Bruce Brugmann

Small Business Awards 2008: Small Business Activist Award

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Scott Hauge is the Scarlet Pimpernel of the small business community. He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere.

Hauge’s day job is president and owner of CAL Insurance & Associates, a company that specializes in providing insurance for small to medium-size businesses. But his real job is operating as a classic San Francisco activist, representing small business on local, state, and national levels almost every day. Hauge is widely recognized as one of the most knowledgeable and effective small-business leaders in the country, and last year was named the National Small Business Association’s Advocate of the Year.

Hauge is a fourth-generation San Franciscan whose great-grandfather was in the Fire Department, fought the l906 fire, and later died fighting another San Francisco fire. His grandfather was a cable car grip. His parents met in the San Francisco Public Library. His father took over CAL Insurance in 1960, and Hauge came into the firm in the early l970s after an activist student life at Washington State University at Pullman. He wrote a thesis on Karl Marx, and was a leader in the student movement whose anti-Vietnam War protests closed down the university two years in a row.

Hauge became politically active in San Francisco shortly after he joined CAL Insurance. He was a major force in the battle in the mid-l980s to establish a Small Business Commission, the first in the country, and served as its first commissioner.

He has introduced government legislation on behalf of small business in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Washington, DC. He is currently a member of more than 20 boards and commissions in San Francisco and California.

He founded Small Business Advocates, a local advocacy group, and Small Business California, a statewide advocacy group, and was a leading advocate during last year’s successful campaign for a Small Business Advisory Center, a City Hall agency helping small businesses with permits and navigating the city’s bureaucracy.

A lot of City Hall progressives consider Hauge a conservative, but his Small Business California organization is considered the most liberal small business group in the state.

He’s a Democrat, and cornered Hillary Clinton early on in the presidential campaign and tried to get her to put small business issues on her agenda. So far, he reports, no luck.

Hauge likes to say his proudest activity is serving as vice chair of the Volunteers in Medicine program. The program has 6l clinics around the country that recruit retired physicians, nurses, and dentists as volunteers to provide health services to the working uninsured. Next stop: San Francisco.

Hauge maintains that San Francisco is the only city in the country that has the infrastructure — with the city’s Small Business Commission and the new assistance center — to really help small business.

"Now we just have to get City Hall to pay attention."

SCOTT HAUGE

CAL Insurance & Assoc., Inc

2311 Taraval, SF

(415) 680-2109

The Nation

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Click here to read The Nation’s article, Our Lapdog Media.

Click here to read The Nation’s article, Mickey Mouse Media.

Ammiano: Yearning for Zion

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Yearning for Zion, PG@E’s attempt to greenwash.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Monday, May 5, 2008.) B3

World Press Freedom Day

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To learn more about World Press Freedom Day, click on the links below:

http://www.worldpressfreedomday.org/

http://www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/freedom.html

http://www.freemedia.at/Heroes_IPIReport2.00/00Heroes_index.htm

http://www.rsf.org/

Ammiano sizes up Joe Nation

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Joe Nation on Castro Street says he’d bend over backwards for the gay vote.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on May 2, 2008.) B3

Flash: Is Stockton ousting PG@E?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Joe Neilands flashed the news late Friday afternoon. The City of Stockton may be moving to kick PG@E out of town.

Neilands broke the PG@E/Raker Act scandal wide open with an expose in the Guardian in l969 and started the long battle to kick PG@E out of City Hall and out of San Francisco.

Sure enough, Joe was on target again. The Stockton Record carried the story on Wednesday (April 30) with a strong headline: “PG@E Sued by Stockton, City Pursues Ruling to Aid Possible Power Takeover.” The story, by David Siders,
reported that the city sued “its century-old power provider Tuesday and requested “that a court rule Stockton has the right to oust Pacific Gas & Electric Company and to take over the local electricity market–even before the city decides if it ought to.

“A ruling in the city’s favor would reinforce its position that PG@E is contractually obligated to sell–agreeing to do so in its franchise agreement in l954–and would undermine PG@E’s claim that a takeover would be hostile and that its assets are not for sale.”

Mayor Ed Chavez had called for a takeover bid in his State of the City address in February. The story quoted him as saying that a takeover would cut rates and generate millions of dollars in revenue. A preliminary estimate found that it could cost Stockton $368 million to buy PG@E’s assets but that the market is so profitable the city could recover that cost and save $8 million more annually, according to the Record.

Hey, Mayor Newsom and all the PUC and other City Hall officials are scared to death of PG@E. Listen up. If Stockton can take on PG@E, why can’t San Francisco take on PG@E? After all, San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is required by federal law to have a public power system (because the Raker Act of l913 allowed the city to build the Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park for its water supply, on condition the city residents get cheap Hetch Hetchy public power.) The city got the water but it never got the electricity because of PG@E muscle and City Hall cowardice and so PG@E stands to this day as an illegal private utility in San Francisco. (See Guardian stories and editorials since l969 and the Neilands story.)

