taxes

Occupy and the State of the Union

Zelda Bronstein
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Occupy and the State of the Union

Have all of the Occupy actions made any difference? Gee — I wonder.


I wonder if a president who acted a year ago as if economic justice wasn’t even an issue in this country would have devoted a substantial part of his State of the Union speech to fairness in tax policy. I wonder if he would have said this:


Right now, we’re poised to spend nearly $1 trillion more on what was supposed to be a temporary tax break for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.


Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we want to keep our investments in everything else –- like education and medical research; a strong military and care for our veterans?


Or this:


Tax reform should follow the Buffett Rule. If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes. And my Republican friend Tom Coburn is right: Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires. In fact, if you’re earning a million dollars a year, you shouldn’t get special tax subsidies or deductions. On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up. You’re the ones struggling with rising costs and stagnant wages. You’re the ones who need relief.


Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.


or this:


No American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax.


Now: Not saying any of that is going to happen right away, or even that Obama will put tax reform at the top of the agenda. And changing the tax code to charge people like Mitt Romney 30 percent is nowhere near enough; in the 1960s, those people paid 80 percent of their marginal dollars in federal taxes. The Repubs in Congress won’t let any of this happen anyway.


But all of the major newspapers (which a year ago didn’t even know how to spell economic injustice) made his pitch for greater fairness in the economy the lead of their reports and all of the headlines talked about it. And when pollster Stan Greenberg tracked the responses of Democrats, Republicans and independents to the speech, the vast majority were pleased by and agreed with the commments that I cited above. That’s not just 80 percent of the Dems but 70 percent of the GOP voters.


The other thing Obama said — in indirectly — is that government is important. Beyond the flag-waving salute to the troops and the talk about the Navy Seals (Yay! We killed a guy! No arrest, no trial, just summary execution!), Obama was setting the tone for a debate over the role of the public sector in America. He talked about building the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge and the interstate highway system. He talked about the importance of public support for research. That’s a direct contradiction to what the Republicans are saying about making government much smaller and less significant in people’s lives. I wonder what happens if the Republican candidate and Obama get out of the platitudes are actually have that discussion this fall.


Of course, he also said the solution to most business problems was tax cuts and incentives, which is not only GOP dogma but silly, since tax cuts for business almost never have the intendent effect. Tax penalties won’t keep companies from moving offshore (although I still support the idea), and tax cuts won’t bring them back.


It’s notable that Obama didn’t mention corporate personhood, which is going to be a huge part of the Occupy agenda this year. And that’s something that could actually change business behavior. Corporate charters are granted by the government — and with a few changes in law, could be revoked by the government, too. Screw your workers, cheat on taxes and move jobs to low-wage non-union areas where children work 14 hours a day making your products? Guess we’ll have to revoke your corporate charter. No more protection for personal liability for the owners and shareholders. Too bad.


And while his populist stuff struck a chord, the energy and environmental policy suggestions were just horrible. Yeah, I’m for ending tax breaks for oil companies — but opening up 75 percent of the potential offshore areas to drilling? Encouraging more natural gas drilling? Not much in the way of serious talk about investing a fraction of that money in renewables?


Oh, and I love this: Obama’s going to force natural gas drillers to “disclose the chemicals they use.” That’s going to keep us safe, yesiree. Thank you, mister driller, for telling me how your poisoning my water. Not that I can do anything about it, of course; you can keep right on going. But now, thanks to our bold president, I know about it.


Occupy the natural gas wells. I’m ready to go.


 

Pay to park

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Pay to park

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has hailed the success of its SFpark program — which uses high-tech meters and demand-variable pricing to manage on-street parking — noting that expired meter citations are down and meter revenue is up. The resulting 11 percent net increase in revenue  is all going to improve Muni. So transit improves, drivers get more spots and fewer tickets — everybody wins.

[CLARIFICATION (2/1): The new meters had an 11 percent net revenue increase compared to the old meters, but overall net revenues from citations and meters was still down by 3 percent.]

But the SFMTA has run into a hornet’s nest of opposition with its latest proposal to expand SFpark into the Northeast Mission District, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, and Mission Bay, largely because the plan involves placing meters on streets where parking is now free. And even those who don’t object to paying for parking say the SFMTA has bungled this process.

The problem isn’t just what critics say are arrogance and dubious outreach efforts by agency officials. It may be that the SFMTA pursued too many goals at once, mixing them in ways that muddled the message. Or it may just be that charging for parking will always anger drivers, no matter how it’s proposed.

The agency wants to discourage driving — particularly cruising for parking, hence SFpark’s “Circle Less, Live More” slogan — to speed up Muni and reduce traffic congestion. But that also means charging for street parking so cars won’t just sit in those spaces, and that involves a complicated balancing act in mixed use neighborhoods.

Residents, many employers, and commuters want all-day street parking, preferably free and easy. But most business owners want enough parking turnover so their customers can find a spot. City policies call for prioritizing residents’ needs, and the SFMTA needs money to fund and expand Muni service.

Meeting all of those needs isn’t easy. But over the last couple of months, the SFMTA’s effort to expand its successful and popular SFpark program have managed to turn thousands of residents angrily against that program, the agency, and the proposition that people shouldn’t expect free parking.

 

COMMUNITY OUTRAGE

Architect John Lum and artist-designer Miranda Caroligne didn’t know each other a couple months ago, but now they’re helping to lead a movement that is uniting neighborhood groups in the Mission, Dogpatch, and Potrero Hill against the parking meter proposals.

“You have an agency that is not listening at all to the community. That’s fascism!” declares Lum. He’s actually an amiable and soft-spoken young guy who employs 10 people at his architecture firm near 17th and Capp streets, but this issue really gets his blood boiling.

And Lum isn’t alone, as the Jan. 13 public meeting before an SFMTA hearing officer showed. Not only did everyone who streamed to the microphone voice opposition to the proposals, but they usually did so in angry and accusatory ways, saying it would destroy businesses, punish the poor, and result in conditions that are simply unworkable and intolerable. And they said the SFMTA simply doesn’t care.

“If you’re a PDR business,” Caroligne said, referring to the Production, Distribution, and Repair businesses whose last bastion is some of the targeted areas, “you’re never going to get people to work at a place that doesn’t have parking…This proposal will push them out.”

There are myriad ways that the plans are flawed, say their critics: Meters were proposed on some residential streets in initial plans, despite SFMTA policies to the contrary; traffic surveys had too small a sampling and weren’t realistic; residential permit districts would be replaced by meters, or meters would be placed where districts might work better; transit service on Potrero Hill is too bad to expect people to use it; live-work spaces were inappropriately treated like retail outlets; and meters near the 22nd Street Caltrain station could actually discourage the use of public transit.

“There’s not that much disagreement, but where there is, it’s really important,” said Tony Kelly, president of the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association. “I’m someone who supports parking management, and I’m frustrated that the MTA is so tone deaf with this. We’ve been through a lot of fake public outreach efforts and this is looking like one of those.”

Janet Carpinelli, president of the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association, said her members feel like the SFMTA is ramming this through without regard for the needs or input of that neighborhood.

“The real issue is it’s a very big inconvenience to the businesses and residents in this neighborhood and it’s not really helping anything. It’s just a revenue grab by the MTA,” she said.

Potrero Hill resident Jim Wilkins was so outraged by the proposal to install meters along Pennsylvania Street outside his home that he started an online petition against the proposals that has so far garnered about 1,300 signatures. “We’re forming an organization to resist these proposals,” he told us.

Lum was already a member of the 17th Street Coalition, which formed in 2010 to oppose the renewal of a liquor license at the local Gas’n’Shop, but more recently organized opposition to the meter proposal. It attracted Caroligne, and now they’ve formed a new group, Northeast Mission Neighbors, which held a joint organizing meeting with the Dogpatch and Potrero groups on Jan. 23. They’re all determined to delay and modify the SFMTA’s proposal, which had been scheduled for adoption by the SFMTA Board of Directors Feb. 7.

Lum said the proposed changes are tough to accept: “I don’t think this is about free parking, it’s about living and working in a community with certain things and now those things are changing.”

 

CHANGE IS HARD

The biggest target of critics’ ire is Jay Primus, who runs the SFpark program for the SFMTA. He maintains that he’s done extensive outreach and gathered community input that has shaped the plans. “These are still proposals and nothing has been approved yet,” he told us.

