Tim Redmond

The mayor’s race begins

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By Tim Redmond

So now it’s official: Just when San Francisco political junkies needed something other than the generally dull November election to talk about, Bevan Dufty has done us all a favor and fired the opening gun in the 2011 mayor’s race.

It’s no surprise, really — everyone knew that Dufty was running. Just as everyone knows that City Attorney Dennis Herrera and state Senator Leland Yee will be in the race, and that Assessor Phil Ting is looking at it, and that Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and Public Defender Jeff Adachi are mulling their prospects.

With public financing in place, and ranked-choice voting, the race will be fascinating. Dufty has never run citywide, but he’s a nice guy who can be funny and charming and he’s built a reputation as a nuts-and-bolts supervisor who takes government seriously. “Ross Magowan [of KTVU] asked me what my biggest single issue was, and I said Muni,” Dufty told me today. “He said that Muni was getting better, but hey — crime is down 30 percent citywide and still up on Muni.”

Fixing Muni is a Dufty kind of thing — not a grand civic vision, but a basic public service that people use that has problems. (A classic Dufty story: When the city got rid of the crossing guard at the school my kids go to a couple of years ago, which is in Dufty’s district, the principal called Dufty, and the guard was back the next day. He loves that sort of thing.)

“What I try to be is a collaborator,” he said. “I’ve never had the luxury of knowing I had six votes on the board, so I’ve had to reach out to people.”

He also promised that Mayor Dufty would always show up for question time at the board. He joked that “it’s easy for me to promise that because Chris Daly will be off the board by them” but in the next breath told me how much he likes and respects Daly, who he called “incredibly talented.” (Again, classic Dufty.)

It’s going to be a challenge for him to stand out in this race. He’s not going to get a lot of progressive support; he simply hasn’t been there on a lot of progressive votes and issues. It’s rare to see him defy Mayor Newsom and he’s been on the wrong side of many of the key battles of the past ten years.

He has a lot of support in his district, and among the more centrist parts of the gay community. But he’s not a big downtown guy, not a prodigious fundraiser and won’t be the next Newsom, who ran the first time with the unwavering support of the big-business community and all the money he could ever need.

And Herrera and Yee — both with a proven track record of raising money, both with citywide name recognition — will also be sitting in that political center. Neither of them can claim the support of the majority of the progressive supervisors (although Herrera will no doubt have former Board President Aaron Peskin on his team).

If Mirkarimi or Adachi runs, they’ll take the left flank. Yee will be the more conservative candidate, especially when he’s working the west side of town. I don’t see how Dufty finds his niche.

He doesn’t either, right now — except to say that “I’m not running for anything else. I have no desire to go to Sacramento or Washington. I’m humble and I’m going to run a grassroots campaign.”

What he has, clearly, done is given a kind of shit-or-get-off-the-pot push to the other candidates. The race is a long way away, but with Dufty out there, raising money and seeking endorsements, Mirkarimi is going to have to decide if he’s serious, and if not, the progressives are going to have to decide if Adachi is their man, and the race is going to start firming up. There won’t be a Matt Gonzalez late entry this time around. What you see is what you get, and the late-comers will be at a disadvantage.

The new taxi plan: Everyone hates it

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By Tim Redmond

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Municipal Transportation Agency officials have drafted a plan to overhaul the San Francisco taxi industry — and just about everyone hates it.

The proposal, outlined in a Sept. 8 memo from Christiane Hayashi, director of taxis and accessible services, would ultimately shift control of cab permits away from working drivers and give them to cab companies.

The process would be slow — the drivers who currently hold medallions would be allowed to keep them until they retire or die, and the 1,700 people who have been on the medallion waiting list for more than 10 years would retain their rights.

But in the future, as the valuable medallions get returned to the city, they would be auctioned off to cab companies. The companies wouldn’t technically own the permits, but would bid for long-term leases.

The idea runs directly counter to the landmark 1978 legislation known as Proposition K, which for the first time gave drivers the right to control their own permits. Under Prop. K, written by then-Supervisor Quentin Kopp, medallions are issued for a token annual fee to active, working drivers. No corporations are allowed to hold medallions. The only way to get a medallion is to put your name on the waiting list; it often takes as long as 15 years.

Of course, drivers who get the medallions see an immediate and substantial increase in their incomes. The medallions are valid 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so medallion holders can driver a few shifts a week and lease them out to other drivers for the rest of the time. The lease fees can add up to about $3,000 a month.

And that income continues as long as the medallion holder is alive — and driving a cab. If he or she can’t drive a minimum number of hours, the medallion is returned to the city and goes to the next person on the waiting list.

Prison report: What the state really wants

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By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His dispatches appear twice a week.

I guess this is sort of a continuance from my last blog, which was, What Plan?My sentiment hasn’t changed — what the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has offered the three-judge panel is a “plan” that will surely get rejected.

The political rhetoric indicates that the state will fight — but it really is weak rhetoric, spoken just between the ears of constituents by politicians who want to appear tough on crime.