Well, it’s good to see Joe still on the story after all these years. But, as I always tell him jokingly, “Joe, with a little more seasoning, you may be ready to cover City Hall in San Francisco.”

Click here to read the Recordnet.com story PG&E sued by Stockton: City pursues ruling to aid possible power takeover and check out the story links for the background.

Ammiano: May Day! May Day!

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

May Day! May Day! Arnold Schwarzenegger stops the light brown sprayijng of his hair.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on May l, 2008) B3

World Press Freedom Day

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Ammiano lectures Barry Zito

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Mr. Zito, can I (errrrrr) have a rebate, please?

(From the home telephone answering service of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Wednesday, April 30, 2008.) B3

Why did Rev. Wright do this?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Bob Herbert, the Afro-American op ed columnist for the New York Times, had the most sensible answer I’ve seen in his Monday (April 29) column.

He waded right in with his lead:

“The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington on Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him.

“Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big time news media,–this reverend is never going away. He’s found himself a national platform, and he’s loving it.”

Then: “So there he was lecturing an audience at the National Press Club about everything from the black slave experience to the differences in sentencing for possession of crack and powdered cocaine.

“All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society.”

Herbert then gets to the question. “This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why–if he is passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks–does he seem so insistent
on wrecking the campaign of the only Afican-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency.”

Herbert says that “my guess is that Mr. Wright felt he’d been thrown under a bus by an ungrateful congregant
who had benefited mightily from his association with the church and who should have rallied to the former pastor’s defense. What we’re witnessing now is Rev. Wright’s “I’ll show you!” tour.”

Obama rightly and firmly rejected Wright and his attacks. Now he should change the subject, get back to the real campaign and the real issues, and let his Afro-American and white surrogates carry on the dialog if necessary. Wright will be a killer swift boat issue only if Obama and his campaign allow it to become one.

I think he should take Clinton on in a Lincoln and Douglas style debate. I think he would win, given his oratorical skills, and it would help change the subject. But most important, Obama needs to reenergize his campaign
by injecting a strong populist appeal to his campaign theme of unifying and transformation. He needs to present the case that he has the grit and the intellect to beat the Republicans on foreclosures, the economy, the war, Iran, universal health care, the rising inequality in American life, and everything else that our despised president and his sucking up successor represents. He must offer leadership and offer real solutions and programs with passion and stick to the issues that really matter to the growing tide of Americans who are desperately angry and frustrated with Bush. That is the best way for Obama to deal with Wright and the Wright attacks to come. B3

Click here to read today’s Bob Herbert column, The Pastor Casts a Shadow.

A Better Solution for Gas Prices

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Pentagon pundits: media facilitate Iraq propaganda

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Every year, the Guardian runs a major front page story from Project Censored at Sonoma State University, listing the 20 major stories that have been “censored” or underreported during the previous year by the mainstream media.

Since 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq with “Shock and Awe,” the project’s stories have criticized the runup to the war, the lies of the Bush administration, the mendacity of the neocons promoting the war, the lousy media coverage, on and on. Neither the project nor most of the stories were published by the mainstream media. And the New York Times, and its sister paper the Santa Rosa Press Democrat near Sonoma State, refused to run the Censored story nor to explain why. (Last year, to its credit, the Press Democrat did a story on Censored.)

Now, the media reform organization Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has raised anew an important point involving a major New York Times story on April 20 that exposed the Pentagon’s program of feeding talking points to military pundits featured on TV newscasts. (Fair pointed out rightly that the military analysts’ ties with military contractors and advocacy groups had been documented as far back as 2003 with a report in the Nation (4/21).

FAIR’s point: “While the Times article focused on the role of the Pentagon, the parties that arguable have most to answer for are the media organizations that relied on these Pentagon analysts and failed to disclose blatant conflicts of interest posed by their ties with defense contractors…Of course, the Pentagon’s propaganda plan would have little effect if not for the enthusiastic participation of the corporate media.”

My question: when will the mainstream media start interviewing such prominent war critics as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and others of this caliber? Meanwhile, keep an eye out for our Project Censored package later this year.

Here’s the FAIR article and its call to action to hassle the five major networks:

Charlton Heston: shameful omissions in his obits

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George Powell, longtime Examiner and Chronicle employee, sent me the following critique of the obituaries of Charlton Heston. Personally, my favorite Heston portrayal was of the honest Mexican detective, as directed by Orson Welles in “Touch of Evil.” I also liked the idea of the two working together and Heston’s touching explanation of what he and Welles were trying to do dramatically in this most interesting Welles film.