For example, Wilkins told us his campaign continued even after the meters in front of his house were eliminated from the proposal last month. Primus also noted the proposed meters allow for all-day parking at just 25 cents an hour in most places, so it isn’t really such an inconvenience or financial hardship. And Primus just announced that the Feb. 7 hearing is being pushed back by at least two weeks to heed more community input.

But most of the opposition to the proposals isn’t surprising, and Primus thinks it comes more from the idea of charging for street parking than with the specifics of the proposal.

“Parking is always an emotional and delicate issue in San Francisco, as it is in most cities,” Primus said, citing protests against charging for parking going back to when the first meters were installed in 1947. “This has happened at every block that has gotten meters.”

But now, there are even more benefits and ease of use with modern meters, which motorists can pay with a credit card or even remotely. Variable pricing is also used to ensure more parking based on demand, although it’s being kept at a very low rate in areas where businesses or residents still need all-day parking.

“If people are opposed to paying 25 cents per hour, the lowest rate in the city, then they are opposed to paying for parking,” Primus said. He said it’s a matter of equity among citizens: “There’s nothing equitable about providing parking for free and asking people to pay $4 for a round trip Muni ride.”

That’s a notion that is echoed by others who say it’s time for motorists to start paying their fair share.

“Everybody wants something for nothing. We all want that. Nobody wants to pay for parking, not even me,” Don Shoup, the UCLA professor who wrote the influential book The High Cost of Free Parking, told us. He later added, “That whining you hear is the sound of change.”

At a time when governments are hurting for revenue to provide basic services — among them, maintaining extensive roadway systems for motorists whose taxes don’t come anywhere near covering their societal impacts — he said it just doesn’t make sense to continue subsidizing the storage of automobiles.

“San Francisco has some of the most valuable land on earth. You have expensive housing for people and free parking for cars. It’s not surprising that San Francisco has homeless people and traffic congestion,” Shoup said. “There was never a city that is so liberal about other people’s affairs and so conservative about its own affairs.”

But Shoup did agree with critics that the real goal of managing parking isn’t to discourage driving, although he applauds the SFpark program for using its increased revenue on public transit, which he thinks makes sense from a social justice perspective.

Jason Henderson, a professor of geography at San Francisco State and author of an upcoming book on the politics of parking and mobility, goes even further than Shoup in saying that San Francisco should use its parking policies to discourage driving. But at the very least, Henderson said it is counterproductive to offer free parking.

“The city is giving away valuable real estate with all of this free and underpriced curbside parking at a time when the city’s transportation infrastructure is crumbling and essential city services for parks, after school programs, and libraries are constantly being cut. And here we have thousands of acres of real estate just being given away,” Henderson told us.

“If anything, it needs to be done citywide so that it’s judicious and level, so that merchants won’t say that people won’t come to their neighborhood because they can go to a different neighborhood where there’s free parking.”

Primus said there is a particularly strong need to manage parking around Mission Bay and the North Mission, where much of the city’s growth is occurring.

“In a way, the SFMTA is catching up with the growth of the city. These are some of the last remaining areas that are residential-commercial mixed use areas with no parking management,” Primus said.

Kelly agrees that time has come, but he doesn’t think the SFMTA has helped its case, particularly given the emotions surrounding the issue and the need to maintain public support for improved transit service.

“They’ve been spending all their waking hours in the last couple years pissing people off over parking meters, do you really think people will then support their revenue proposals?” Kelly questioned.

Lum and Caroligne both said the SFMTA should have been willing to make the fundamental argument to people that the days of free parking are coming to an end.

“That’s where a lot of the anger is coming from, you’re doing this for all these reasons that don’t make sense and treating us like children,” Caroligne said, although she also added, “I agree with you that there would still be some outrage, even if the outreach had been better.”

Legal, not legal

Andrew Lam
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Legal, not legal

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE It’s been a weird year to start a marijuana column. Shortly after we started Herbwise, which was intended to be our weekly look at marijuana culture and events, politics reared its ugly head, rendering it necessary to go to hearings at the State Building, call up California Assembly members, and occasionally wade through seas of legalese. Such is the state of cannabis under ongoing federal prohibition, but it’s been a particularly dramatic year.

And in some moments, news and culture reporting melded together in the marijuana world. Take, for example, the case of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, which is often called the largest dispensary in the world (it is certainly the largest in California). After years of painstakingly crafting a working relationship with city government, the business was heavily audited by the IRS. The federal agency decided Harborside — and 40 other California dispensaries — fell under the jurisdiction of Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, which denies the right for businesses involved in illegal drug trafficking to claim standard business expenditures. The collective now owes $2.4 million in back taxes, an amount that founder Steve DeAngelo asserts will bankrupt it if his business is forced to pay up.

Despite the ever-growing acceptance of the plant in the United States — a Gallup poll put the number at 50 percent in the fall of 2011 — medical marijuana is under attack by the federal government. Last fall, US Attorney for Northern California Melinda Haag sent out letters to the landlords of roughly a dozen Bay Area dispensaries threatening them with civil forfeiture, or possibly four decades in prison, if they failed to move this “trafficking” off their property within 45 days. The letters targeted dispensaries considered to be in a school zone.

Most left without a fight. In San Francisco, the Tenderloin’s Divinity Tree Patients Wellness Cooperative, the Market Street Collective on Upper Market, and the Mission District’s Medithrive and Mr. Nice Guy were among the businesses that shut their doors, some completely and some to transition into delivery-only services. [UPDATE: Attorney Matt Kumin tells the Guardian that Divinity Tree and Medithrive have filed a “coordinated federal lawsuit” through his office in protestation of the closures]

Fairfax’s sole dispensary, Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana, was forced to close after 15 years of legal operation overseen by long-time cannabis activist Lynette Shaw. The 7,500-person Marin County berg’s town council passed a resolution supporting the Alliance, which served as a symbol of popular support for legal cannabis in a county beset with some of the highest breast cancer rates in the country.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and Sen. Mark Leno have been the most outspoken California politicians in coming out against the federal government’s meddling with the state’s cannabis. At a press conference at San Francisco’s State Building in October 2011, Ammiano announced his frustration that the feds would “upset the will of the people” by curtailing safe patient access. Proud to be an elected gay official, he promised to continue to crusade for an issue that he says disproportionately affects the LGBTQ community.

One of the steps Ammiano took was to meet with Haag to discuss what could be done to assuage her concerns with the industry. “That was very, very disappointing,” Ammiano commented on this initial talk. In a recent phone interview with the Guardian, he remembered that Haag implied that the order was coming from above, from high up in the Obama Administration.

Ammiano doubts her assertion that she had little discretion in the matter. “She said she was only doing what the boss was telling her to do. We had a hard time with that.”

He does think that the Obama Administration is sending its attorneys mixed messages — case in point, US Attorney General Eric Holder’s repeated comments that federal interference in state-legal marijuana operations would be “a low priority.” Ammiano also makes the connection between the attacks on cannabis and the self-sustaining industries behind the War on Drugs. “The DEA, some of the diehards, this is like a jobs program for them,” he said.

His meeting with California Attorney General Kamala Harris went more smoothly. Ammiano says Harris, who voiced cautious support for the industry last fall, was eager for a more comprehensive regulatory system to be put into place, but she supported Proposition 215 — the 1996 measure that legalized medical marijuana in California — on principle.

Faced with an ambiguous future, medical cannabis’ proponents — politicians, activists, entrepreneurs, and patients — are putting forth plans for just such a system. This year will be the playing field for a passel of campaigns to take medical marijuana out of the under-supervised arena in which it’s found itself.

Three ballot initiative campaigns seek to address the issue. Two — Regulate Marijuana Like Wine and Repeal Prohibition — would legalize cannabis use for adults across the board. Another, which has perhaps the most likely chance to succeed in the $2 million process of getting onto the ballot, is being put forth by patient advocacy group Americans for Safe Access, the United Food and Commercial Workers (the union that represents many cannabis workers in California), and marijuana collectives. It’s called the Medical Marijuana Regulation, Control, and Taxation Act.

“We decided to focus on medical because we figured that taking that further step at this point is unwise given the federal government’s actions over the last months,” said attorney George Mull, who is part of the team that proposed the measure. If passed, the initiative would establish a 21-member state regulatory board comprised of doctors, industry folk, patients, activists, government officials, and others. A state supplemental tax on cannabis would be levied and local governments would be required to allow one dispensary per 50,000 residents. Ammiano said that he and Leno were also working on proposing legislation that would provide regulations.

