absentia. But — heavily pregnant by a new suitor — she’s more than ready to move on with her life. In town to help with this task is her younger sister, Callie (Katie Parker), a former drug addict who nudges Tricia to look for new apartments and work on her social life. But is Daniel really dead? Tricia’s been having freaky visions that suggest he’s still … somewhere. And what, exactly, is haunting that tunnel down the block from Tricia’s front door? Absentia is an indie-horror find: Bell and Parker are totally believable as sisters who stick together despite their complicated relationship, and writer-director Mike Flanagan conjures serious menace from a benign suburban streetscape. Mon/6, 9:20 p.m.; June 12, 5:20 p.m. (Cheryl Eddy)

Apocrypha (Michael Fredianelli, U.S., 2011) Vampires are about as ubiquitous and tired a pop cultural fixture as the Kardashians and it’s getting harder and harder to come up with an original twist on such a shopworn staple. That’s all the more reason why I wanted Apocrypha, a modestly-budgeted, locally-made indie premiering at HoleHead, to make good on its promising premise that vampires aren’t just bloodsuckers, they’re also amnesiacs. Unfortunately, director Michael Fredianelli (who also coproduced, edited, cowrote, and stars in the film) makes a hot mess out of this neat idea thanks to weak dialogue, inept direction, lackluster performances, and a virulent misogynistic streak that’s far more unsettling than the inevitable torrents of blood. Fredianelli plays Griffith Townsend, a man at wit’s end to understand his growing compulsion to bite the women he takes home. Eventually, his path crosses with Maggie (cowriter and coproducer Kat Reichmuth) — an equally confused woman trying to find out how she woke up in Golden Gate Park — with whom he shares a dark, and somewhat obvious, connection. When Townsend’s job as a senior editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, rather than all the neck-biting, requires the greatest suspension of audience disbelief, you know it’s time to go back to the drawing board. June 11, 3:20 p.m. (Matt Sussman)

Auschwitz (Uwe Boll, Germany, 2010) It takes serious cojones or at least a healthy dose of self-delusion, for Uwe Boll to decide he’s the one to give us a realistic depiction of Auschwitz. Boll is often considered cinema’s most reviled director, known more for his schlocky video game adaptations than for his sense of morality. But in Auschwitz, he does his best to reflect on a horrific atrocity, bookending his portrayal of the death camp with a short documentary in which he questions German youth about the Holocaust. The mind-boggling ignorance on display is somewhat effective, but these teenagers likely know about as much as most American high schoolers — if not more. And Boll’s gritty Auschwitz isn’t the answer: it’s hard to watch at times, and it’s certainly more to the point than Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). But Boll shows his trademark lack of restraint, and the legitimately stirring moments are undercut by shock value violence. June 10, 9:20 p.m.; June 13, 7:20 p.m. (Louis Peitzman)

Helldriver (Yoshihiro Nishimura, Japan, 2010) Leave it to Japanese director Yoshihiro Nishimura (2008’s Tokyo Gore Police) to give us a joyous, blood-soaked twist on zombies. Helldriver‘s living dead are distinguished by the antlers growing out of their foreheads — antlers that can be removed and ground into powder for use as a popular street drug. There’s more of a plot to Helldriver than the set-up, but it’s admittedly a little tough to make sense of it with body parts and buckets of blood flying in all directions. Short version: Kika (Yumiko Hara) has to take down her evil stepmother, who has become the Zombie Queen. To say there are casualties along the way is an understatement — nearly every character is flayed, decapitated, or torn into pieces, all with gleeful abandon. However gross Helldriver may be, it’s an awful lot of fun, an over-the-top, distinctly Japanese reinvention of the genre. Fri/3 and June 13, 9:20 p.m. (Peitzman)