By George Powell

Anne Marie Conroy becomes rock star

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Anne Marie Conroy becomes rock star. “I’m neither grateful nor dead, she says.”

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup.Tom Ammiano on Thursday April 24, 2008.) B3

Let’s stop Murdoch

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

More on the kind of media news the mainstream media conglomerates censor as a matter of policy: news involving the conglomerates and how they seek major concessions from the government:

This morning, the Senate Commerce unanimously approved a “resolution of disapproval” as the first major step toward an official congressional “veto” of the Federal Communication’s new rules that gut media limits.

Here’s the call to action from the freepress action fund, a national non partisan organization working to reform the media.

Big Senate Win Today: Let’s Stop Murdoch

Ammiano: Joe Nation comes out

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Joe Nation comes out! Against crime and change. zzzzzzzzzzz

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Wednesday, April 23, 2008) B3

Hillary: Just go, go, GO!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I liked the jaunty conclusion to Maureen Dowd’s column summing up the Pennsylvania election in the Wednesday, April 23 New York Times:

“Before they devour themselves once more, perhaps the Democrats will take a cue from Dr. Seuss’s ‘Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now.’ (The writer once mischievously redid it for his friend Art Buchwald as ‘Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now!’ They could sing:

“”The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go…I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis…You can go in an old blue shoe.

“‘Just go, go, GO!'” B3

Ramblin Jack and Country Joe

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Here’s a press release on an unusual coupling of musical legends as put together by Lee Houskeeper, press agent and worthy keeper of the flame for rock and roll music from the l960s and beyond:

Ramblin Jack Elliott And Country Joe McDonald
An Evening of Song, Stories, Wit, Wisdom and Much More . . .

Living Legends Share Stage for the
First Time in Berkeley April 25 & 26th

WHERE: Cafe de la Paz 1600 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA
WHEN: Friday & Saturday, April 25 & 26th -7:30 PM
TICKETS: $40 in advance (100 seats per night) Cafe de la Paz (510) 843-0662
http:///www.cafedelapaz.net

I first met Country Joe on stage at Woodstock a few years after he recorded a Woody Guthrie tribute LP in Nashville. In 1976 I met Ramblin Jack Elliott at my buddy Phil Ochs memorial in New York. Jack had introduced Dylan to Woody and has performed Guthrie songs his whole career. When I caught Jack at the Noe Valley Ministry earlier this year I was amazed that he and Joe had never met and got them together for this historic union Friday and Saturday in Berkeley.

This one time only get together will be a rare and historic treat for the lucky 100 per performance. There has been no advertising and I would be forever in your debt if you would let folks know about the show. The following is a

Two of Music’s Living Legends

and long time evangelical Woody Guthrie devotees Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Country Joe McDonald recently broke bread together for the first time at Cafe de la Paz

…and something special happened. Jack picked up a guitar and started playing Woody Guthrie’s Ladies Auxiliary and Country Joe, who has been performing his critically acclaimed tribute to Woody: This land is Your Land (premiered at Cafe de la Paz, dropped his jaw when Ramblin Jack sang some long forgotten stanzas to the popular old Union ballad. After hours of swapping lies, stories and lessons on text messaging, the two decided to do an intimate one-time only show right in Cafe de la Paz’s intimate (100 seat) Fiesta Room.

Lee Houskeeper
Managing Editor
San Francisco Stories
(415) 777-4700
newsservice@aol.com

Ammiano: no balls, but lots of chutzpah

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

No matzo. No matzo balls. No balls but lots of chutzpah.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Tuesday, election day in Pennsylvania,
April 22, 2008.)

Hearst blacks out the PG&E scandal. Again!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Often, on Wednesday, the San Francisco Chronicle will run a nice color PG&E ad on the lower right hand corner of its front page.

On Wednesday, April 16, the Chronicle did not run a PG&E ad on the front page, but it did run a major story on the front page above the fold that did a major favor for PG&E.

The story by Kelly Zito focused on public power and alternatives to PG&E, largely in Marin County where there’s an active and aggressive move to create a CCA (community choice aggregation) system that would replace PG&E
as an energy supplier in ll cities.

The story once again largely ignored San Francisco and its CCA movement headed by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi. It didn’t quote Mirkarimi nor any public power or CCA leaders, but instead used a dubious expert from the University of California at Berkeley, who never supported public power and generally supports PG&E private power and deregulation efforts to undermine without rebuttal the community- based anti-PG&E efforts.
And it once again followed the longtime Hearst policy of blacking out the key element of any serious public power story: the PG&E/Raker Act scandal and the fact that San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is mandated by federal law to have a public power system. (See Guardian stories and editorials back to 1969.)

