Tim Redmond

Does “bureaucracy” equal “corruption?”

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Players: Michael “Kennedy” Cassidy, Gus Murad and Jean-Paul Samaha (the three men on the right) party together at Murad’s wedding in Morocco. Photo by Luke Thomas, Fog City Journal.

By Tim Redmind

The Chron’s Seth Rosenfeld continues to cover the controversy over the demolition of the Little House on Russian Hill, and he’d advanced the story a few notches. But the headline — “cracks in bureaucracy doomed historic house” — makes it sound as if this whole episode were just a matter of screw-ups and incompetance. As opposed to, for example, systemic corruption in the Department of City Planning and Department of Building Inspection.

Read through Rosenfeld’s article, and our piece, by Rebecca Bowe, and the notion that all of this happened by accident — that somehow, simple bureaucratic messups allowed two very influential players in the local political scene to pull off what should have been an illegal demolition — strains credibility. To say the least.

So far, nobody has come up with a smoking gun that links anyone at City Planning or DBI, or either of the developers, to any violation of law. And that’s probably the way it will stay. Shady stuff happens all the time in the world of San Francisco real-estate development, and some of it’s perfectly legal, and even when it isn’t, nobody ever seems to go to jail.

No — it’s just business as usual at CIty Planning and DBI. As Charles Marsteller, former head of Common Cause, told us:

“It was just a put-on by some insiders in City Hall working the network that they normally work,” Marsteller says. “And it shouldn’t have happened.”

Big box is back for Bayshore

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By Tim Redmond

Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Sophie Maxwell are pushing a massive 107,000-square-foot Lowe’s home improvement store for the old Goodman Lumber site on Bayshore Boulevard.

And it’s still a bad idea.

Big-box retail is the opposite of sustainable economics and progressive city planning. I know, we’re in a recession and we need any jobs we can get, but low-wage employment in a chain store that sucks all its revenue out of town every night isn’t going to help us get out of this hole.

Fiona Ma’s “renegades”

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By Tim Redmond

So Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, with the help of the Republicans, managed to get a bill through committee that would force San Francisco to restore JROTC. It’s astonishing to me that a San Francisco representative, and a former supervisor who understands why local control is often important to San Francisco, would try to get the state to override a local school board policy decision. I’m totally against JROTC in the public schools, but however you feel about it, letting the state dictate that kind of policy for a local school board is a dangerous precedent.

And to make things worse, she read what looked like a prepared speech blaming the situation on “renegade” SF school board members. “Renegade?” Because local elected officials voted their conscience on a tough issue?

I emailed Ma to get an explanation, but according to her email auto-response, this great maker of educational policy is on “vaction.” (Sic). I’ll let you know if I hear any more.

Brain damage is good for your political career

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By Tim Redmond

I thought this was an April Fool’s joke at first, too, but it’s not: Former Sup. Ed Jew is asking for a reduced sentence in his extortion case because of brain damange

Now, before you go all bananas about this, keep in mind that it’s fairly common in high-stakes capital cases for defense lawyers to argue — often correctly — that their clients’ violent behavior was caused in part by organic brain damage. Arguing that someone has diminished capacity because of head trauma, and that his medical condition should be a factor in his sentence, is a perfectly legitimate legal strategy.

But what I love about this story is that Stu Hanlon, a brilliant defense lawyer, is arguing that Jew’s brain damage was exactly what made him so popular and got him elected:

“His social naivete and exuberance likely endeared him to people initially, helping him to become supervisor, but ultimately contributed to his downfall when more prudent judgment and impulse control were necessary.”

In other words: People with brain damage make excellent politicians. Wow, that explains a lot.

The BART Board is clueless

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

EDITORIAL The senseless and horrifying murder of four Oakland police officers March 21 has cast a pall over law enforcement agencies all over the Bay Area. It’s renewed calls for a federal ban on assault weapons, which is long overdue. (It’s also reminded us why a daily newspaper can be so valuable — Chronicle coverage of the incident, with numerous reporters quickly responding, is the kind of journalism that won’t happen if the city’s only major daily dies.)

Unfortunately, it’s also taken the focus away from other police issues, and while we mourn the four deaths of veteran officers who were killed trying to do their jobs, we can’t stop trying to solve the problems of cops who lack training, supervision, and oversight.

In that context, there is no other way to say this: the BART Board of Directors is as clueless as any governmental organization we’ve seen since the administration of George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq.