The Mole Man of Belmont Avenue (Mike Bradecich and John LaFlamboy, U.S., 2010) What happens when a pair of slacker brothers (writers-directors-stars Mike Bradecich and John LaFlamboy) inherit a dilapidated apartment building with a perilously low occupancy rate? What if that building also has a pet-eating monster scrambling between its walls? And what’s that ever-hungry monster gonna eat once all the pets are gone? Dilemmas — all of them absurd, some of them gory, and most of them hilarious — abound in this clever, fast-paced cracker featuring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund in a cameo as a cranky, horny tenant. Chicago-bred comedians Bradecich and LaFlamboy have Simon Pegg-Nick Frost levels of chemistry. Is it too much to hope that the dreaded Mole Man will return so there’ll be a sequel? Sun/5, 7:20 p.m.; Tues/7, 9:20 p.m. (Eddy)

The Oregonian (Calvin Lee Reeder, U.S., 2010) More an experiment in tedium than terror, Calvin Lee Reeder’s The Oregonian will look familiar to anyone who has seen their share of David Lynch movies. Only unlike Lynch, Reeder offers little in the way of narrative or structure to counterbalance all the creepy randomness he throws at us. One can truly sympathize with the film’s nameless heroine — a frightened young woman who, upon waking up in a station wagon covered in blood, embarks on a hellish journey through the Oregon countryside — for in watching The Oregonian in its entirety the audience also undergoes a seemingly endless slog, only the succession of borrowed gestures merely exhausts rather than frightens. If you really want some good backwoods scares, watch Gummo (1997) or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) instead. Sat/4, 9:20 p.m.; June 16, 7:20 p.m. (Sussman)

Hundreds Protest Wells Fargo Shareholder Meeting in SF

Mary Magee
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6
Hundreds Protest Wells Fargo Shareholder Meeting in SF

The New Bottom Line, a national campaign to hold banks accountable for foreclosures, kicked off in San Francisco this week, as hundredsmarched through the Financial District to demand that Wells Fargo change corporate policies that bankrupt families, dismantle neighborhoods, and empty public coffers.
During the bank’s annual May 3 shareholder meeting, a group of homeowners and clergy addressed Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf to demand a foreclosure moratorium.
According to protest organizers, which include Contra Costa Interfaith, ACCE (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment) and other members of the New Bottom Line Campaign, unlike other national banks, Wells Fargo has not changed its foreclosure procedures despite reports of “robo-signing” and other foreclosure irregulalities.
“Since 2005, I have been fighting Wells for wrongful foreclosure,” San Leandro resident Donna Vieira said in a press statement. “But through this process, I have learned that I am not alone. A quarter of foreclosures in this country happen right here in California and 700,000 families are in foreclosure right now. We need these banks to have a new bottom line that includes investing in our communities.”
The New Bottom Line Campaign notes that, according to the U.S. Departments of Treasury and Housing and Urban Development, 350,169 Wells Fargo homeowners were eligible for the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) by the end of 2009. But as of Feb 2011, only 77,402 homeowners have received permanent modifications.
Protestors note this only amounts to a 22 percent modification rate, more than two years after the HAMP program began. They also charge that Wells Fargo has canceled 118,697 trial modifications and denied 175,336 homeowners from accessing HAMP.But during this same two-year period, Wells Fargo received nearly $43.7 billion in federal bailout funds, according to a study by the nonpartisan think tank, Nomi Prins of Demos.And in 2010, Wells Fargo reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it paid its CEO John Stumpf more than $17 million, including a $14 million bonus.
Protestors also claimed that, over the last ten years, Wells Fargo has paid the lowest worldwide tax rate of the top five biggest banks and did not pay federal taxes in 2009.
Protestors said the May 3 action was supported by a coalition of community organizations, congregations, labor unions, and individuals working to challenge established big bank interests on behalf of struggling and middle-class communities.
“Together, we work to restructure Wall Street to help American families build wealth, close the country’s growing income inequality gap and advance a vision for how our economy can better serve the many rather than the few,” campaign organizers stated.
The New Bottom Line campaign, whic includes National People’s Action, PICO National Network, Alliance for a Just Society, ACCE, and Industrial Areas Foundation of the Southeast (IAF-SE), is making five main demands of Wells Fargo.


