Tim Redmond

A true radical thinker dies at 85

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By Tim Redmond

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

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

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

Newsom’s loser

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By Tim Redmond

Gavin Newsom is endorsing Rob Black, a former aide to Michela Alioto-Pier, for supervisor in District Six. That’s an obvious — and entirely predictable — slap at the incumbent, Chris Daly. But I’m with Randy Shaw on this one; he points out in Beyond Chron that Daly is still immensely popular in the district and that almost nobody in the South of Market area has ever heard of Rob Black.

The San Francisco Sentinel reported somethat effusively on Black’s press conference with the mayor. There’s also an interesting (again, effusive) story about Black and a response from Daly’s office that makes it look like Black shot off his mouth without checking his facts.

This is chilling

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By Tim Redmond

Check this out, which I first saw on Daily Kos. Watch all the way through to the end; it’s only a couple of minutes.

Hidden in the Chron

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It was the lead item on the widely-read Romanesko media news column, but you had to dig deep into the Bay Area section of the San Francisco Chronicle to find it: There’s breaking news in the deal that would give Dean Singleton’s Media News Group near-monopoly control of daily newspapers in the Bay Area.

Clint Reilly, a former mayoral candidate, is the only one doing what the U.S. and California Justice Departments should be doing: Going to court to block the deal. But yesterday, a judge moved to deny Reilly’s request for a preliminary injunction to put the deal on hold until the court could determine how it would damage the local journalistic and economic landscape.

All of the local papers that are a part of the deal covered it; read the Contra Costa Times story here and the San Jose Mercury News story here.

But none of the stories quoted outside sources on the problems with the deal, and none of them pointed out the essential flaw in the judge’s argument: Judge Susan Illston claimed that Reilly hadn’t shown “imminent, irreparable damage” – although she did see irreparable damage to the Denver billionaire who is working overtime to corner the Bay Area news market and impose a chokehold on it for the duration. What she missed is that Reilly is representing not just his own economic interest here, but the public interest – which will of course be damaged, irreparably, now and forever.

Now THIS is scary

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By Tim Redmond

THe Bush Administration is quietly moving to give an eight-member panel appointed by the president the ability to kill any federal program or agency — unlilaterally. I’m not joking; Rollling Stone broke the story, and there’s a post on Daily Kos that lays it out and offers ways to fight back.

Here’s how RS describes it:

“[T]he commission would enable the Bush administration to achieve what Ronald Reagan only dreamed of: the end of government regulation as we know it. With a simple vote of five commissioners — many of them likely to be lobbyists and executives from major corporations currently subject to federal oversight — the president could terminate any program or agency he dislikes. No more Environmental Protection Agency. No more Food and Drug Administration. No more Securities and Exchange Commission.”

I’ve found very little other press on this, but it’s one of the more frightening things I’ve seen in a while.

Dufty wants to cancel Halloween

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By Tim Redmond

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

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

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

{Empty title}

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
I started down Valencia Street around 8:30 last Thursday morning, trying to get to Mission and Embarcadero for a 9 a.m. radio show, and I caught up with two other bicyclists at a red light around 23rd Street. None of us said anything, but we rode more or less together for a couple more blocks, then picked up a few more riders here and a few more there, and by the time we hit Market Street, there were probably 15 of us, riding along in some sort of impromptu Critical Mass–style convoy. We (carefully) ran lights together, rode around cars together, and somehow, I think, psychically watched each other’s backs. I was on Market Street during rush hour, and I actually felt almost safe.
It was a San Francisco moment, one of those instances of accidental community that make you remember why this is the world’s best city. And while the greedheads keep trying to ruin it, we can still dream of making it better.
That’s what this Best of the Bay issue is dedicated to: a celebration of all that is wonderful in San Francisco and the Bay Area — and a vision of what it could be, maybe even might be, if we can wrest control of the future from the people who brought us the high-rise boom, the war against fun, dot-com development, Gavin Newsom, and the $2,000 studio apartment.
It could be, it can be, and sometimes it is — the city of the future. SFBG

Come on, Mr. Sheriff

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By Tim Redmond

Here’s a great idea: Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Ross Mirkarmimi are pushing for a resolution that would call on the San Francisco sheriff to refuse to carry out Ellis Act evictions. Sheriff Mike Hennessey doesn’t seem so hot on this; he says he doesn’t want to face a contempt of court citation and wind up in his own jail.

But hey, it’s a San Francisco tradition: Back in 1977, then-Sheriff Dick Hongisto refused to evict the residents of the International Hotel, and spent five days in jail before relenting. The worst that would happen to Hennessey: He’d be stuck for a few days in his own clink, where I suspect he’d be treated well (and would learn a bit about how the inmates feel day to day). Eventually, he’d probably have to relent, too — but what a glrious legal battle. It would be an other great example of what we call Civic Disobedience — using the clout of the city and the full legal resources of the city to defy an immoral law. Gavin Newsom did it with same-sex marriage. Now, Hennessey has a chance to make history. Go for it, Mike.