For those who that don’t deal directly with lawyers and politicians on a daily basis, the “we-will-fight-the-feds” speech really is weak. They have to say that — to appear tough on crime and strong for public safety (in their minds anyway). But I believe a good percentage of them are silently grateful for the escape granted to them by the feds. Ultimately, the court will reject their weak plan and take over long enough to release dozens of thousands of us .

If CDCR and the politicians who say they’re against releases felt as strong as they would have you think, a much more robust, pragmatic, well-thought-out process to deal with overcrowding would have been presented.

The Republicans claim to be against big government. If they really thought that way about the release scenario, they would have pushed for a plan that would have been acceptable to the courts and kept the big federal government out of the California prison system.

The Democrats who speak against releases and federal interference are just hypocrites scampering for a way to ride out the potential political fallout they perceive if they don’t “speak out” against releases.

Meanwhile, the ones who are speaking up for sanity are not getting the shaft that the others so feared.

The long-term results of the current budget cuts for health care, welfare and education are not seen as threats to public safety. But its so right in front of everyone to see and it’s not too complicated to explain nor to understand:

— Cuts to welfare mean more people have to find a way to feed themselves and their families. Consequently, they may steal or deal drugs.

— Cuts to health care mean less money to pay for you and your family’s health — consequently people will steal or deal drugs to pay for health care.

— Cuts to education mean a less-educated workforce that can’t get jobs because the economy sucks so they get on welfare …. oops, there is no welfare. Consequently, they steal or deal drugs to pay for food or healthcare or both.

Of course, there are those that wind up on drugs because it’s easier to worry about the next high than your next meal.

40,000 now — or what, 400,000 in five years?

Prison report: Where’s the plan?

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By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His reports run twice a week.

I wasn’t going to write anything for today, but I realized after a conversation with someone earlier in the day, and one this afternoon with Tim, that I had an apology to make.

You see, I’ve been guilty over the last month or so of the very thing I am constantly denouncing, which is wholesale condemnation of various groups and entities.

That’s not fair, and I don’t want it done to me, and I really am trying to treat people how I would like to be treated.

So, I say: Please accept my apology if you are a politician, or a California Correctional Peace Officers Association member, or a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation employee, or a media person or a person in general who is fighting for change within the prison system, fighting for sentencing reform, trying to move toward sane policies around prisons, and doesn’t buy into the constant rhetoric about those of us in prison.

I apologize for lumping you together with those you don’t deserve to be compared with. And I say, thank you for your efforts at rational laws and fair inmate practices.

But, for those of you that are the cowards and liars serving from the trough of fear, that acrid ambrosia you’re serving the general public in the name of public safety, I still say, Screw You.

Well, it’s 3:30 and California still hasn’t, to my knowledge, given the federal courts a plan to reduce the prison population by 43,000 over the next two years. Imagine that. They don’t have a real plan — well, actually, the real plan all along has been to have the feds come in and take over, so the state can still look tough on crime.

A meager fight is the same as a non fight, which is basically giving up and saying, we don’t know what to do.

There’s nothing wrong with admitting when you are wrong and accepting defeat. But for many, I think it’s more cowardice at the public expense — the public that would rather the problem just go away because we have enough problems already.

“Oh well, oh hell,” as my dad would say.

I hope the feds get it right, and the powers that be use their “new slate” to make changes that may work.

Do unto others as you would have then do unto you.

SF Weekly dredges up the Sixties. Sigh.

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By Tim Redmond

I wasn’t going to say anything about the SF Weekly’s big story on the Weather Underground. I mean, Peter Jamison clearly did a lot of work, it was reported in some detail, and frankly, I’ve over talking about what happened back in 1970.

But it keeps gnawing at me, mostly because I don’t really like this whole idea of dredging up radicals from the past and trying to find ways to put them in jail today. I know, I know, a cop got killed and there’s no statute of limitations for murder, and nobody should ever get away with killing anyone else.

But that was a time when all sorts of people on all sides were doing really fucked-up stuff, from the Vietnam War to COINTELPRO; Geronimo Pratt spent most of his adult life in prison after being framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Fred Hampton was murdered. The list goes on — and none of the perpetrators of the state-backed or state-sanctioned violence have ever paid for their crimes.

You can read a remarkable essay by former Guardian arts editor J.H. Thompkins about it here. His basic take:

The ’60s were full of challenge, and although I’m not a revolutionary now, in my heart, I’m still a revolutionary then. You believed you could change the world and yourself in the process, and that was liberating. The politics were confusing, we made mistakes, and at the end of the day, the fact is that we were right and the other side – racists, politicians, corporate vultures, and the rest – were wrong.

Sometimes I think we should just have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, put it behind us and move on.