But the future of medical marijuana in California remains somewhat cloudy. “I’m worried that even if we come up with the regulations, the feds will find something else,” said Ammiano. Complicating the matter, the California Supreme Court moved unanimously on Jan. 18 to review the power that cities and counties have to make their own laws concerning cannabis accessibility — plus, it plans to look at the old disconnect between state and federal law on the matter..

So much for the politics of marijuana in 2012. Away from the headlines, it’s plain to see that the plant is increasingly accepted in popular culture. On a local level, East Bay YouTube stoner Coral Reefer continues to tweet to thousands of followers every time she sparks a bowl, and on the national stage, Miley Cyrus admits to smoking “way too much fucking weed,” after seeing the birthday cake friends had gotten her. (It had Bob Marley’s face on it.)

On television, the United States is learning about Harborside’s travails — but not just from the news shows. Discovery Channel shot a season of reality TV following DeAngelo and his staff, telling the stories of patients and about the reality of running a dispensary for a show they entitled Weed Wars even before the final $20 million IRS ruling. As the collective is being persecuted by the feds, its fan base across the country grows.

Will Discovery Channel renew Weed Wars for a second season? Regardless of the network’s views on the protagonists’ profession, if the cameras are kept rolling they’re sure to capture another year of interesting times for California cannabis.

 

Will Obama bring the populist fire in tonight’s speech?

Sasha Cuttler
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Will Obama bring the populist fire in tonight’s speech?

President Barack Obama has a choice for how he uses his State of the Union speech this evening. He could follow the advice of Blue Dog Democrats like Mark Penn, who wrote in The Hill today that Obama should avoid “rhetoric that could be interpreted as class warfare.” Or he can find his inner populist and give the speech that the 99 percent needs to hear by announcing that the rich and the Right have already declared that war, and now he intends to win it on behalf of the people.

I’m rooting for the latter, but fearful that Obama is no William Jennings Bryant – or either of the Presidents Roosevelt – and that he is just not up for seizing this moment and going to war with the powerful plutocrats who are ruining this country.

But there are signs that Obama is at least prepared to “double down on taxing the rich,” as the Christian Science Monitor put it today. Certainly, all signs indicate that he will at least raise the economic inequity issue again tonight, and it’s a positive sign that the invited audience will include Debbie Bosanek, the secretary to billionaire investor Warren Buffet that he famously complained shouldn’t be paying his same tax rate. Certainly, Obama intends to push for his “Buffet rule” that would tax investment returns as income rather than at lower capital gains rates.

But those sorts of reasonable arguments aren’t enough. Obama has been calling for higher taxes on the rich throughout his presidency, albeit never as forcefully as he did on the presidential campaign trail in 2008. And since then, he’s repeatedly betrayed that pledge in cutting deals with Republicans in Congress, exacerbating historically high concentrations of wealth and betraying his own stated principles.

The Occupy movement and most of the left – and even segments of the Tea Party right that complain about the economic elites – no longer trust Obama and the Democrats to fight for the interests of the commoner. We’ve become cynical about putting any hopes in a president poised to shatter campaign fundraising records this year.

Yet as Obama prepares to run for reelection against either a vulture capitalist or hypocritical moralist – both of whom will be openly shilling for the 1 percent – he should realize that it’s both good policy and good politics to capitalize on the opportunity that the Occupy movement has opened up, join the class war, and help us finally win it and seize the resources we need to deal with this country’s myriad problems.

Today’s Chronicle includes a front page story about Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s hopes that Democrats will pick up the 25 seats needed to retake the House of Representatives this year – along with analysts poo-pooing that possibility. The only hope they offered for Pelosi’s plan is a meltdown by the Republican presidential nominee.

But that sort of clear contrast between Democrats and Republicans won’t simply happen on its own, it is something that Obama and the Democrats will need to force by finally relying more on populist ire than using campaign contributions from the wealthy to tarnish their opponents. Simply winning the presidential election won’t help Obama break this country’s political gridlock, he needs to make this race about the undue power of the rich and the Right and win it on those terms.

Pelosi acknowledged that her best hopes for gaining a substantial number of Congressional seats are in California, but they don’t seem to realize that the real potential here is with changing the political dialogue and tapping the 58 percent of California voters who said in a November Field Poll that they agree with the economic critiques that sparked the Occupy movement (and even higher percentages have supported taxing millionaires). Even those who didn’t join the Occupy movement agree with its basic analysis that the few are exploiting the many.

There is a simmering populist discontent that will play out in unpredictable ways this year. And it’s possible that many of the left will never trust Obama until his deeds finally match his words. But there is no larger mainstream political podium in this country than the State of the Union speech, and if Obama misses this opportunity to declare his allegiance with the 99 percent – and his willingness to fight for us – then we may all just be in for the nastiest yet most meaningless presidential election in modern history.

Supervisors make the Chamber of Commerce happy

Zelda Bronstein
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Supervisors make the Chamber of Commerce happy

You want a sense of what’s happened to politics at City Hall? Here you go: the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce is thrilled.


The Chamber just released its 2011 voting scorecard on the Board of Supervisors (which it calls the “Paychecks and Pink Slips Scorecard,” as if most of the stuff the Chamber supports had anything to do with actual job creation), and guess what? The board is more pro-downtown than it has been in a while:


The 2011 year-end scorecard reveals marked improvement in city’s efforts to create jobs and grow the economy. Overall, the Board of Supervisors received a score of 82 percent (equivalent to a B – grade), up from 60 percent (or a D – grade) in 2010. Individual rankings also improved, with five supervisors increasing their scores by at least 15 percent since last year. In 2011, a solid majority of supervisors voted in favor of jobs, the economy and government efficiency more than 75 percent of the time.


The top performer: Sup. Scott Wiener, who voted with the Chamber 88 percent of the time. Second best: Supervisor David Chiu (82%). The worst (or best, depending how you see downtown’s agenda of low taxes, reduced public services and minimual regulations) was Sup. John Avalos, who scored 56%.


The reality is that some of the Chamber’s key votes were relatively noncontroversial things that everone on the board supported — for example, a law sponsored by Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, Eric Mar, David Campos and Wiener making it easier for small cafes and restaurants to host live music and a measure restricting restaurant waste, both of which passed unanimously. There were some votes where nearly everyone opposed the Chamber — the cell phone disclosure requirements and the ban on yellow pages. And on a couple of them, even Chamber darlings Sean Elsbernd and Mark Farrell were on the wrong side — they voted against a tax exclusion for stock options because they wanted even greater tax reductions.


But on the key votes, you can see where the majority of the board lies: Six, sometimes seven votes with downtown, five, sometimes four with the rest of us. Not exactly a progressive majority. 

Firing bad teachers

Zelda Bronstein
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Firing bad teachers

Diane Ravich, who used to be on the wrong side of school reform but has pretty much come around, was on Forum Jan. 18 talking about education policy. For the most part, she was right on target, explaining that too much of a focus on testing (as a measure of school and teacher accomplishment, not as a diagnostic tool) and too narrow an emphasis on math and reading has damaged public schools.


Neither she nor host Michael Krasny spent much time talking about the bigger problem — money — or the fact that other nations that are eclipsing the United State in education actually tax people and spend that money on schools. California has already cut the number of classroom days, and may cut as much as a week out of the school year. That’s a huge deal, one that’s directly related to the intransigence of a few state legislators who can hold the entire budget hostage — and to the unwillingness of California residents to amend Prop. 13 and allow reasonable property taxes.


But one of the things that struck me was a caller who complained that tenure was making it impossible to fire bad teachers.


Tenure, Ravich noted, is badly misunderstood. At the college level, it’s essentially a lifetime commitment; a college professor gets tenure and he or she understands that, for the most part, it means a career at an institution — with minimal job requirements. Tenured professors teach a few classes, but are free to spend a lot of time on academic research (without any set requirement for success or publication.)


For K-12 teachers, tenure is just a word meaning that they get due process in employment. It’s basically the same as the civil-service rules that San Francisco city employees have — the right to a hearing on discipline and freedom for arbitrary actions on the part of management.


You think it’s hard to fire a teacher? Try firing a cop. The police, who have nothing called “tenure,” have more and broader rights than any other public-sector employees, including the right to have all disciplinary matters kept completely secret. And police officers are armed and given the ability to arrest and even shoot people.


So yeah, let’s blame the inability to fire teachers. That’ll fix the problems. 

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.