Why land trusts work

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By Tim Redmond

We’ve been watching the community land trust concept for years, and I’ve personally pushed this as a major solution to the housing crisis in the city. And now even the Chronicle is noticing: In a recent Chinatown deal, tenants are able to buy their apartments for just $10,000 — and those units will be affordable forever.

The beauty of a land trust is that it takes housing entirely out of the speculative market. Not to go all Marxist or anything, but it separates the “commodity value” (what you can sell a piece of property for) from the “use value” (the fact that it’s a place to live, not some sort of stock-market index option). Since the private market has been utterly unable to provide affordable housing in San Francisco, and public-sector resources are far too limited to solve the entire problem, land trusts are a great way to keep low-income tenants from losing their homes.

So I’m not the only crackpot …

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By Tim Redmond

… who thinks that this latest heat wave means global warming is here.

More mess at New Times

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By Tim Redmond

Catch the Seattle Times story on the ongoing meltdown at the Seattle Weeklyl. Another sign that Mike Lacey and New Times (now Village Voice Media) management are driving away staffers and changing the basic mission local alt-weeklies.

Here’s how David Brewster, who founded the Seattle Weekly, puts it: Commenting on the old Weekly, he says:

“It’s been about building a better city, rather than just reveling in how bad the place is.”

That’s not how New Times thinks.

Blackouts

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By Tim Redmond

We knew this was coming, but the California authorities just announced that there may be rolling blackouts today as the searing heat overwhelms the state’s creaky old electricity grid.

That’s lovely: It’s 115 degrees in the Central Valley and senior citizens are going to lose their air conditioning.

Two things:

1. Global warming is here. It’s not coming soon. It’s here, and the climate change Al Gore warns about is happening faster than anyone anticipated. No, I’m not a climate scientist, but I don’t need a weatherman to know how hot the sun glows.

2. Responding is going to be a massive challenge, even more than Al Gore suggests. Step one: take the entire system of providing electricity (and eventually, all energy) out of the private sector.

Local blog roundup

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By Tim Redmond

Not a lot hot on this steaming day. A few choice bits:

Randy Shaw hates Aidin Vaziri.

Robert Haaland points out that Jake McGoldrick is trying to get a municipal WiFi network — and explains why he’s against tearing down the Hetch Hetchy dam.

The Sentinel has some great photos of protesters getting arrested while DiFi and the Israeli consul general try to defend the assualt on Lebanon.

Carla Marinucci, who has a thing for Arnold, attacks the latest Angelides ad — but this time, she has a point. The last time a Democrat tried to dismiss a GOP candidate for California Governor as just an “actor,” it was 1966, and the Dems didn’t do so well.

Okay, it’s not local, but if you have any ties to Connecticut (where I used to live) or you hate Joe Liberman (as a lot of us do), you’ll love this.

World War III

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By Tim Redmond

It’s not news that Newt Gingrich announced last week that World War III has begun. Some people in the progressive blogosphere are taking this seriously, saying it signals a new GOP offensive and the possibility that the Bush Administration is going to launch more military action in the Middle East. That’s not what Condi is telling the world, but I gather from what’s buzzing on the wires that I’m not the only one who thinks that the mess in Lebanon could quickly grow into a mess in Iran, and beyond.
The guy who runs my corner store on Cortland Street — not a foreign policy expert, but a native of the region — told me last night that he thinks Hezbollah and the Iranians love practicing with Iranian firepower in Lebanon, because it’s a convenient way to see if the stuff works. Besides, it gets Israel militarily engaged, which gets the Islamic radicals stirred up, which destablizes everything, which is what the luncatics on both sides want. And after all, who cares if Lebanese civilians die?
Tim Kingston, a freelance journalist who used to work for us, calls or emails me every day with the latest death toll; he grew up in Lebanon, and he’s written a piece for next week’s Guardian that explains why this latest assault on “the middle east’s whipping boy” is so painful — and has to be stopped. Watch for it.

Now, this is really lame

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By Tim Redmond
Everyone knows that the East Bay Express and the SF Weekly are owned by Village Voice Media (formerly New Times), but this weeks editions were a sign of what that sort of industry consolidation can mean for readers. The cover story in the Express? A profile of talk-show host Michael Savage by Ron Russel. The cover story in the SF Weekly? A profile of Michael Savage by Ron Russel.

I know that for years, NT/VVM headquarters in Phoenix has been pushing the members of its chain — there are 17 now — to share stories as a way of saving money. But we’ve never actually seen a shared cover story in the Bay Area before.

The art is slightly different, and so is the headline, but come on: The same cover story on two papers that circulate in the same market area? That’s really lame.