Anyway, I asked an old friend of mine who was around in those days what he thought about the Weekly story. He didn’t want his name used, because even now this shit scares people, and the FBI seems happy to be looking for every Sixties radical it can find. But he had some interesting comments:

I’d heard this story was coming out;. it doesn’t seem credible to me. I wasn’t too far away from that scene during those months they refer to — December ’69-March 1970 — and I don’t think BLA and Weather were much connected. Weather types had showed up in disarray after the fucked up “days of rage” thing. And I just don’t think they had the ties — in fact, I’m almost certain they didn’t. even the early weather people weren’t so stupid as to meet a group (BLA) and then pull some horrific job with them. I’d be more inclined to think it was the splinter Panther, BLA-types, even though that trend wasn’t very big in the bay area.

Cops and FBI statements all sound like typical conspiracy things, general and ignorant of any real nuance. And the writer – what was the point of this? – doesn’t dig much up but aging police sources, but does a good job with the incriminating innuendo.

The most credible voice for the cops is Gitlin; because his statement is very true. The group was nearly defunct after days of rage, and the true believers were prone to crazed hyperbole like Bernadine Dohrn’s Manson riff at Flint. It was like that Sociology 101 book “when prophecy fails,” so they were over the top between the fall and when the townhouse exploded. then it changed dramatically.

But I still don’t think that it makes any sense. The Weather people were so naive and so new to it at the end of ’69; I just don’t think they could have – or would have – pulled it off. Plus, and I was closer to the people if not the group as ’70 wore on, I never heard one whiff of gossip about it, and those people loved to tell their stories. What’s more disturbing is the way all this stuff sets precedents, softening up people so that the country is used to finding demon radicals in America again.

I don’t know if Weather Underground was involved in this bombing. I do know that it’s almost impossible at this point to prove it, one way or another. There were too many nutcases doing too much crazy stuff, and all this can possibly lead to is another show trial that seeks to put the Sixties on defense again.

I’m kind of over that, too.

How Newsom chooses commissioners

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By Tim Redmond

The Small Business Commission isn’t one of the highest-profile public bodies in San Francisco, but to the tens of thousands of small entrepreneurs in the city, it’s important. So the recent appointment of Luke O’Brien to a vacancy on the panel left a lot of small business activists scratching their heads.

“Nobody knew this individual,” Scott Hauge, one of the city’s best-connected and active small business leaders, told me. “As far as we know, he’s never been active in small business issues.”

When the seat opened up, the commission’s director, Regina Dick-Endrizzi, let the small business community know there was on opening, and advised interested people to send in recommendations, and Hauge and others had plenty to offer. But in the end, the way the new commissioner was chosen says a lot about how Newsom makes decisions — and how little he cares about real community input.

O’Brien, according to a resume the mayor’s office sent over, has a background in sales, engineering and technical support and has worked for several technology companies, including Lucent, where he was a corporate sales engineering manager, and two start-ups, one in Mountain View and one in Reno. In 2003, he joined Pattani Construction, a San Francisco outfit run by Mel Murphy, a developer and Residential Builders Association guy who holds the RBA seat on the Department of Building Inspection Commission. When Murphy set up a real-estate investment company the next year, O’Brien joined him as vice president and partner.

According to the mayor’s press secretary, Nathan Ballard,

Commissioner O’Brien will work to ensure that small local construction companies get their fair share of construction dollars. He will work with Small Business Commission Director Regina Dick-Endrizzi and Supervisor David Chiu on their ongoing efforts to reduce redundant and unnecessary businesses fees, and will bring needed expertise into those business fees flowing out of the DBI and Planning Department that are most onerous for small businesses.

In other words, he’s an RBA guy who wants to make life easier for developers. He’s given money to Newsom allies, including Doug Chan for Supervisor and Joe Alioto for supervisor. (I haven’t been able to reach O’Brien, but I left him a message and I’ll let you know if I hear back.)

Since he has no visible background in the small business community, none of the activists had ever heard of him, and none of the names that Hauge and his allies submitted had made the cut, I asked Ballard who the mayor had met with, reached out to or discussed this appointment with. His response:

“O’Brien was recommended to us by his business partner, Mel Murphy.”

Prison report: Mass releases?

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By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in the California state prison system. His dispatches run twice a week.

I am constantly amazed at the cowardice of the politicians who are running this state. The Legislature passed the prison bill, reducing the population by 16,000 inmates — but this is a watered-down bill that still leaves $200 million more for California to wrest from other areas, like education and health care.

No one wants to be seen as soft on crime — but a lot of the crimes people are in prison for are moral crimes. Any crime in which there is not an actual victim — that is, a person or entity — should not be a crime, period.

Eighteen percent of the inmates in California are in for drug-related crimes — possession or sales. That’s roughly 30,000 people. Why not let all of them out, now?

Politicians seem only able to describe the decisions they make when they are accused of something — rarely do we see a thoughtful conversation held about a topic that necessitates a dialogue. Like the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, these legislators do what they want, when they want, to whom ever they want, but hide behind the veil of public safety when questioned about their actions — which will, in the long term, harm public safety.

I don’t understand how the general public keeps allowing this ridiculous spending on prisons to go on unquestioned. Are the voters so caught up in their own little worlds to not realize the long-term impact of the terrible laws and terrible system? It must be — because it keeps going on, unchecked.