1.KEEP FAMILIES IN THEIR HOMES:
“We are demanding that Wells Fargo establish a moratorium on all foreclosures until it negotiates with our coalition to establish comprehensive reforms to their loan modification practices, including offering principal reduction; affordable, fixed interest rates; and provide proof of ownership of the loan,” NBL said in a press release. “We are also calling on Wells Fargo to cease all illegal evictions of tenants in foreclosed properties and commit to working with real estate companies and servicers who follow local and state tenant protection laws.”


2. STOP PREDATORY LENDING:
“We are demanding that Wells Fargo stop financing predatory payday lending companies and stop providing predatory payday loans to their own customers,” NBL stated.


3. REBUILD OUR NEIGHBORHOODS:
“Cities and counties estimate that it costs approximately $34,000 per each foreclosed home that becomes vacant and a potential blight on our communities,” NBL continued. “We are demanding you maintain and PAY the fines on your blighted properties and help share in the cost to our cities and counties starting with Cities and Counties throughout California with Foreclosure Blight and Building Registration Ordinances.”


4. PAY YOUR FAIR SHARE:
“Wells Fargo needs to stop exploiting loop‐holes in property tax laws and federal tax shelters to avoid paying its fair share of local, state and federal taxes,” NBL stated.


5. RESPECT HUMAN RIGHTS:
“We are calling on Wells Fargo to stop investing in the GEO Group and other corporations that are profiting off of immigrant detention centers and private prisons that detain immigrants and separate families,” NBL concluded.


During the May 3 action, eight protestors were reportedly arrested for civil disobedience.

ACLU, Guardian sue over secret death drugs

Zelda Bronstein
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1
ACLU, Guardian sue over secret death drugs

The ACLU and the Bay Guardian have filed a federal lawsuit demanding the release of secret documents related to the scramble in California and other states to secure lethal-injection drugs for executions. And we’ve asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction ordering the Drug Enforcement Administration to release the documents quickly.


Both Arizona and Nebraska have recently scheduled executions — and apparently they plan to use drugs that were not obtained in the United States, may have been imported illegally and may not meet American medical standards.


Here’s the ACLU’s statement:


“The DEA has already acknowledged that the public has an urgent need to view records regarding states’ efforts to import execution drugs and the role of federal officials in that process,” said Linda Lye, staff attorney with the ACLU-NC. “We are dismayed that for nearly four months DEA has not released a single document.  The public has a right to these records before imported drugs that may have been illegally acquired are used to execute another inmate.”


Here’s the background:


On January 4, 2011, the ACLU-NC and The Guardian submitted FOIA requests to three federal agencies seeking records related to the federal government’s role in assisting – or failing to oversee – efforts by states to acquire controlled substances from outside the United States to carry out executions. The requests, submitted to the DEA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), sought documents that would reveal whether state officials violated any laws in the states’ scramble to acquire execution drugs and the role of federal agents in the process.


The ACLU-NC and The Guardian sought these records after public records disclosed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) revealed that California prison officials engaged in a worldwide “secret mission” to acquire sodium thiopental, a controlled substance used in California’s execution process that is no longer legally available in the U.S. The records from the CDCR and other state prisons eventually revealed that six states imported sodium thiopental from Dream Pharma, a drug distributor that operates out of the back of a driving school in the United Kingdom. Records also revealed that two other states imported a controlled substance purporting to be sodium thiopental from an Indian Company that states publicly it is not authorized to import drugs into the U.S.


The DEA granted the ACLU-NC and The Guardian expedited processing of the FOIA request submitted in January. In so doing, the DEA acknowledged that the records relate to an issue of significant public importance and that the public had an urgent need for the information contained in the records. Yet, for nearly four months, the DEA failed to produce any records and failed to even provide a timeline for when records would be produced.