Editorial: Mayor Lee, support Prop. 13 reform

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EDITORIAL You want a quick way to cut a huge chunk out of the city’s budget deficit? A way to save essential services without having to put a tax increase before the voters?

Just force the owners of large commercial properties to pay their property taxes.

It’s an open secret in California that the biggest properties are bought and sold under a loophole in the Proposition 13 that prevents city’s from reassessing them. It’s a fairly easy scam, one that almost never happens with lower-priced residential property: Instead of selling, say, a large commercial office building, the owners simply incorporate the building as a limited liability corporation and then sell shares in the LLC. That doesn’t count as a property transfer under Proposition 13, so the building is never reassessed.

That means a building that may have sold for $500 million still pays taxes on an earlier assessment, which is often far, far lower. That loophole alone is costing San Francisco millions of dollars a year, according to Assessor Phil Ting.

The California Tax Reform Association, in a May, 2010 report, notes that many of the biggest mergers, acquisitions, and property sales in the state over the past 30 years have taken place with legal tricks that keep property taxes artificially low.

Assembly Member Tom Ammiano has introduced a bill, AB 448, that would classify any substantive transfer of property, even if it’s done through subsidiaries and corporate shells, as a sale and allow counties to reassess the property. It’s a fairly mild step, far short of a split-roll measure that would treat commercial and residential property differently. In fact, Ting told us, 99 percent of all commercial sales (mostly smaller properties) don’t use the loophole. It’s just (once again) the 1 percent taking advantage of everyone else.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has contacted Ammiano and asked to testify and help pass the bill. But at press time, Ammiano had heard nothing from San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee. (Lee’s spokesperson, Christine Falvey, told us she didn’t think the bill was still alive. It is.)

Lee needs to take a high-profile position in support of this bill — and he needs to encourage every other mayor in the state to do the same. The Board of Supervisors ought to pass a resolution of support — and push the County Supervisors Association of California to make this bill a top priority.

Making even a minor, eminently reasonable change in Prop. 13 is tough, and Ammiano’s best chance is if local elected officials really push for this. It’s crazy that Mayor Lee isn’t leading the way.

 

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
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0

tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s hard for California cities to raise taxes. Almost anything that amounts to a tax hike has to go before the voters, and most of the time, it requires a two-thirds vote.

But in a year when the local legislators are also up for election — and six of the supervisorial districts are up this fall — the voters can pass taxes with a simple majority.

That’s one reason that 2012 is a perfect year for tax reform in San Francisco. The other is the spirit of Occupy.

The tent-city protests changed the political dynamics all over the country, putting the message of economic injustice on the agenda and on the front pages. That’s even more true in this city, which was one of the epicenters of the national movement.

Mayor Ed Lee announced in his inauguration speech that he’s going to be the mayor “of the 100 percent,” an effort to preach the message that we’re all good pals and we all love each other here in this great city of ours, but the truth is we aren’t, and we don’t. The very rich in San Francisco not only have little in common with the rest of us; for the most part, they like it that way. The biggest corporations and wealthiest individuals have an interest in preserving economic injustice, and they’ve shown repeatedly that they will go to great lengths to prevent progressive change.

San Francisco needs to change the way it raises revenue, and one of the key elements of that is the local business tax. Right now it’s a flat tax on payroll, and a lot of people (including me) don’t like it. So there’s movement for a new type of tax, maybe on gross receipts.

That’s fine — but it has to be more than a shift in how taxes are determined. San Francisco desperately needs more money — probably at least $250 million a year — to balance the budget without further cuts and to make up for what the state and federal government have taken away. And a new business tax needs to be progressive — to hit the biggest and the richest harder than the small and struggling.

I fear the mayor is not going to be pushing that kind of agenda, so someone on the board has to do it. This is the year that a “tax the one percent” measure can win. But we need to get started now.

The state (and local) tax measures

Zelda Bronstein
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1
The state (and local) tax measures

The state of the state tax measures is more and more confusing; as Calitics notes, Jerry Brown, who has a half-assed tax plan that relies too much on sales taxes, wants everyone else out of the way, but you don’t say things like that to really, really rich people, and a really rich person wants her own tax measure, which is much more progressive but earmarks the money just for schools, which isn’t particularly helpful.

And there may be more.

The always-insightful and hardly-ever wrong folks at CalBuzz say Jerry’s got to stop everyone else from cluttering the ballot, else all of the plans will fail. Which is definately CW — but it doesn’t always work that way. There were five competing ballot measures aimed at insurance reform (some of them industry fakes) in 1998, and the voters still approved the real one, Prop. 103.

But taxes are a bit different — and if the voters see the various options not as alternatives but as many ways to raise taxes higher and higher, they might all go down.

And there’s another factor here: I’m hoping that there’s a serious business-tax reform measure on the San Francisco ballot. And if there are several state tax measures (attracting intense and big-money opposition) and there’s another one on the local ballot, we might be in trouble.

Maybe Jerry should get with Molly Munger and cut a deal: The guv makes his plan more progressive, Munger helps fund it — and local governments can join in the fight to “tax the 1 percent.” Then we can all win. Maybe.

Who will push progressive taxes in 2012?

Zelda Bronstein
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47
Who will push progressive taxes in 2012?

Mayor Ed Lee talked to the Examiner about his plans for the next year, and it’s a lot of the usual political crap: I’m going to create jobs, I’m going to bring people together and promote civility, ho hum. But he did mention, briefly, the need to change the city’s business tax, and here’s how he put it:

We have given ourselves four months to reach out to all the business groups. There will be different views and opinions. You can have a hybrid [between a payroll and gross receipts tax], and you can also have a phase-in period of time. We want to have a good conversation with everybody and get their best ideas, and then use those ideas to craft what we think could be on the ballot. We’re not saying it has to be on the November ballot, but it could be. We want to have something that is not job punishing, but also something that does not decrease our revenue.

First: He’s going to reach out to all the business groups — but what about everyone else in the city? The level of business taxes has a direct impact on city services; is that not part of the equation? Clearly, he’s talking about something that’s at best revenue-neutral, something that “does not decrease our revenue.”

And please, don’t tell me about “job punishing” — it makes me even crazier than I already am. Look: There has to be a business tax in San Francisco. And any time you tax businesses, you take money for the city that could be used for other things. In some cases — not that many — the extra money might be used to hire a few people. In reality, for most businesses, the payroll tax is absolutely NOT a factor in job creation. It sounds bad — Gasp! a tax on jobs! — but the truth is that payroll is a rough approximation for the size of a company, and that’s what the city uses as a tax base.

Of course, we could change that to a gross receipts tax — another rough approximation for the size of a company. It’s also imperfect — some companies have a lot of money (VC funding, for example) and a lot of employees, but at this point not much in the way of sales. Some companies (supermarkets, for example) have high gross receipts but relatively low profit margins. And, of course, if you do a gross receipts tax the same people who complain about the payroll tax will have a new line: The GR tax penalizes growth! It penalizes success! The more money you make the more you pay! Unfair! Un-American! Job killer!

Because some people in this town (mostly big business types) just want lower taxes, period — not different taxes, lower taxes

So let’s get rid of the “job killer” rhetoric and start talking about what the city’s tax policy should be. And it should go like this: The individuals and businesses with the most money should pay the highest tax rates. The rich don’t pay their fare share anywhere in the U.S., and while the mayor and the supervisors can’t change federal policy, they can do their part on a modest level at home.

This a great year for tax reform in San Francisco. The spirit of Occupy is very much alive. There is, for the first time in decades, a national discussion about income and wealth inequality. There’s strong evidence that the middle class is vanishing in San Francisco. And, thanks to the wierdness of state law, in 2012, when there’s an election for the Board of Supervisors, a tax measure can pass with a simple majority vote In many ways, this is the single most important policy issue in the city, the one that defines who pays for what and who gets what and whether (public sector) jobs are created or destroyed and what kind of a city we want to be.

So let’s take it seriously. Instead of allowing Mayor Lee and the (big) business folks set the agenda, the progressives really need to move forward on a tax-reform plan that looks at making big business pay more and small business pay less — and that brings in another $250 million a year for the local coffers If gross receipts is the flavor of the day, I’m good with that — but not a flat tax. Exempt, say, the first $250,000 (or the first $500,000, whatever, run the numbers and see what we can afford). Put a 1 percent tax on the next million, a 1.5 percent tax on all receipts between $1.5 million and $5 million, a 2 percent tax on $5 million to $10 million and 3 percent on everything higher. Adjust the numbers either way, but that’s the general idea. Then add in a tax on commercial rents (again, exempt the first $500,000 or whatever) to make sure the the big landlords (who get away with murder under Prop. 13) are paying, too. And yes, based on market supply and demand, some will try to pass that on to their tenants, but companies (including a lot of law firms) that rent enough space to be paying millions of dollars a year in rent can afford to modest tax hike.