The president’s health-care reform plan has the public screaming and yelling and talking about long-term costs etc. But they can’t seem the forest for the trees when it comes to prison spending. It goes to show how shortsighted people can be when it comes to their own wallets. It’s akin to never getting your home checked for termites, then being surprised when the house comes crashing down around you, but the chimney still stands.

It’s pretty obvious that the plan in Sacramento is really to just allow the feds to come in and take over the problem. California has until Friday to show the court its plan to replace the prison pop by 43,000 over the next two years. Right: They can’t even figure out how to reduce it by 27,000 over one year. You think they’ll come up with a workable plan by Friday?

The Supreme Court already denied CA’s appeal to extend the deadline.

Mass releases — coming soon, to a theater near you.

Editor’s Notes

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

I’m really glad that you can watch the state Legislature on streaming video, because it gave me something to do Friday night. For a couple of hours, I sat there transfixed, flicking from the Assembly channel to the Senate channel, as the exhausted and somewhat punchy leaders of our state government blazed through about 100 different bills.

I think my favorite moment was when the Assembly Republicans tried to derail AB 962, a bill by Assembly Member Kevin De Leon (D-Los Angeles) that bans the sale of mail-order ammunition. De Leon tried to explain how reasonable the measure is — you can still order ammo on the Internet, but it has to be delivered to a licensed gun store, someplace where a clerk can check to make sure you’re over 18 and not a felon. He spoke of teenagers in his district ordering thousands of rounds of deadly bullets and getting them delivered to their doorsteps.

But oh my, the GOP was outraged. One Assembly Member announced that this was a violation of the Second Amendment and started chanting "let my people go." Another described a letter she received from a senior citizen who apparently had trouble getting around but needed a thousand rounds of live ammo for a "cowboy reenactment." The guy can’t drive to a gun store, but he can shoot live bullets at other old cowboys? What a great country.

At any rate, the Assembly passed the bill, with the minimum 41 votes, and the governor will now get to decide once again if he’s with the gun nuts or reasonable law enforcement.

I was a little worried that the modest prison reform bill would fail. Barely enough Assembly Democrats supported it, and some of the more liberal state Senators said it didn’t go far enough. Which it didn’t, and it doesn’t, and it’s at best a weak plan that could lead to the release of 17,000 nonviolent inmates. But the heart of the original bill, which called for a commission to review the state’s insane and often arbitrary sentencing policies, died. And some Assembly Democrats — including San Francisco’s Fiona Ma — refused to support a proposal to release more inmates to alternative custody, including home detention with electronic monitoring. So an alternative-release bill never made it to the floor.

That means the state is at least $200 million short of the cuts it needs to make in the prison system to balance the budget — cuts that were already included in the fiscal plan approved this summer. And California is still out of compliance with the federal courts, which have ordered the state to release some 40,000 inmates.

Something’s got to give.

The water system isn’t getting any better, either. The five key water bills failed to get approval, so it appears the Legislature will be coming back for a special session on water. Maybe one on education, too. Maybe more prison reform will come up in those sessions. Maybe Fiona Ma will realize that unlike some moderate Dems, she runs no risk of losing reelection over prison releases and can vote the right way next time.

And maybe Tantalus will get to eat some apples. Last I heard, he was still hungry.

I’ll miss the defenestration building

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By Tim Redmond

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I’m not about to start a campaign here; I know the place is falling apart and a hazard to everyone and ought to be turned into affordable housing, so there’s no rational reason to protest the Redevelopment Agency’s plan to bulldoze the old Hugo Hotel.

But I have to say: I’m going to miss the place.

It just sat there for so long, a weird piece of street art, an abandoned building with furniture flowing out of the windows and hanging on the walls defying gravity and progress. Every time I’d pass by, I’d say: God, I love this fucking city.

It was just art for art’s sake, no money in it, no sign describing the vision of the artist, no discussion of what it means or meant … just old stuff miraculously bolted to the old crumbling walls of an an old crumbling building. I always wondered what would fall down first and what the green couch would look like after it hit the sidewalk.

It was never meant to be permanent. And now it will be gone. That’s appropriate, in a sad kind of way.

But every time something truly strange goes away, San Francisco loses a bit of itself. I hope we don’t forget this one; maybe Redevelopment can find the cash to hire a photographer to document the place, and put great big color pictures of it up in the lobby of the new, clean, sterile project that takes its place, just to remind us that things were different here, once.

The Legislature’s all-nighter fails

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The state Legislature wrapped up its session around 7 a.m. Saturday, after officially stopping the clock on the midnight deadline and pretending it wasn’t the next day yet until 120 elected officials endured a sleepless night and a lot of critical work didn’t get done. The really bad all-nighters in college were the ones when you felt like hell the next day and didn’t finish the term paper anyway.

There’s a pretty good roundup here and hereon a couple of the bills.

It’s remarkable: Governor Schwarzenegger is going to veto the very bill he initially proposed. He’s going to sign a prison reform bill that doesn’t even come close to doing what he agrees has to be done to cut prison costs. And unless he calls a special session of the Legislature to deal with water issues, there will be nothing to stave off the near-collapse of the Bay/Delta estuary.