(Even sfist, which ranks the local weeklies every week, took these guys to task.)

Make those donuts …

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By Tim Redmond

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

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

The rent-control lie

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By Tim Redmond

I’ve been hearing this shit now for more than 20 years: Landlords say the reason there’s no new rental housing built in San Francisco is because of rent control. Never mind that new buildings are exempt from rent-control anyway; it’s that ugly monster in the radical left-wing closet — actual limits on how much a tenant can be gouged — that keeps housing-supply down and thus rents (uncontrolled rents) up.

Now, an economic report on the housing industry prepared for the Mayor’s Office of Housing provides some very different answers. Why is there no rental housing being built? Because developers want huge, insance profit margins — a minimum of 28 percent for large projects — and condos pencil out better than rentals.

You make more money building condos. That’s why nobody’s building rental housing in the private sector. Let’s at least be honest about it.

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
It’s your Guardian. That’s the message we posted on the cover today, and I mean it: The new sfbg.com website is designed to be fully interactive. You can post your comments on every article, every review, every editorial. You can join in on five new blogs. In a few weeks, we’ll have a reader’s blog, just for you.
Newspaper publishing should never be a one-way communication. For more than 20 years, I’ve been hearing from readers (yeah, I answer my own phone), and your ideas and suggestions (and complaints) are what make this paper great.
And now you can share your thoughts with all the other readers, too. Argue, fight, tell me I’m full of shit, point out great San Francisco ideas that ought to be in the mix … It’s easy. Registration takes about 30 seconds. And keep coming back – there’s going to be more, much more, rolling out in the next few weeks.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The first thing I did when I learned that private housing developers in San Francisco were demanding 28 percent profit levels (see page 5) was to call my brother Mike, who runs a small business building houses in New York. He almost dropped the phone.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “These guys say they need 28 percent profit?” That’s the minimum, I told him.
“Shit, sign me up,” he laughed. “I’ll take the whole crew and we’ll be on the next plane.”
Mike is thrilled when he walks away with 10 percent profit on a job. So is everyone he knows. So are most small businesses (and quite a few large ones). The only ones who can get away with demanding that sort of return are oil companies, daily newspaper publishers, and, it appears, San Francisco real estate developers.
This isn’t really shocking news: We’ve known for a long time that developers make a killing in an inflated housing market. Compared to the boom years of the 1980s, when the office market was running rampant and out of control, the 28 percent margins aren’t that outrageous – high-rise office developers made even more.
But there’s a bottom line for the city: These folks aren’t just getting rich; they’re getting really rich – purely off a market that exists simply because of the appeal of San Francisco. They owe it to the city to give more than a pittance of that back.
Now this: Just about every small-business owner in San Francisco is sitting down with a spreadsheet and trying to figure out how much Sup. Tom Ammiano’s health care legislation is going to cost. A lot of them seem to be nervous – in part because of the fearmongering campaign put out by the Chamber of Commerce and the Committee on Jobs.
But when you actually look at what the law says, it’s not that scary. I’ve gone over the final language, and here are some key points:
1. The requirement that employers pay for health care doesn’t affect anyone with fewer than 20 employees, which is most of the small businesses in town.
2. Nobody’s going to have to pay anything until July 2007, and companies with between 20 and 50 employees aren’t going to have to pay anything until April 2008.
3. There’s a 90-day waiting period before anyone has to pay for a new employee.
4. Nobody will have to pay for employees who either have health insurance already (from a spouse, say) or who voluntarily decline health insurance.
5. Employers will pay based on how many hours an employee works, so the price for a part-timer will be comparatively small.
6. If you have more than 20 employees and don’t currently provide health insurance for all of them (or the amount you pay for that insurance is low), you’ll have to ante up, either by buying insurance in the private market or paying into the city plan. For companies with 20 to 99 employees, the city plan will run about $1.12 an hour next year for anyone who works more than 12 hours a week. Pencil it out; it may not kill you.
It’s absolutely an imperfect system. Employer-based health insurance is the wrong model. But for now it’s all we have – and this is a way to offer at least basic primary health care to everyone in the city. It’s worth the price. SFBG

Bush the groper

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By Tim Redmond

And this is truly special. Bush thinks it’s just fine to suddenly start groping the German chancellor ….

Bumper sticker of the week

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By Tim Redmond

Yes, it’s sick, but it’s disturbingly appropriate (from DailyKos)

“maybe all the peace-loving Israelis and Palestinians should get together and kill all the ones who keep fighting.”

Daly’s re-election

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By Tim Redmond

Pat Murphy at the Sentinel has a nice recap of a party for Chris Daly, sponsored by Jane Morrison and Agar Jaicks, who are longtime stalwarts of the local Democratic Party. Murphy reports on the usual plaudits from the likes of Tom Amminano and Aaron Peskin, who talked about Daly’s fighting spirit.