It will take the city controller or the city’s economist to do the math and see what the options are and how you get to $250 million net new revenue, so my proposal is just a start. But somebody needs to take this on, some member of the Board of Supervisors — or else we’ll just be responding to what the Chamber of Commerce wants. Who wants to be the champion of Tax Reform for the 99 Percent? Time is getting short.

Ed Lee and District 5

Zelda Bronstein
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12
Ed Lee and District 5

It’s all gossip at this point because if anybody other than Ed Lee knows who Ed Lee is going to appoint to the District 5 seat, that person isn’t talking. It’s no surprise the Chuck Nevius, who really loves Mayor Ed, thinks it’s just fine and dandy that he’s taking his sweet time to name a replacement for Ross Mirkarimi, but a some people who live in the district aren’t so happy.

Here’s the thing: The new supervisor will hav to be appointed and take office pretty soon, since Mirkarimi is officially sworn in as sheriff Jan. 8, and so is effectively already off the Board of Supervisors. Either Lee makes his choice by Jan. 10, the next board meeting, or the supes will meet one member short — and the district will have no representation.

Not the end of the world, of course, but: No matter when Lee pulls the string now, the new person will have to hire a staff, make connections across the district, get up to speed on the issues and move into a difficult and complicated job without any transition time at all. No time for preparation, no time to meet with Mirkarimi or his staff to figure out what’s going on — nothing.

If Lee had made his choice a few weeks ago, that person could have been doing what Mirkarimi has been doing in the sheriff’s office — meeting with the outgoing office holder, going to briefings, assembling a team etc.

So Lee’s indecision isn’t just bad for the district; it’s bad for the person he appoints.

Oh, and by the way: Nevius has part of his analysis a little wrong. He claims that

The Guardian, the progressive playbook, has already made its pitch, twice writing that Planning Commission President Christina Olague would be acceptable.

Actually, we haven’t endorsed or promoted anyone for the job (and that’s probably just as well, since anyone I suggest will never get the mayor’s support). We did run an opinion piece by Gabriel Haaland saying that Olague would be acceptable to him. All we’ve done is described the profile we’d like to see:

It’s critical that the mayor appoint a District 5 supervisor who is a credible progressive, someone who supports higher taxes on the rich and better city services for the needy and is independent of Lee’s more dubious political allies.

Either way, it’s time for Lee to make a decision.

Stuck in reverse

Sasha Cuttler
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18
Stuck in reverse

Some days, you wake up, check the news, and wonder just what the hell happened to this country. And I’m not talking about that nutty right-wing view that we’ve strayed from the original vision laid out for us by the authors of the Constitution or the Bible. I have just the opposite view: I’m wondering why those people seem so intent on dragging us back into the bad old days of bygone centuries, when white male property owners ran things as they saw fit.

A dangerously intolerant religious fundamentalist who longs for the Puritan days, Rick Santorum, essentially tied for first place in the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses. And he was part of an entire field of candidates that wants to revoke women’s reproductive and LGBT rights, deny that industrialization has affected the environment and should be addressed, dismantle already decimated government agencies, simply let the strong exploit the weak, and hope that Jesus comes back to save us from ourselves. Their strange reverence for the Constitution apparently stems from wanting to drag us back into the 18th century.

And don’t even get me started on President Barack Obama and his worthless Democratic Party, which is only a bit better than the truly heinous Republicans. At least Obama says some of the right things – like wanting to raise taxes on millionaires, reverse Bush-era attacks on civil liberties, respect states’ medical marijuana laws, and use diplomacy rather than only bellicosity with concerning countries like Iran – even though he acts in contradiction of those statements, over and over again.

It’s no better in the Golden State, where the yestercentury crowd now wants to abandon plans for a high-speed rail system that has already been awarded $3.5 billion in federal transportation funding and for which California voters authorized another $10 billion in bond funding. Why? Because a panel headed by an Orange County douchebag says the business plan isn’t detailed enough and the money for the entire $100 billion buildout isn’t nailed down yet. Well guess what? California also doesn’t have a plan for when its highway and airport systems get overwhelmed by population growth over the next 20 years. And criticizing the viability of high-speed rail – something most other advanced countries figured out how to build decades ago – isn’t exactly going to help secure private equity commitments. It’s a super fast train, folks – not some scary satanic iron horse from the future – people will pay to ride it.

But the situation must be better here in liberal San Francisco, right? Wrong! Mayor Ed Lee, the San Francisco Chronicle, and all their business community allies continue to relentlessly push their belief that the main job of government is to create private sector jobs, even though most economists say a politician’s ability to do so is limited at best.

Lee is pushing for all city legislation to be measured by whether it creates private sector jobs, as if protecting the environment, preserving public sector jobs, or safeguarding the health, welfare, and workers’ rights of citizens weren’t also under the purview of local government. A Chronicle editorial today called Lee the most “realistic city leader in memory. He’s all about creating jobs, repaving streets, sprucing up faded Market Street and fixing Muni’s flaws,” the same goals the paper was focused on a century ago.

But the main trust of the editorial was calling for Lee to also focus on homelessness. Not poverty, mind you, but homelessness. “A decrease in jobless numbers is important, but so are fewer shopping carts pushed along sidewalks and a drop in the numbers of mentally ill in doorways and on park benches,” they wrote. In other words, they just don’t want to see poor people on the streets, because that newspaper and its fiscally conservative editorial writers and base of readers certainly haven’t been calling for a fairer distribution of this city’s wealth, or even higher taxes on the rich that might fund more subsidized housing programs or mental health treatment. I get the feeling they’d be content to just allow shanty towns on our southern border where our low-wage workers can live, just like the Third World cities that they seem to want to emulate.

Ugh, so depressing, so ridiculous, so regressive. I think I’m going back to bed now.

The GOP and class warfare

Zelda Bronstein
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42
The GOP and class warfare

Every political consultant knows that words like “together” and “unite” play well with voters. That’s why you hear them so much on the campaign trail, from races for local office to presidential campaigns. Remember Obama’s signature speech, with his signature line?

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America – there’s the United States of America.

Now the Republicans are claiming that it’s the Obama administration that’s dividing America:

Democrats will “poison the American spirit by pitting one American against another and engaging in class warfare,” Romney said. “I believe in an America that is one nation under God, and I will keep it that way.”

But here’s the thing: Obama actually tried to work with both sides. I wish he hadn’t tried so hard, since the Republicans have no interest in helping him govern, but you can’t say he was a divider. The GOP candidates, on the other hand, can’t possibly succeed without being divisive; as Kos points, that’s all they have:

Their entire schtick is predicated on pitting Americans against Americans. Without such demonization, they would be unable to function as an ongoing concern.

I don’t have to run for office, so I can get away with saying this: I am not a uniter, not in the sense that the politicians are using the word. I want us all to get along and I’m not a fan of violence, but there’s already a war on in this country. There’s a class war — and our side didn’t start it. Americans have already been pitted against each other — not by Obama but by a small group of the very rich and the political toadies who support them, who have systematically dismantled the tax, education and service system that once made at least an attempt at creating a country with a level playing field, a stable middle class and an income and wealth distribution curve that wasn’t grossly distorted.

The one percent has declared war on the rest of us. And we’re supposed to sit here and take it and not fight back?

Or should we attempt to drown corporatocracy in the bathtub?

City Hall’s 2012 agenda

Andrew Lam
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16

EDITORIAL There’s so much on the to-do list for San Francisco in 2012 that it’s hard to know where to start. This is a city in serious trouble, with unstable finances, a severe housing crisis, increased poverty and extreme wealth, a shrinking middle class, crumbling and unreliable infrastructure, a transportation system that’s a mess, no coherent energy policy — and a history of political stalemate from mayors who have refused to work with progressives on the Board of Supervisors.

Now that Ed Lee has won a four-year term, he and the supervisors need to start taking on some of the major issues — and if the mayor wants to be successful, he needs to realize that he can’t be another Gavin Newsom, someone who is an obstacle to real reform.