Meanwhile, of course, the Republicans refused to back down and approve a tiny $16 million allocation to save domestic violence sheters (which literally save lives).

At least the Senate refused to exempt a bizarre sports stadium plan in Southern California from CEQA; it looked for a while there as if the legislators were going to cut a huge hole in the state’s landmark environmental law just to please a billionaire.

Hell of a session. Can’t wait for the fall.

UPDATE: Prison reform squeaks through

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By Tim Redmond

Well, the state Senate just approved the Assembly’s version of a prison reform bill, which is too weak but at least it’s something. It will go back to the Assembly tonight.

By the way, if you want to watch all the end-of-session madness — the bills flying through, the impassioned speeches and the outright nuttery (I was just enjoying the debate in the Assembly over limits on mail-order ammunition — good God, these Republicans are strange), you can get streaming video here.

Give Kamala Harris credit for integrity

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By Tim Redmond

The San Francisco district attorney is running for attorney general. Statewide candidates, especially Democrats, tend to get hammered as “soft on crime” if they so much as utter of word against locking up more prisoners and killing more murderers.

So on the surface, it doesn’t make much political sense for Kamala Harris to announce that she won’t seek the death penalty in a high-profile (and particularly nasty) murder.

She still insists that, while she personally opposes the death penalty, she looks at every case individually. But right now, she’s doing the right thing, and refusing to go against what she knows is the right position on the issue. And she’s going to take some political heat for it.

In the end, though, it’s not going to cost her the job. If anything, in a race and a season when everyone is going to be pandering and trying to make cheap political points, she’s going to look good.

At least I hope so.

Will prison reform survive?

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By Tim Redmond

The governor agreed to cut $1.2 billion out of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilition budget this summer, but ducked the tough question of how to do it, leaving that up to the Legislature — which also can’t quite reach an answer. A moderate, watered-down bill that Speaker Karen Bass pulled together scraped through the Assembly, but is stuck, like so many other bills, in battles over the final language. As Brian at Calitics puts it:

The Assembly plan doesn’t have enough cost savings (or enough spine) and the Senate seems reluctant to pull the trigger on a half measure

Some weak Democrats, including Fiona Ma, refused to vote for the moderate bill, and now the Senate leaders are saying they want a stronger bill, which gives some of them a reason to vote against it. It takes political courage (and common sense) to recognize that most inmates are getting out anyway, and that early, supervised releases of nonviolent prisoners isn’t going to harm the public in any way.

So if nothing happens here, we’ll be stuck this fall with a big problem: A $1.2 billion hole in the state budget, and no plans to fix it.

Vaginas and insurance: Billboard wars

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By Tim Redmond

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The group Consumer Watchdog is going after Mercury Insurance. Absolut Vodka is going after guys, I guess, with what appears to be a giant vag in the sky.

And guess which image the billboard company removed?

Steve Lopez at the LA Times says “its funny what passes for offensive these days.

Now, I don’t find pictures of vaginas offensive (it’s supposed to be a mango, but WTF?). But I agree with Lopez that removing a billboard critical of an insurance company is, at the very least, a free speech issue.

Prison report: Where the money goes

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By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His reports run twice a week.

Tuesday night’s news reported on California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spending and, believe it or not, the anchor was actually outraged.

The report said that over the past three years, CDCR has spent 32 percent more — but the inmate population has decreased by one percent. over that same period of time.

CDCR claims that the increase in spending is due to an increase in the cost of health care for inmates as well as lawsuits and overtime.

Well, in the two years and change that I have been in the custody of CDCR, I have not seen the quality of health care improve one iota. For our perspective, it has not improved as it should with this purported increase in spending. At least not at the institution I’m in.

The federal courts seem to agree as well, since they have ordered the release of more than 43,000 inmates since CDCR’s overcrowded conditions are resulting in constitutionally inadequate health care.

For you whiners and corrections officers who say we get better health care than most people on the streets, and that we should consider ourselves lucky, blah blah blah: Just because are getting some “health care” does not mean we are getting better health care than the general public.

The state is obligated to give us health care. Just because we’re in prison doesn’t mean we should be denied health care. To do so would create misery for CDCR and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association anyway — it’s really in their best interest to keep us recidivists healthy to guarantee their jobs for the long haul.

The aging prison population still has to be watched, right?

For every one of us that does get an expensive procedure done, there are hundreds that don’t get shit done. Half the medical staff and doctors barely speak English well enough to be understood, and they use their broken language to try and convince you there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s not like CDCR hires the best and the brightest — working in prison for most health care providers is the bottom of the rung.

The overtime: The news said that there were seven CDCR officers — sergeants and lieutenants — who earned more than the director of CDCR, Matt Cate, who makes a salary of $225,000 a year. They also said that 8,400 staff made $20,000 or more in overtime last year. At $20,000, that’s $168 million. But how many made $30,000, or 40,000? How many earned between $10,000 and $20,000 in overtime? What’s the real overtime figure, $250 million? How many programs could be created to help out prisoners — or crime victims — for $250 million? How many college kids could afford to go to school for a year?