In the interim, based on questions surrounding the drug’s legality, the DEA has taken possession of the sodium thiopental imported from Dream Pharma from five states. This includes Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, which imported the controlled substance directly from the United Kingdom. DEA also took possession of drugs from and Kentucky and Alabama, which acquired the illegal drug from other states. Only Arizona, California, and Arkansas continue to maintain possession of drugs imported from Dream Pharma, while Nebraska and South Dakota continue to possess drugs imported from India.


I’ll keep you posted.

Leno forces GOP hand

Zelda Bronstein
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5
Leno forces GOP hand

For whatever tactical reason (or other inexplicable Jerry Brown rationale), the governor has refused to tell Californians what he would cut if he can’t get his tax extensions approved. And the Republicans refuse to say what they would cut instead of letting the taxes continue.


So Sen. Mark Leno did it for them. Leno asked the Legislative Analyst to explain what $13 billion in budget cuts — the “no-new-taxes” budget the GOP wants — might look like.


It’s really, really scary.


For starters, take $4.5 billion away from K-12 education. That means the end to class-size limits for K-3. It’s a huge deal: The Gray Davis measure that limited those classes to 20 students probably did more than anything in decades to save public education in California. You want 40 kids in a kindergarten class with one teacher? You think any of them will be learning to read? Oh, and the state could save $700 million by delaying kindergarten for kids; guess who that impacts? Those kids are going to spend more time in pre-school which either (a) is subsidized by the taxpayers or (b) comes out of the hides of working parents.


Oh, and we’d eliminate food stamps for noncitizens. So people won’t be able to feed their kids. You think crime might become more of a problem? But wait: No room in the prisons.


Then we put college out of the financial reach of middle-class kids and expect to build a 21st century economy. And that’s just the beginning.


Leno deserves thanks for putting this list out; it ought to be in the ballot handbook along with the proposal to continue (not RAISE, just continue) some taxes. And we should all be asking every Republican in Sacramento: Is this what you want? If not, give us an alternative. 


 

I solved the state’s budget problem

Zelda Bronstein
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41
I solved the state’s budget problem

And you can, too! The Sacramento Bee has a handy tool to evaluate options for closing the budget gap — and unlike some of the other versions of this I’ve seen, it actually offers a wide range of revenue options. I cleared up the $26 billion shortfall without cutting anything at all (except prisons; I checked the box for letting out low-level offenders early. I’d go even further, and repeal three strikes and the death penalty, but those options weren’t on the table at the Bee).


But you can see from this that the state doesn’t have to be broke, failing, in collapse. All we have to do is fix the revenue problem (and yeah, the state does have a revenue problem) and bingo — problem solved. In fact, I managed to get the state a billion-dollar surplus.


Go ahead, check it out.

Joining the journey

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Joining the journey

news@sfbg.com

Malcolm X once said “Tomorrow is for those who prepare for it today.” And today, Malcolm Shabazz, the eldest grandson of Malcolm X, says he is trying to carry on the storied legacy of the radical advocate for African American civil rights and leading voice for the Nation of Islam.

Shabazz, 26, was recently in San Francisco discussing that legacy, as well as his own spiritual and personal journeys, which included making the pilgrimage to Mecca for the hajj in November, a requirement for Muslims that his grandfather also undertook in 1964, the year before he was assassinated.

It was the latest chapter in a long and complicated story. At the age of 12, Shabazz started a fire in his Yonkers home that left his grandmother (Malcolm X’s wife, Betty) with burns over 80 percent of her body, which led to her death a few days later. Shabazz has spent more of his adolescence and adulthood in prisons and other institutions than in the real world.

After serving four years in juvenile correctional facilities for arson and manslaughter charges for the fire, Shabazz pleaded guilty to attempted robbery in 2002. He served three and a half years in prison for that crime and then went back to prison months after his release for punching a hole in a store window.