I missed the party, but let me add a point. Daly is a political pugilist, of course, and sometimes a bit prickly (he wouldn’t talk to me for weeks after we declined to endorse his Transbay Terminal proposal). But I watched a lot of the budget hearings, and I have to say: It’s not easy chairing that committee, and Daly did a really good job. When he’s not yelling at anyone, he’s actually a pretty fair legislator.

{Empty title}

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Wow: A little more drunkenness and a bit of public nudity, and San Francisco could have had a real world-class soccer party Sunday. As it was, things were pretty darn festive: I was too busy chasing the kids around and watching the game to get a good count, but I bet there were 15,000 people at Dolores Park, more than I’ve seen in one place in the Mission for anything short of a big antiwar rally. The sun was shining, the mood was upbeat, people waved French and Italian flags around and cheered when either side scored a goal… what a great event.
And it only happened because a German-born former teacher named Jens-Peter Jungclaussen, who is traveling around in a bus trying to bring the world to local kids, decided to get the permits, line up a big-screen TV and a huge forklift, and pull it off.
And as I stood there and marveled at how one motivated person could create a massive civic event, I had to wonder: Why can’t the Recreation and Park Department do stuff like this?
How hard would it have been for the city to rent the TV screen (or better, three or four screens; there were so many people the ones in the back could barely see), put out the word (Jungclaussen did, as far as I can tell, no advertising — the whole thing was by e-mail and word of mouth), and maybe even do this in half a dozen places around town?
It’s funny, when you think of it: So much of the fun stuff that happens in San Francisco is done by private groups. The street fairs, the festivals, the concerts… the city does almost none of this. Even the Fourth of July fireworks are run by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Rec-Park spends a lot of time pissing people off, making dumb rules about permits that make even the private events harder to finance. It’s a nest of bureaucrats without any vision.
This ought to be a wake-up call: There are all sorts of things that can bring people together. There are all sorts of ways to spend the public’s money helping the public have fun (and along the way, reminding people why we pay taxes).
You want to cough up extra money every year to pay someone to tell you that you can’t drink beer in North Beach? I don’t either — but a few events like Sunday’s impromptu festival in Dolores Park, and one of the most loathed agencies at City Hall could become one of the most loved.
Think about it, folks.
Now this: I think just about every Guardian reader in the world has noticed that we’ve had some serious Web problems in the past few weeks. We got hit with something — maybe an attack, we’re still not sure — on Election Day, and whatever it was pretty much fried sfbg.com, and we’ve been limping along ever since.
But we’re back now and way better with a bunch of big changes that we’d been planning anyway. Sfbg.com now has a new design, a (much, much) faster user interface — and several new blogs that will be updated daily and full of everything you need to know about politics, arts, culture, and the unconventional wisdom of San Francisco.
It’s still a work in progress, but it’s going to be a lot easier to tell us what you think. SFBG

The taxi “thief”

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By Tim Redmond

This is front-page news in the Chronicle? A weeks-old story that an assistant to a department head was convicted of stealing a $100 necklace 15 years ago?

Let’s check out the facts. The man, Tristan Bettencourt, is now the assistant to the director of the Taxi Commission. He’s filling in as acting director because the commission fired director Heidi Machen in a politically motivated move June 28th.

Back in 1989, Bettencourt was a cab driver when a woman he’d taken to a movie later realized her house had been burglarized and a necklace stolen. She accused Bettencourt. An overworked public defender told Bettencourt that he could be facing six years in prison, and urged him to plead. The way Bettencourt described it to me, he was a 130-pound kid, terrified about doing hard time. He took a deal that kept him out of the violence of the California prison system.

Maybe he’s telling the truth, and he’s innocent. He was poorly advised by a lawyer and took a felony rap. These things happen all the time.

But what if he was actually guilty? Should anyone really care 15 years later?

There’s no doubt that he’s been free from legal trouble since that episode. His conviction was erased from the record because he’d fulfilled his probation. He’s gone on to get a decent job and is supporting himself and contributing to society. Isn’t that something we should all be proud of?

And what possible connection could a small-time burglary bust all those years ago have to do with his qualifications to work for the Taxi Commission?

There’s no secret what’s happening here. The big cab companies are pissed that Machen is cracking down on all their permit scams, and they’re trying to smear her staff. It’s disgraceful that the Chron is playing along.

A solution in search of a problem

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By Tim Redmond

I don’t really know where this comes from; do people have nothing better to do than whine about their neighbors? But I know that in neighbhorhoods like Chinatown, North Beach and yeah, Bernal Heights, where I live, it’s going to be tough on some people who have neither garages nor alleys and could be asked to stick their trash cans in the front hall.

But I have an answer: Paint them wild colors, and call them public art.

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