Lawsuits? What are they talking about? Are they talking about money paid out to plaintiffs and in settlements? If so, is that not indicative of a pretty big problem — so big that CDCR is losing lawsuits because of its ineptitude?

Just something to think about.

Editorial: No compromise on health care

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By Tim Redmond

It’s not hard to find suggestions for how President Obama should handle his speech tonight. Maybe the speech isn’t all that important anyway — it’s what the president does afterward.

But our line on it is simple: The Democrats have compromised enough. The Republicans have no credibility here and there isn’t going to be a bipartisan solution. So Obama needs to fight to win.

Is it 1975 all over again?

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By Tim Redmond

I talked in my editors notes column this week about the remarkable document created in 1975 by the San Francisco Community Congress. It marked the beginning of community-based local organizing in modern San Francisco, and I promised to post it on the web.

So here it is. (PDF) Enjoy.

Editor’s Notes

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

Every poor and working class community in San Francisco has learned the hard way that its interests are at the bottom of the list as far as City Hall is concerned. At the top of the list are the banks, real estate interests, and large corporations, who view San Francisco not as a place for people to live and work and raise families, but as a corporate headquarters city and playground for corporate executives. By using their vast financial resources, they have been able to persuade local government officials that office buildings, hotels, and luxury apartments are more important than blue-collar industry, low-cost housing and decent public services and facilities.

Sound familiar?

It’s more than 30 years old.

Back in 1974, more than 50 San Francisco community groups — from Bay Area Gay Liberation to the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center, from the Federation of Ingleside Neigbhors to the San Quentin Six Defense Committee, from the Golden Gate Business and Civic Women’s Association to the Socialist Coalition — started meeting to develop a plan to take back the city.

It culminated with a Community Congress, on June 8, 1975, at Lone Mountain College (now part of the University of San Francisco). More than 1,000 people attended, and they drafted a remarkable 40-page document that outlined an alternative political, economic, social, and environmental agenda for San Francisco. The movement led, among other things, to the advent of district elections of supervisors (a key element in the platform) and the rise of active community-based organizations in this city.

Calvin Welch and Rene Cazenave, the veteran activists who run the San Francisco Information Clearinghouse, were among the organizers. They found the old manifesto recently and sent it out to a few of us by e-mail. I’ve posted it on the Politics blog. It calls for rent control, a sunshine ordinance, a health commission, full-time supervisors (who were to be paid $20,000 a year, the equivalent of $86,000 today), cable-TV coverage of the supervisors meetings, a mandate that developers build affordable housing and a feasibility study on public power. In fact, much of what the left has achieved in San Francisco in the past three decades is outlined in the Community Congress document.

(The congress also called for decriminalization of victimless crimes, including public inebriation, a guaranteed annual income, the abolition of the criminal grand jury, and some other things that didn’t quite come to pass.)

I mention this not only because it’s a fascinating historical document but because Welch and Cazenave think it’s time for a new Community Congress. Their draft agenda refers to a New Deal for San Francisco, and they’re talking about holding a series of meetings culminating in a major session sometime next year.

It’s tough to get the San Francisco left to come together on issues, even harder to build a broad-based organization that can push an agenda. Sup. Chris Daly tried several years ago, but the San Francisco People’s Organization never got the traction many of us had hoped for.

But although the progressives have accomplished a tremendous amount in this city, and have come a long way since 1975, the need is still there.

"San Francisco’s downtown corporate and banking interests and their representatives in city government are attempting at a local level to shift the burden of the current economic and political crisis ever more fully onto the backs of the poor and working people of San Francisco."

That was then. Today, Welch and Cazenave write, "San Francisco stands at a crucial junction brought about by the collapse of the real estate based speculative bubble and the related steep reduction of city revenue resulting in cuts in funding important programs and services … There needs to be a general coming together of community groups to articulate a set of policies able to be implemented at the local level which seek to maximize community control over the provision of critically needed health and human services and beneficial community development and to maintain a vital public sector."

Sounds like a plan. *

Prison report: Skylights and fruit loops

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By Just A Guy

I feel like ranting, so I’m going to.

There’s a TV show called Southland on NBC, a show about cops in LA that’s actually quite entertaining. At any rate, in the show, one of the cops is addicted to pain pills, to the point where he buys them illegally. I guess what I have an issue with is the way the show portrays this cop with an addiction, causing one to feel sympathy for him. But when you see the other addicts in the show, the ones who are criminals, they are portrayed much more, shall we say, negatively.

It’s almost as if a cop’s moral compass is more finely tuned because he’s a cop addict and not your general street addict.

Most shows portray addicts as thieves or crooks, and while I appreciate Southland’s attempt to honestly look at addiction in uniform, I think it’s disturbing that the media generally promotes addiction as something that only thugs and gangsters experience.