Although he is often portrayed in media accounts as disturbed, Shabazz seemed calm and reflective during a two-hour interview with the Guardian. A soft-spoken man with few but well-chosen words, Shabazz is not unafraid to speak his mind about the state of the country and his grandfather’s legacy.

“If you want to know anything, then go back to the source,” he told us, which is what we did, reviewing his long, twisted journey to Mecca.

As the oldest male heir to Malcolm X, Shabazz was born into a fascinating family. Media accounts have documented him as a troubled young man, shuttled back and forth among family members. Like his grandfather, he spent time on the streets and in jail. Like his grandfather, it was behind bars that he finally regained his faith and found himself fully immersed in Islam. Shabazz explains that while he was born into Islam, he finally began to fee its presence in his life during his most recent incarceration period. While quarantined in Attica Correctional Facility in New York, Shabazz explained that he “didn’t have any hygiene supplies, I didn’t have any reading materials.”

But it was during his time in Attica that he met another prisoner — half Mexican, half Iranian — who identified himself as a Shia Muslim. “He asked me ‘Are you in a lie? Or are you a real Muslim?’ ” Shabazz recalled. He answered that he was a real Muslim. “He gave me reading materials to read in my cell.”

According to Shabazz, this was the man who discussed and poured over religious texts with him during their time together, and the one who inspired him to convert from the Sunni sect to Shia.

“I was raised a Sunni, everyone in my family was Sunni,” he said. There is much antagonism between the two sects, so his conversion caused a backlash akin to when his grandfather left the Nation of Islam in 1964 and declared himself a Sunni, which let to his assassination the following year.

When word spread of Shabazz’s conversion, various Sunni leaders and community members expressed their discomfort with what he had done. He explained that many people wrote to him asking him, “How could you become a Shia?”

After his release, Shabazz decided to move to Syria to study at an Islamic institute and then spent the following eight months teaching English to children. “I came home from prison [and] I wanted to get away for a little while,” he explained.

After arriving back from Syria in April, Shabazz went to Miami and worked on his memoirs, which he said are due to come out this May. The book discusses Shabazz’s life and tribulations, noting that “there are misconceptions that I would like to clear up.”

Once he returned to the United States, Shabazz decided to follow his grandfather’s footsteps and make the pilgrimage to Mecca, where, he said “the air felt different.” But he also explained how the people he saw on the pilgrimage seemed less willing to impose their rules on Americans.

“It seems like they have more fear [of] Americans than they do for Allah,” he said. “If they know you’re American, I don’t know what it is, but they leave you alone.”

Shabazz said he had the experience of a lifetime and proved his intense vigor for the Islamic faith. He circled the Kaa’ba, and despite swollen feet and a bad case of the flu, carried on his pilgrimage like a true believer. “I never saw this many people at one place at one time. It was much more of a struggle than I had anticipated,” he said. “But everything was earned.”

Decades before, his grandfather Malcolm X made his mark on American culture, taking a radical approach to demanding equal rights. When asked if his grandfather would admire President Barack Obama if he were alive today, Shabazz replied, “Definitely not. To me, Obama is no different than [George W.] Bush.”

He said that democracy in this country is a sham, an illusion effectively perpetuated by the ruling elite. “The U.S. is a land of smoke and mirrors, and they’re the best at doing what they do,” he said. “My grandfather? Hah. He wouldn’t have supported any of those dudes.”

Although Shabazz doesn’t particularly admire Obama so far, he does hope that the election of the first African-American president will “boost the esteem of the young black youth.” And he said that the messages of Malcolm X are more important today than ever.

“My grandfather once stated that there are only two types of power that are respected within the United States of America — economic power and political power — and he went on to explain how social power derives from these two. Unfortunately, the majority of the people [today] are economically illiterate and politically naive. They believe most of what they see on television and read in the papers. I say believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear.”

For his own personal politics, Shabazz said change begins with education and unity. “[Education] could be done through music, spoken word poetry, art, preaching from the pulpit, or putting in physical work right in the trenches,” Shabazz said.