Here are just a few of the things the mayor and the board should put on the agenda for 2012:

• Fill Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s seat with an economic progressive. This will be one of the first and most telling moves of the new Lee administration — and it’s critical that the mayor appoint a District 5 supervisor who is a credible progressive, someone who supports higher taxes on the rich and better city services for the needy and is independent of Lee’s more dubious political allies.

• Make the local tax code more fair — and bring in some new revenue. Everybody’s talking about changing the payroll tax, which makes sense: Only a small fraction of city businesses even pay the tax (which is not a “job killer” but is far too limited). Sup. David Chiu had a good proposal last year that he abandoned; it called for a gross receipts tax combined with a commercial rent tax — a way to get big landlords and companies (like law firms) that pay no business tax at all to contribute their fair share. That’s a good starting point — but in the end, the city needs more money, and the new system should be set up to bring in at least $100 million more a year.

• Create a linkage between affordable and market-rate housing. This has to be one of the key priorities for the next year: San Francisco’s housing stock is way out of balance, and it’s getting worse. The city’s own General Plan mandates that 60 percent of all new housing should be available at below-market-rate prices; the best San Francisco ever gets from the developers of condos for the rich is 20 percent. The supervisors need to enact legislation tying the construction of new market-rate housing to an acceptable minimum level of affordable housing to keep the city from becoming a place where only the very rich can live.

• Demand a good community-benefits agreement from CPMC. The California Pacific Medical Center has a massive new hospital project planned for Van Ness Avenue — and so far, CPMC officials are refusing to provide the housing, transportation and public health mitigations that the city is asking for. This will be a key test of the new Lee administration — the mayor has to demonstrate that he’s willing to play hardball, and refuse to allow the project to move forward unless hospital officials reach agreement with community activists on an acceptable benefits agreement.

• Make CleanEnergySF work. A recent study by the website Energy Self-Reliant States shows that by 2017 — in just five years — the cost of solar energy in San Francisco will drop below the cost of Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s fossil-fuel and nuclear mix. So the city’s new electricity program, CleanEnergySF, needs to be planning now to build out both a large-scale solar infrastructure system and small-scale distributed generation facilities on residential and commercial roofs and set the agenda of offering clean, cheaper energy to everyone in the city. The money from the city’s generation can be used to purchase distribution facilities to phase out PG&E altogether.

• Don’t let Oracle Corp. take over even more of the waterfront. The America’s Cup continues to move forward — but at every step of the way, multibillionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is trying to squeeze the city for more. Mayor Lee has to make it clear: We’ve given one of the richest people in the world vast amounts of valuable real estate already. He doesn’t need a giant TV screen in the Bay or more land swaps or more city benefits. Enough is enough.

There’s plenty more, but even completing part of this list would put the city on the right road forward. Happy new year.

Guardian editorial: City Hall’s 2012 agenda

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20

EDITORIAL There’s so much on the to-do list for San Francisco in 2012 that it’s hard to know where to start. This is a city in serious trouble, with unstable finances, a severe housing crisis, increased poverty and extreme wealth, a shrinking middle class, crumbling and unreliable infrastructure, a transportation system that’s a mess, no coherent energy policy — and a history of political stalemate from mayors who have refused to work with progressives on the Board of Supervisors.

Now that Ed Lee has won a four-year term, he and the supervisors need to start taking on some of the major issues — and if the mayor wants to be successful, he needs to realize that he can’t be another Gavin Newsom, or Willie Brown, mayors who were an obstacle  to real reform.

Here are just a few of the things the mayor and the board should put on the agenda for 2012:

+Fill Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s seat with an economic progressive. This will be one of the first and most telling moves of the new Lee administration — and it’s critical that the mayor appoint a District 5 supervisor who is a credible progressive, someone who supports higher taxes on the rich and better city services for the needy and is independent of Lee’s more dubious political allies.

+Make the local tax code more fair — and bring in some new revenue. Everybody’s talking about changing the payroll tax, which makes sense: Only a small fraction of city businesses even pay the tax (which is not a “job killer” but is far too limited). Sup. David Chiu had a good proposal last year that he abandoned; it called for a gross receipts tax combined with a commercial rent tax — a way to get big landlords and companies (like law firms) that pay no business tax at all to contribute their fair share. That’s a good starting point — but in the end, the city needs more money, and the new system should be set up to bring in at least $100 million more a year.

+Create a linkage between affordable and market-rate housing. This has to be one of the key priorities for the next year: San Francisco’s housing stock is way out of balance, and it getting worse. The city’s own General Plan mandates that 60 percent of all new housing should be available at below-market-rate prices; the best San Francisco ever gets from the developers of condos for the rich is 20 percent. The supervisors need to enact legislation tying the construction of new market-rate housing to an acceptable minimum level of affordable housing to keep the city from becoming a place where only the very rich can live.

+Demand a good community-benefits agreement from CPMC. The California Pacific Medical Center has a massive new hospital project planned for Van Ness Avenue — and so far, CPMC officials are refusing to provide the housing, transportation and public health mitigations that the city is asking for. This will be a key test of the new Lee administration — the mayor has to demonstrate that he’s willing to play hardball, and refuse to allow the project to move forward unless hospital officials reach agreement with community activists on an acceptable benefits agreement.

+Make CleanEnergySF work. A recent study by the website Energy Self-Reliant States shows that by 2017 — in just five years — the cost of solar energy in San Francisco will drop below the cost of Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s fossil-fuel and nuclear mix. So the city’s new electricity program, CleanEnergySF, needs to be planning now to build out both a large-scale solar infrastructure system and small-scale distributed generation facilities on residential and commercial roofs and set the agenda of offering clean, cheaper energy to everyone in the city. The money from the city’s generation can be used to purchase distribution facilities to phase out PG&E altogether.

+Don’t let Oracle Corp. take over even more of the waterfront. The America’s Cup continues to move forward — but at every step of the way, multibillionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is trying to squeeze the city for more. Mayor Lee has to make it clear: We’ve given one of the richest people in the world vast amounts of valuable real estate already. He doesn’t need a giant TV screen in the Bay or more land swaps or more city benefits. Enough is enough.

There’s plenty more, but even completing part of this list would put the city on the right road forward. Happy new year.

 

 

Money and values

Andrew Lam
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0
Money and values

steve@sfbg.com

Warren Hellman left a hole in the heart of San Francisco when he died on Dec. 18 at the age of 77. That’s where he existed, right in the city’s heart, keeping the lifeblood of money and values flowing when nobody else seemed up to that task. But as the outpouring of affection and appreciation that followed his death attests, he set an example for others to follow…and maybe they will.

Hellman was born into one of San Francisco’s premier wealthy families, a status he maintained by becoming a rich and famous investment banker. His great-grandfather founded Well Fargo, as well as the Congregation Emanu-El, the spectacular temple where Hellman’s memorial service was held Dec. 21, attended by a huge crowd ranging from Gov. Jerry Brown to young country music fans.

Hellman was more than just a philanthropist who funded key institutions such as the San Francisco Free Clinic, the Bay Citizen newsroom, and a variety of programs and bond measures benefiting local public schools. He was more than the go-to guy for mediating sticky political problems such as this year’s pension reform struggle.

Hellman was the conscience of San Francisco, reminding his rich friends of their obligations to fair play and the common good. And he was the rhythm of the city, single-handedly creating and funding the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, perhaps the greatest free music festival in the country. And he was so much more.

“What do banjos, garages, Levis, 50- and 100-mile runs, ride and tie, investment banking, public policy, ballot measures, free medical clinics, and a zest for women,” U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said at his service, causing the room to erupt in laughter at the misstated last item, “for winning — correction, a zest for winning — have in common? The answer, of course, is simple: Warren Hellman.”

It was a gaffe that Hellman probably would have appreciated as much as anyone. Speaker after speaker attested to his marvelous, and often risqué, sense of humor. It was a theme that ran through the testimonials almost as strongly as two of his other key qualities: his competitiveness and his compassion.

For a charter member the 1 percent, Hellman had a deep appreciation for the average person of goodwill, and he found those people as often on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder as he did on the top. While most of his contemporaries in San Francisco’s uber-wealthy class, such as Don Fisher and Walter Shorenstein, often used their money to wage class warfare on the 99 percent, Hellman used his wealth and influence to bridge the divide.

He generously gave to good causes and advocated for higher taxes on the wealthy to lessen the need for such charity. Hellman understood that we all help make San Francisco great, and that perspective animated his love of bluegrass music, which he called “the conscience of our country.”