***

I have certainly blogged about the lack of programs at CDCR, but feel compelled to mention this: A couple of day ago I noticed a signup sheet taped to the officers’ podium in my building. It read: “sign up sheet” on the top sand underneath, “emotional maturity class”

There are 200 people in my building. One has signed up. Question: How many others in prison are emotionally mature enough to realize we may benefit from such a class? And how many really know what emotional maturity means?

The weird attacks on Van Jones

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By Tim Redmond

It’s no surprise that the right-wing nuts are going after Van Jones, the Bay Area activist who is now Obama’s green-jobs advisor. The loonies have picked up on the fact that Jones was one of 100 people (along with Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Hawken) who signed a letter raising questions about the government response to the 9/11 attacks. It’s actually not that radical a letter; Indybay has posted it here.

But what amazes me is how quickly people who aren’t typically considered wackos have bought into this — take, for example, the former wife of the mayor of San Francisco, who appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to denounce Jones with some bizarre claims:

GUILFOYLE: Well, that’ s a problem. When you say, is there a problem with the vetting process? Clearly he wasn’t vetted. All they had to do was go and ask a couple of questions in San Francisco about this individual. You know there’s a problem when he’s not even wanted in the city of San Francisco where I come from. OK?

HANNITY: That’s a good point.

GUILFOYLE: That’s a huge red flag right there. What is this man’s qualification besides his anti-American theory? He’s far left, radical.

HANNITY: No, he’s a communist. I mean avowed.

GUILFOYLE: Yes.

CUPP: Self-avowed. Yes.

GUILFOYLE: Self-avowed communist. Why is he even in the White House? Is that the reward?

He’s “not even wanted in San Francisco?” What? Van Jones is an icon in this town. Some people think he gets too much fawning press; nobody I know thinks he’s unwanted.

And, um, self-avowed communist? Kimberly, that’s so 50s. I know Van Jones, and I know some communists, and I can tell you that Van Jones — for better or for worse — is not a communist. Guilfoyle must know that, too — in fact, there really aren’t a whole lot of communists left, even in the Bay Area. In the 1980s, I used to see the Revolutionary Communist Party types at political events, but you hardly ever hear from them any more. Calling someone a communist these days doesn’t even qualify as red-baiting; it’s just nutty-mouth.

More:

HANNITY: All right. This is back in March of 2008. We examined this. He called on participants to take a pledge of resistance and — “Not in our name will we invade countries, bomb civilians, kill children, letting history take its course over the graves of the nameless.”

Now, I mean, we can keep going, look at the comment that he made about white polluters steering poison into black communities.

CUPP: Right.

GUILFOYLE: Well, this is an individual that doesn’t have the qualifications to be in the bizarre job that he’s in. And it just raises the issue here about these czars gone wild. This is someone who actually just doesn’t even like the United States of America, wants to reshape it, remake it into something that we would not even recognize, and what’s so wrong with this country that we have an individual like this coming in, meddling in our affairs that has no idea what he is doing, who really is traitorous in his comments against this country.

Actually, I spent several years of my life researching a book on the American environmental movement, which is now available in the remainder bins of finer used books stores here and there, and I can tell you that the question of environmental racism — in this case, of white-owned companies dumping toxic waste in black communities — is well settled. In fact, I was surprised to learn that chemical pollution wasn’t entirely a class issue — poor white communities got less poison than middle-class black communities. That’s 20-year-old news.

I know these guys need ways to attack Obama, but come on, Kimberly: You know better.

At least, I guess, Newsom can always distance himself; isn’t that what ex-wives are for?

Obama needs to stop being nice

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By Tim Redmond

The New York Times has a great piece by Jean Edward Smith on why Obama needs to stop trying for a bipartisan health plan and a compromise that the moderates and conservatives can agree on:

This fixation on securing bipartisan support for health care reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead.

This was not true of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Congresses that enacted the New Deal. With the exception of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 (which gave the president authority to close the nation’s banks and which passed the House of Representatives unanimously), the principal legislative innovations of the 1930s were enacted over the vigorous opposition of a deeply entrenched minority. Majority rule, as Roosevelt saw it, did not require his opponents’ permission.

When Roosevelt asked Congress to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide cheap electric power for the impoverished South, he did not consult with utility giants like Commonwealth and Southern. When he asked for the creation of a Securities and Exchange Commission to curb the excesses of Wall Street, he did not request the cooperation of those about to be regulated. When Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act divesting investment houses of their commercial banking functions, the Democrats did not need the approval of J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers.

From the start, the wrong people (that is, the insurance industry reps.) have been at the table. Now the president is going to Congress to make his case — but he ought to have enough support to get a strong bill passed anyway.

And maybe he can start his speech with this report from the National Nurses Movement, which notes:

Researchers from the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee analyzed data reported by the insurers to the California Department of Managed Care. From 2002 through June 30, 2009, the six insurers rejected 45.7 million claims — 22 percent of all claims.

The main point here:

Left hanging in the air is a bigger question. If the private insurers are not paying for care, why do we have private insurers?