In terms of unity, he cited the European Union, explaining that it is an organization “where nations that don’t necessarily like each other [but] have at least enough common sense to come together for a cause, to achieve a common goal, or to stand up against a common enemy. When it’s time to put niggers in check, they know how to come together.”

Almost 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, Shabazz sees growing potential for Islam to exert an influence in the U.S. “After 9/11, a lot of people did not know too much [about Islam]. But they started to investigate and learn more.”

Although many people’s first reaction was to turn away from the religion of jihad, Shabazz feels that many people also felt the need to educate themselves on the matter — and found that there is much more to Islam than the mainstream media portrays. And for a young man who has already led a turbulent life, Shabazz is seeking something basic from his newfound faith: “I want a peace of mind.”

Secrets of the state’s death-drug deal

Zelda Bronstein
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Secrets of the state’s death-drug deal

After weeks of grilling the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) on the source of their newly acquired sodium thiopental, we are finally getting some answers.

Deputy Press Secretary of the CDCR Terry Thornton verified to the Associated Press yesterday that the state has acquired 521 grams of the lethal injection component from a British manufacturer, Archimedes Phrama.


Thornton said that the state paid $36,415 for the drug, “its chemicals, all legal and processing fees, and shipping and handling.”


So CDCR has finally given the public some information to work with — although many of the details are still sketchy. We filed a formal public records request in October asking for information on the procurement, and the agency still hasn’t turned over the documents.


But at least we know that California has obtained its death drug from overseas. And apparently, British officials aren’t thrilled about it. No European nation has the death penalty, and officials across the pond are dubious about helping other nations kill their own citizens.


Earlier this week, Britain’s secretary of state for business, Vince Cable, issued an order adding sodium thiopental to the list of items that must be licensed for export — effectively banning its sale to institutions that will use it for executions. Although Cable issued the order after Arizona inmate Jeffrey Landrigan’s execution on October 26, the British media commended him for putting an end to the export of the death drug.


According to the UK Guardian, Cable realized that the sodium thiopental “was not being sent there to help save lives, only to take them.”


The London paper also noted that since California uses just 3 grams of the drug to execute each individual— and keeps an additional 3 grams as backup — the state has acquired enough of the stuff to kill 86 people.


California’s executions have been on hold until the state could acquire more of the drug — and the legality of using thiopental in the first place is still a matter of debate. And given the fact that this new batch will expire in 2014, why does the state need so much of the drug for just three years? Does CDCR really expect to kill almost 30 people a year, one every 10 days or so — between now and 2014?


Actually, that’s not even remotely possible — executions involve long legal proceedings, and there are no more than a handful of cases that could possible reach that state in the next 36 months. So will California be reselling this stuff to other states? Will we become the default death-drug dealer for America? Who in Sacramento approved that policy? We couldn’t get an answer from Thornton on that.


Thornton told AP that the state’s fresh shipment is currently on the East Coast waiting to be approved by the FDA, and is already authorized by the DEA to be sent to the prisons.Facing lawsuits from the ACLU, the CDCR must soon release its documents, which include most of the details of the drug’s acquisition.


 “We’ve been as transparent as we can be,” Thornton said.


Well, not exactly.


 

California’s secret death drug

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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California’s secret death drug

news@sfbg.com

California was forced to postpone the execution of convicted murderer Albert Greenwood Brown in September because the state had run out of sodium thiopental, part of the death drug cocktail used in lethal injections.

The last batch of the drug expired Oct. 1 and the manufacturer won’t have more until 2011. So as of early October, all executions had been postponed until next year.

But on Oct. 6 the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced in a court filing that it had obtained 12 grams of sodium thiopental, also known as sodium pentothal, with an expiration date of 2014. That could mean some swifter executions.

But it also raises a critical legal question: where did the drug come from, and did the state violate federal or international laws obtaining it?