As he told me in 2007, “A big passion of mine is to try to help — and people have defined it too narrowly — the kinds of music that I think have a hell of a lot to do with the good parts of our society.”

Hellman may have started the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival because it was music he loved and played, but he turned it into such a major spectacle — booking some of the biggest acts from around the country, going as big as the city and space would allow — because he thought it was important to the soul of his city.

“I’m glad that we have first-rate opera, but it’s equally important that we foster the kind of music, lyrics, etc., that support all this,” Hellman told me. And by “all this,” he was talking about the grand social bargain, the fact that we’re all sharing this planet and we’ve got to understand and nurture one another.

At the memorial service, that attitude came through most strongly in the words — spoken with a country twang — of musician Ron Thomason, who became good friends with Hellman through their shared loves of bluegrass music and horseback riding, including the endurance rides in which they each competed.

“I know I’m amongst all good folks,” Thomason told the packed synagogue. “The plain truth is Warren didn’t tolerate the other kind.”

That was true. No matter your perspective or station in life, Hellman wanted to know and appreciate you if had a good heart and curious mind. And if not, he would let you know — or cut you off, as he did with the political group he helped start, SFSOS, after its director Wade Randlett launched nasty attacks on progressive politicians and advocates.

Thomason joked about how ridiculous much of this country has become. “It’s hard to believe that only half the people are dumber than average,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone ever saw Warren Hellman talk down to anybody.”

He told the story of meeting Hellman backstage at Hardly Strictly. Thomason knew Hellman from equestrian events and didn’t know that he was a wealthy banker or that he created and funded the festival. And Hellman didn’t immediately offer that information, telling his friend that he was just backstage because he knew someone in management.

“He knew everyone in management, and he expected them to do right,” Thomason said, later adding, “In his mind, there should not be any disenfranchised.”

It was a perspective that was echoed by people from all parts of Hellman’s life, from his family members to his business partners.

“He taught us to respect people from all walks of life,” said Philip Hammarskjold, the CEO of Hellman & Friedman and Hellman’s business partner of 17 years, describing how Hellman was as engaged with and curious about the firm’s low-level support staff as he was its top executives, an attitude that infected those around him. “His culture is now our culture. His values are now our values.”

“Money meant noting to Warren,” said his sister, Nancy Bechtle. “But in business, money was the marker that you won and Warren always wanted to win.”

He was a competitive athlete and an investment banker who wanted to give companies the resources they needed to succeed, rather than slicing and dicing them for personal gain. And he used the wealth he accrued in the process to make San Francisco a better place.

“He treated San Francisco as if it were part of his family, nurturing its health and education,” said his granddaughter, Laurel Hellman.

Personally, he was an iconoclast with a lively sense of play.

“He never worried about the things that most parents worried about,” said Frances Hellman, the eldest of Warren’s four children. Rather than getting good grades and staying out of trouble, Hellman wanted his children to be happy, hard-working, respectful of people, and always curious about the world.

She told stories about taking Hellman to his first Burning Man in 2006 (along with Rabbi Sydney Mintz, who led the service), an event he loved and returned to the next two years, and watching his childlike pleasure at leaving his painted footprints on a sail that was headed around the world, or with just sitting on the playa, picking his banjo, watching all the colorful people go by.

“I love him and I miss him more than I can express,” she said.

As Hellman told me in 2007, he just loved people and was genuinely curious about their perspectives.

“I’m so grateful for the friendship of Warren, to know this incredible man,” singer Emmylou Harris — one of Hellman’s favorite musicians — said before singing for a crowd of others who felt just the same way.

Period Piece: Brannan Street sense (and Geary Boulevard, too)

Andrew Lam
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Period Piece: Brannan Street sense (and Geary Boulevard, too)

Guardian history writer Lucy Schiller is exploring the city street-by-street in the slow week inter-holiday weekends. Today, learn about Samuel Brannan’s shipment of Mormons to San Francisco and John Geary side jobs (which include governor of Philadelphia). Click here for yesterday’s installment on Baker Street.

Brannan Street 

Named for Samuel Brannan, Mormon, ex-Mormon, journalist, Gold Rush instigator

Samuel Brannan (1819-1889) brought 240 Mormons to San Francisco on a ship along with a printing press, effectively tripling the tiny town’s population. And though he himself steered clear of panning for gold, Brannan was the first man to capitalize on the Gold Rush. And capitalize he did, publishing news of California’s gleaming bounty in his newspaper The California Star, while simultaneously selling mining supplies out of a well-placed general store. Brannan quickly became a millionaire, and with his notoriety, his character displayed itself. After being expelled from the church for some pretty questionable tithe diversions, Brannan became an integral member of San Francisco’s notorious citizen police force, the Vigilance Committee. Brannan Street runs in a fittingly prominent path parallel to Market.

Geary Boulevard

Named for John Geary, postmaster, mayor, governor

Just like the street named in his honor, John Geary (1819-1873) was a bustling behemoth, standing around six and a half feet tall and holding the dubious honor of more than 10 war wounds. He also managed to hold an impressive array of titles throughout his violent life, working as San Francisco’s first postmaster, last alcade (premier authority during Mexican rule), first mayor, military general, governor of Kansas, and governor of Pennsylvania. Geary levied the first taxes on San Franciscans, established the first jail (a stinking, unsanitary mess on the ship Euphemia), and ensured that both Washington Square and Union Square remain public spaces.  

 

Dick Meister: A decent living for all?

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Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsoom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Finally there’s some good news for the millions of Americans who must to live on pay at or close to the legal minimum wage. Eight states are raising their minimum wage on January First, in line with state laws requiring the minimum to keep pace with inflation.

The raises to come are modest by any measurement. But any increase must be welcomed as desperately needed and hopefully as a major start toward increasing the minimum wage everywhere to a level that will provide a decent living to all working Americans, many of them living in poverty or near-poverty.

The minimum wage is just as important now as it was in 1938, when the wage law was enacted as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, with a promise of guaranteeing workers “a standard of living necessary for health, efficiency and general wellbeing.”

The federal rate was set at 25 cents an hour, with states and local governments free to set their own minimums, as long as they are above the federal rate.

Today’s rates are much higher, of course, although barely adequate. The federal rate is $7.25 an hour, only about $15,000 a year for full-time workers before taxes and other deductions. Eighteen states, more than 100 cities and counties and the District of Columbia have higher rates, but their rates also are clearly inadequate.

During his 2008 election campaign, President Obama proposed raising the minimum to  $9.50 an hour by 2011. But even though that would merely adjust the minimum wage for inflation, Congress and the White House have done little to make it happen.

Some of Obama’s Republican opponents in Congress actually have called for the minimum wage to be abolished, largely because their big money backers in the restaurant business, who employ about 60 percent of all minimum wage workers, are against it, as are many other business and corporate interests.

Congress’ failure to act has left it up to the states. The eight that are raising their rates on New Year’s Day include Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.  Their rates will increase by 28 to 37 cents an hour to between $7.64 and $9.04. The National Employment Law Project (NELP) calculates that will bring nearly 1.4 million full-time minimum wage workers an extra $582 to $770 per year.

Another 400,000 will get raises as pay rates are adjusted upward to reflect new minimum wage rates. It’s not just individual workers who will benefit from the raises. Like all low-wage workers, they must spend virtually every cent they earn, thus raising the overall demand for goods and services and the hiring of new employees to help provide them.

NELP estimates that the increased consumer spending generated by the raises will add $366 million to the gross domestic product and create the equivalent of more than 3,000 full-time jobs. Other estimates indicate that every dollar increase in wages for workers at the minimum creates more than $3,000 in new spending after a single year.

And we shouldn’t forget that those earning the minimum include many of our most valuable yet needy and exploited workers.  Most work in the service or retail fields, as domestics providing home health care for the elderly and other household services or caring for the children of working mothers, for example. Others work in agriculture.

Many can’t find full-time jobs even at the bare minimum.  More than one-third are the main or sole support of their families. Almost two-thirds are women, many of them single mothers. One-third are African-American, Latino or Asian. Many are recently arrived immigrants. Only a few belong to unions or have other protections aside from the law.

But wouldn’t a minimum wage increase cause businesses to cut back their hiring, as opponents of minimum wage raises claim? No. Studies show that even during times of high unemployment, raising the minimum does not lead to a loss of jobs. Actually, the number of jobs has grown after each of the 19 times the federal minimum has increased over the past 73 years.