Prison report: Playing politics

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By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His reports run twice a week.

“We should not play politics with public safety.” That’s what Assembly member Fiona Ma states as part of her argument against the bill that proposed early releases as part of how California will make up for slashing $1.2 billion from the vast coffers of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Those coffers, incidentally, have more in them than do the coffers for higher education. Oddly, Ma is a Democrat out of San Francisco.

We live in a state that prides itself for its innovation, its technology and its forward thinking. These characteristics have made California great. But I don’t think that innovators and forward thinkers seem to be running the Assembly or Senate.

We are supposed to be progressive, so we decriminalize pot for medical use — but ban gay marriage and pass laws like three strikes?

Forward thinkers, these politicians, so forward that even their hindsight is not 20-20 — because three strikes is what got California into this big prison mess in the first place.

Don’t you remember all those stories about people getting life sentences for stealing bicycles and pizza?
What they really used three strikes (consciously or not) for is to create an industry out of crime and prisons, an industry in which thousands of families now are able to live the American dream and make their very adequate living – and the politicians can create long political lives for themselves by destroying many thousands of other dreams, at the public’s expense.

If public safety were really the number one priority of politicians and those who proclaim it, they would take off their broken glasses and go get a second opinion as to what the results of their pitiful budget and myopic laws are really resulting in: Less public safety in the future.

Amazing that we can see the results of harming the earth through abuse, that we know that if you smoke you’ll probably die, if you beat your kids they will probably beat their kids, etc …. Yet we can’t seem to see that if you spend more on prisons than on higher education, if you take away further money from K-12, from welfare and from health care, that you will be creating more of that, long term, which you say the public needs protection from.
If they were really concerned about your longterm safety, and not their political careers, they would vote for the lesser of two evils — which is to let those people out now that are costing $50,000 a year, and apply those funds to the future of public safety. (I bet if you release 27,000 people and give them each $50,000 a year, not too many will come back!)

Ahh — but what about the redundancies that would be created and the officers that would be laid off because they had to close seven or more prisons? You see the cycle folks, do you? It’s obvious, it’s plain, you can buy it two for one, 24/7/365 at Lenscrafters.

I wonder if Fiona Ma and the others voting against releases up for reelection next year are running on a tough on crime platform.

We should be tough on some crime, but often toughness is predicated on money (Dante Stallworth) and not on the crime.

We are hypocrites, us Californians. We every day we spend more on prisons than college, or have another person do any other day for a victimless crime.

Lastly …. more hypocrisy: Phillip Garrido may not be charged for some of the crimes he committed because the statute of limitations has passed and those crimes will never be prosecuted. But many in prison are doing life, or getting their sentences doubled or tripled, for crimes that happened 10, 20 or even 30 years ago. Why isn’t there a statute of limitations from your past?

Did you ever forgive the high school bully that picked on you because you had four eyes — or are you going to hold that against him forever?

Move on, California. They have corrective surgery now — and maybe that bully is your ophthalmologist.

Flash: Yee wants to sell the Cow Palace!

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By Tim Redmond

Okay, this is pretty radical:

State Sen. Leland Yee has been a bill that would force the Cow Palace, a state-owned operation, to sell 13 acres of land to Daly City. Okay, we’ve got some problems with that, but basically, the idea is to force the Cow Palace folks to negotiate a deal with a developer for a long-term lease so that neighborhood can get a supermarket and some other amenities.

But now, at the last minute, with only days left in the legislative session, Yee is trying to amend the bill to authorize the sale of the entire site — 63 acres of public land.

“We were hoping for a lease deal, but that hasn’t happened,” Adam Keigwin, Yee’s press spokesperson, told me. “That neighborhood has no grocery store. The land is currently underutilized. The governor wants us to include the entire parcel in the bill.”

So in cooperation with Gov. Schwarzenegger, Yee is preparing to allow the state to sell off 63 acres of public land. That’s a huge site, a vast amount of immensely valuable property in one of the densest urban areas in America.

Joe Barkett, CEO of the Cow Palace, is (not surprisingly) upset: “The Cow Palace is an historic institution with wonderful memories for many people,” he told me. “To try to sell it off in this manner is a disservice to the community.”

Keigwin notes that the bill doesn’t mandate that the Cow Palace be torn down; “all it would do is change the ownership.” And that might not happen right away; “the governor’s office agrees that this might not be the best time to sell.”

But the governor and Yee are also looking for cash to address the horrifying budget deficity, and this is one potential source of millions and millions of dollars.

The problem is that once you sell public land, it’s gone, forever. And with all the needs in San Francisco and Daly City — affordable housing, parks, cultural facilities as well as a supermarket — there ought to be a way to keep this in the public sector. I asked Keigwin about some sort of public development authority, and he agreed that was a nice idea, but “that’s never happened at the state level.”

Folks: This is a bad idea. I’m in full agreement that the site is underutilized, but I have this visceral opposition to selling off 63 acres of land to a private developer.

And if the Assembly goes along, this will happen in a matter of days.

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