CDCR isn’t talking. Terry Thornton, deputy press secretary, refused to identify the source of the newly acquired drug. But it clearly didn’t come from the manufacturer Hospira. The company, the only U.S. manufacturer of sodium pentothol, says it has none available and is in no rush to sell it to the CDCR. In a statement released by Hospira, company spokesperson Daniel Rosenberg announced that “the drug is not indicated for capital punishment and Hospira does not support its use in this procedure.”

Natasha Minsker, death penalty policy director for the ACLU of Northern California, said it would be tricky for the state to buy the drug from anyone else. “Hospira is the only approved manufacturer in the U.S.,” she said.

But there’s a hint of where California’s supply might have come from. Arizona also recently obtained some of the death drug — Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard told the Arizona Republic that it was delivered from an unidentified source in Britain.

But the British press has raised questions about the deal. No European country has the death penalty and both British and European Union laws bar exporting for profit materials used for executions.

Both the Arizona and California batches have the same expiration date.

Ty Alper, associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at Boalt Hall School of Law, explained that to his knowledge, “California got [the sodium thiopental] from a foreign source,” He raised questions about the possible risks of obtaining the drug from an unknown outfit.

“If the drug is not FDA approved, could it have contaminants in it? Could it perform differently?” Alper asked. “If that drug doesn’t work right then, everybody knows the execution will be horribly painful and torturous.”

So far, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t bought that argument. Oct. 25 the court voted 5-4 to clear the way for Arizona to execute Jeffrey Landrigan, a convicted murderer. “There is no evidence in the record to suggest that the drug obtained from a foreign source is unsafe … There was no showing that the drug was unlawfully obtained, nor was there an offer of proof to that effect,” the unsigned opinion stated.

Landrigan was executed Oct 27.

However, we can’t find any evidence that California obtained the drug legally. There are no FDA-approved importers, and federal law strictly limits the ability of anyone to bring powerful drugs directly into the country. Title 21 United States Code of the Controlled Substances Act, Section(b) states: “It shall be unlawful to import into the customs territory of the United States from any place outside thereof (but within the United States), or to import into the United States from any place outside thereof, any nonnarcotic controlled substance in Schedule III, IV, or V, unless such nonnarcotic controlled substance … (1) imported for medical, scientific, or other legitimate uses”

Sodium pentothal is a Schedule III drug.

Executing a human being clearly doesn’t count as a “medical or scientific” use — no doctor is involved in administering the lethal drugs. Of course, there might be an opinion from the state attorney general concluding that killing a condemned prisoner is an “other legitimate use” but the office won’t produce one. When we asked if obtaining the drug from a foreign supplier was legal, Christine Gasparac, a spokesperson for Attorney General Jerry Brown, stated in an e-mail that “You’ll have to contact the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for a response to your questions” and that “this office was not involved in the procurement of the drug.”

CDCR hasn’t presented any import license, purchase order, chain of custody documents, or anything else to show where the deadly stuff originated. We’ve filed a written request under the California Public Records Act for the data, but have not received a reply.

That bothers state Sen. Mark Leno (D-SF), who chairs the Public Safety Committee. “I am concerned that a state agency, using taxpayer money, is buying something and refusing to disclose where the money went,” he told us.

Procuring sodium thiopental may become even harder in the future — it has only limited use in medicine.

Dr. Philip Lumb, chair of department of anesthesiology at the University of Southern California medical school, said that over the past few years the drug Propofol has replaced sodium thiopental in the majority of surgical cases. (Propofol is the same drug Michael Jackson overdosed on.)

“It is still available — we still have it,” Lumb said. “It is used sometimes for brain procedures.”

But if Hospira isn’t making much and doesn’t want to sell it to prisons for executions, and European companies can get in trouble for exporting it, California may find that a drug it relies on to kill people isn’t available from any legitimate source. Which means the custodians of our prison system could, in effect, be buying lethal drugs on the black market.

They put other people in prison for that.

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