Consider this, too: Taxpayers are providing billions of dollars in subsidies to employers of minimum wage workers, since much of the money paid out in public assistance goes to families whose working mothers do not earn enough to be self-supporting. Private charities provide additional millions in aid.

There’s no doubt employers are shifting a significant part of their labor costs to the general public, and no doubt that welfare costs could be reduced substantially if the minimum wage they had to pay was raised to a decent level.

Think of the benefits to society generally if the minimum wage workers who now must depend on government assistance could earn enough to make it on their own.

Think of the benefits to employers. As several studies have shown, raising workers’ pay raises workers’ morale and with it, their productivity, while decreasing absenteeism and replacement costs.

Think of the benefits to small retail businesses. Opponents of a minimum wage increase say they’d be hurt the most by a higher minimum wage, but it’s far more likely they’d be among the greatest beneficiaries. For minimum wage workers have no choice but to spend most of their meager earnings in neighborhood stores for food and other necessities.

Tiffany Williams of the Institute for Policy Studies says raising the minimum wage “would be a step toward restoring dignity for millions of workers, enabling many ordinary working Americans to become part of the economic recovery rather than its collateral damage.”

Hard to argue with that, or with Christine Owens, NELP’s executive director,  who says the minimum wage increases “represent bright spots on an otherwise bleak economic horizon. Workers’ buying power is the secret weapon in the fight to get our economy back on track. States are taking action to protect that critical buying power. Congress should follow their example to realize those benefits for the national economy.”

Let the minimum wage raises in eight states be just the beginning of raises in all states.  Let all Americans have the right to a decent living

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsoom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Tax Kim Kardashian!

Zelda Bronstein
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Tax Kim Kardashian!

This is perfect: The Courage Campaign is running an ad encouraging Kim Kardashian — who made $12 million last year for pretty much nothing except being Kim Kardashian — to endorse the millionaire-tax ballot initiative. The point is that Kim’s income is about 240 times as much as the income for the median California family — and she pays only 1 percent more in taxes.

We need to make Kim understand how much regular folks are suffering these days. If we do, maybe she’ll support paying a little more to help fund criticial services.

Sign me up. Tax Kim. If I had her phone number, I’d call her right now and tell her that her public is waiting — for her to join the Courage Campaign. Somehow, I don’t.

Ed Lee and “job killers”

Zelda Bronstein
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Ed Lee and “job killers”

Every time I hear the word “job killer” I think of the California Chamber of Commerce, which loves to affix the label to anything that might hurt corporate profits. Most environmental legislation, most pro-labor legislation, most financial regulations, anything that improves employer requriements for health insurance — the Chamber dubs it “job killers.”

And now Ed Lee is using that word to slow down progressive taxes, regulations or business mandates. He’s proposing a Charter Amendment to send any bills that might cause job losses to the Small Business Commission for a “jobs impact” public hearing.

That would give another weapon to downtown interests who want to kill, say, improvements to the Healthy San Francisco law, or any changes in the business tax.

Here’s what kills me: How many jobs were destroyed by the LACK of regulations over the U.S. financial industry? How many jobs were destroyed by a tax system that keeps most of the wealth concentrated in the top one percent? How many jobs were destroyed by cutbacks and layoffs in the public sector (which were a direct result of a failure to seek new revenues that business leaders would have called “job killers”?)

But we don’t have a special commission weighing in on tax cuts and tax breaks that cost the city money and kill city jobs.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, who has to deal with the California Chamber and its lackeys, told me that Lee “is talking like a Republican, or like the moderate Democrats in Sacramento.” That’s not where the mayor of San Francisco ought to be.

 

 

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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alert@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY 14

Is Global Revolution Possible?

The Arab Spring and Occupy movements were catalysts to a worldwide introspection and discontent toward countries’ economic and political systems. Change is necessary in order to place human interest over economic gain. The big questions are on the table with Shimaa Helmy, revolutionary activist in Cairo, Egypt, and Sid Patel, OccupySFer and contributor to SocialistWorker.org.

7 p.m., free

Redstone Building, Third Floor Conference Room

2940 16th St., SF

www.norcalsocialism.org

iso@norcalsocialism.org


THURSDAY 15

Occupy Chevron

The multi-billion-dollar oil corporation Chevron is appealing its property tax assessment for its Richmond refinery and other Contra Costa County facilities, trying to get $150 million back from revenues going to the cash-strapped county and its school district. So the Richmond Progressive Alliance and other groups are organizing a protest outside the hearing of the Contra Costa County Assessment Appeals Board in Martinez. Stop Chevron’s slick lawyers from bullying the community and taking more away from the 99 percent.

11:30 a.m. gathering, rally at noon, free

651 Pine, Martinez Contact: Eduardo Martinez

(510) 412-2260

www.richmondprogressivealliance.net

info@richmondprogressivealliance.net

 

Rally Against Budget Cuts

The state deadline for mid-year budget cuts approaches and Gov. Jerry Brown’s $2.5 billion additional take backs from public education and other social services launches another stint of heavy austerity measures. Why steal from the poor and the state when you can take taxes from the rich? Sisters United Front for Survival and CalWORKS invite all to congregate and try to save what is left of California services.

5 p.m., free

California State Building

455 Golden Gate, SF

(415) 864-1278

baradicalwomen@earthlink.net

 

SUNDAY 18

Resist ICE raid

Over 200 workers at the Pacific Steel Castings foundry in Berkeley were fired as a result of a “silent raid’ by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch. ICE claims the employees had no legal immigrant status, but this massive firing is damaging the East Bay economy and job market since many of these steel workers had been employees for decades. A community coalition stands in solidarity for those displaced and out of work.

2-4 p.m., free but suggested donations include food, toys, clothing to help families

St Mark’s Hall

159 Harbour Way, Richmond

(510) 233-5215

For more info call Rev. Debbie Lee at 510-903-7106 ext. 319

Or Francisco Herrera at 510-903-7106 ext. 302


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

Guardian editorial: And now we recommend a national Occupy Day

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EDITORIAL In less than three months, the Occupy movement has changed the national political debate — and possibly the course of U.S. history. A small group of protesters, derided in the mainstream media, grew to a massive outpouring of anger at economic inequality. It’s no coincidence that politicans at all levels have begun to respond. At least five different measures aimed at raising taxes on the rich are in the works in California. In Kansas Dec. 6, President Obama made one of the most progressive speeches of his career, talking directly about the need for economic justice.

While even some supposed allies say the encampments weren’t effective, the truth is that the out-front, in-your-face tactic of holding nonstop protests in the financial heart of places like Manhattan and San Francisco got attention. The visibility of the Occupy camps forced everyone to pay attention. The U.S. economy is in a crisis; less disruptive tactics wouldn’t have worked. But now most of the emcampments are gone, broken up by police forces and scattered from the central areas of major cities. It’s crucial that this growing and powerful national movement not fall apart after the almost inevitable crackdown on one style of protest. Occupy needs to look forward and plan its next steps.

Some of that is already happening, with Occupy activists targeting home foreclosures and marching on West Coast ports. But it’s worth considering another tactic, too: Occupy ought to begin planning now for a massive spring mobilization in Washington and a series of nationwide actions that could bring millions more people into the movement.

Part of the strategy of the Occupy camps was to maintain a presence, day after day — and that made perfect sense when the movement was starting. But single-day events, if organized on a massive scale as part of a larger campaign, can have a profound and lasting impact.

The original Earth Day — April 22, 1970 — involved 20 million people across the United States. There were events in hundreds of cities and thousands of high school and college campuses. It brought together old-school, sometime stodgy conservation groups with radical young environmentalists, the United Auto Workers with people concerned about pollution from car exhaust. It was, by any reasonable account, the birth of the modern American environmental movement.

The other great thing about Earth Day — and the reason it makes a great model for the Occupy movement — is that it was largely a grassroots event. Although there was a national office, most of the work was done spontaneously, in local communities, with no top-down direction.

And everyone — from Washington D.C. to the state capitols and city halls — paid attention.

Mass marches and mobilizations helped end the Vietnam War, spark the Civil Rights Movement and fight the anti-labor politics of the Reagan Administration. None of those events took place in isolation, any more than a national Occupy Day would take place in isolation. The nation’s ready for major economic change — and organizing a national event alone could help make stronger connnections among the broad constituency that is the 99 percent.

 

 

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