I don’t blame Zito the reporter. She is only the latest in a long line of Hearst reporters who ends up executing Hearst policy of coddling PG&E and blacking out the Raker Act scandal. And, after years of questioning Chronicle reporters and editors and trying to get to the bottom of Hearst’s incessant censorship of and capitulation to PG&E, I really don’t know who to blame. But let me ask the questions again: who censors Hearst stories on PG&E as a matter of Hearst policy. The reporter? The city editor? The top editor? The publisher? Hearst corporate? Anybody over there?

In any event, I would much rather have a straightforward PG&E ad on the Chronicle front page, properly labeled PG&E, than stories that omit the Raker Act scandal and slant the stories for PG&E and against public power. B3

Click here for this week’s editorial, PG&E’s attack on CCA.

Click here for this week’s editorial, The floating peakers: An energy solution on the Bay?

Click here for The shame of Hearst

Ammiano outs polygamist DNA target

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Polygamist DNA test points to Mitt Romney. Talk about a stimulus package.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup.Tom Ammiano, making his say to Sacramento as the virgin politician amongst the hard-driving lobbyists. Recorded on Monday, April 2l, 2008). B3

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Nicky and Gordo are back!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Well, the sail racing news is that Nicky and Gordo are back.

As attentive readers of this blog remember, the fearsome twosome are my grandson, Nicholas Perez, a lithe 14-year sailor from Santa Barbara, and his veteran skipper Gordon (Gordo) Bagley, of Boulder City, Nevada. I wrote up how they did the impossible in the Hobie National Championship race in Alameda and and pulled off one of those once-in-a-lifetime sailing feats that sailors only dream about. Read original blog here.

Nicky and Gordo port tacked the fleet, which means they threaded the needle between the pin boat and the rest of the fleet of catamarans on port tack, took the lead, and never gave it up during the race. To pull off this maneuver during a national championship was nothing short of miraculous.

They were back in fine form in their first race of the season last weekend in Monterey Bay, the kickoff regatta for the Hobie Association of North America. (Hobie is the name of a catamaran boat.) It was so cold and windy that the race was canceled the first day (Saturday) and it was almost as cold and windy on Sunday, but some 40 sailors took to the water. Gordo sailed in bare feet. “I get a better feel of the movement of the boat,” he said, explaining his obvious masochistic tendencies.

Nicky and Gordo were first out on the bay, in their l6 foot Hobie, and sailed smartly out to sea.
They hit some rough patches during the race, but still managed to place fifth. “We survived,” Gordo said,
always optimistic, and looking ahead to the next race in San Diego.

HIs feet, he said, didn’t get cold but the rest of his body did. Nicky, bundled up in a dry suit, was cold but he didn’t complain. I was cold as hell standing on the shore watching.

As Gordon latched his boat onto his car for the ll-hour ride home, I noted several lines from Gordo’s favorite songs scrawled in blue on the sides of the boat.

Gordo’s favorite was a line from a song by the group Cream, “The sparkling waves are calling to kiss their lace white lips.” My favorite, “You can leave it all behind and sail…” from an Eagles song.

Meanwhile, I caught a wave while getting some closeup photos. So I headed off to a local bar to get out of the wet and into a dry martini. B3

nick1.jpg

Nicky and Gordon head out to sea.

nick2.jpg

Nicky and Gordo put their boat on wheels

nick3.jpg

Nicky and Gordo wheel the boat to the car.

nick4.jpg

Nicholas and Gordo standing tall at the end of a cold windy day at sea. Note Gordo’s bare feet. B3

Perspective on the ‘bitter’ campaigns

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I liked the perspective of Bob Herbert in his April l5 Op Ed column in the New York Times.

Senator Obama, he wrote, ” has spent his campaign trying to dodge the race issue, which in America is trying to dodge the wind. So when he fielded the question in San Francisco, he didn’t say: ‘A lot of folks are not with me because I’m black–but I’m trying to make my case and bring as many around as I can.’

“Instead, he fell back on a tortured response that was demonstrably incorrect…In his San Francisco comments, Senator Obama fouled up when he linked frustration and bitterness over economic hard times with America’s
romance with guns and embrace of religion. But, please, let’s get a grip. What we ought to be worked up about is the racism that still prevents some people from giving a candidate a fair chance because of skin color.”

Herbert also made a key point: “this toxic issue is at the core of the Clinton camp’s relentless effort to persuade superdelegates that Senator Obama ‘can’t win’ the White House. It’s the only weapon left in the Clintons’ depleted armory.”

The race is over. Obama has won. And I will never feel the same about the Clintons.

Click here to read Bob Herbert’s NY Times article Some Perspective on ‘Bitter’.

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