In the past 17 years, BART police officers have improperly shot and killed three people. There have been hundreds of complaints of unnecessary use of force. Most recently, a BART cop shot a young man point blank, and video recordings of the incident have created widespread anger and unrest.

Yet there is still nothing resembling a civilian oversight agency for that 200-member force — and the BART Board members are once again asking the public to trust them to take care of the situation.

Assembly Member Tom Ammiano and state Sen. Leland Yee are sponsoring state legislation that would force the BART Board to establish a San Francisco-style office of citizen complaints to handle all civilian complaints about BART police officer conduct. There are ways Assembly Bill 312 can be improved, and Ammiano, who is guiding the measure through its first legislative hearings, is open to productive suggestions. But when the BART Board sent a delegation to meet with Ammiano, the transit directors had only one basic message: they said AB 312 was "too prescriptive" — that is, it sought to set clear, strong rules for what BART has to do. BART would rather that the Legislature make some broad suggestions but let the folks who run the district shape the final outcome.

That’s simply unacceptable. BART has had plenty of time to address this problem, and plenty of notice that something is terribly wrong. In 1992 a BART cop shot and killed 20-year-old Jerold Hall near the Hayward Station, firing a shotgun into the back of Hall’s head as the unarmed young man was walking away. The shooting violated BART’s own police procedures and the rules that govern the use of deadly force at nearly every modern law enforcement agency in America — but the officer received no disciplinary action, not even a reprimand. In 2001 another BART cop shot and killed a mentally ill man who was lying naked on the ground. Again, BART declared the shooting perfectly okay. With that kind of lack of oversight, it’s not surprising that Oscar Grant was shot and killed early New Year’s Day — the BART police have never been held accountable for improper killings.

And the BART Board has never done a damn thing about it.

Now there is a special board committee that’s supposed to study police oversight. It has never held a single public meeting. Board member Tom Radulovich, who represents San Francisco and sits on the committee, told us there will be public meetings soon. But so far, all that the four-member panel has done is hold private discussions with local interest groups, with no public notice. We would argue that those meetings were a clear violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Brown Act, which mandates that government agencies hold open meetings. But more than that, the closed meetings suggest that the BART Board has no understanding of the public anger and impatience with its 17-year record of failing to keep its police force in line.

Ammiano and Yee should refuse to compromise the basic premise of their bill. The state of California, which gave BART the right to create a police force, must now mandate exactly how that force will be managed. The BART Board had its chance and failed. We simply can’t trust that ineffective agency to get it right this time. * *

Reilly on Hearst’s Hindenberg

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By Tim Redmond

Clint Reilly calls the San Francisco Chronicle “the greatest wealth destruction machine in American journalism today.” It’s an interesting hit on the situation; he cites a Wall Street Journal interview with investment banker (and media industry expert) Jonathan Knee, who notes:

The reason why most newspaper companies have gone bankrupt or appear perilously close to it is that they have too much debt, not that they have stopped being profitable. For the reasons I have already described, they are certainly less profitable than they used to be, but compared to most media businesses like movies and books, most newspapers still have higher profit margins. Unfortunately, many of these companies maxed out on available debt during a bubble in the debt market just before the debt bubble popped and their own profit margins precipitously declined. That does not mean that these companies cannot continue to generate significant cash flow once restructured into a sustainable capital structure.

Then points out that Hearst’s problem isn’t debt — I suspect the bean counters have already written off as a tax loss most of the $700 million the company paid to buy the Chron. The problem, he argues, is bad management:

With more than 75 percent of its circulation outside San Francisco, the Chronicle is unable to cover The City or the suburbs in depth. The paper’s circulation should have been cut in half many years ago; at 360,000, it remains massively expensive to produce, print and circulate. Resizing alone might have saved the paper by dramatically reducing operating costs across the organization.

All of which, of course, argues against Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s plan to eliminate anti-trust regs and allow the Chron to merge with, say, Dean Singleton’s Media News Group.

California is NOT a high-tax state

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By Tim Redmond

Next time a politician tells you that businesses are leaving California because of high taxes, try the truth. California is #12 on the list of state tax levies per person.

Check out this nifty chart from the Sacramento Bee:

Per capita

U.S. total $2,571
Alaska $12,276
Vermont $4,095
Wyoming $4,070
Hawaii $3,996
Connecticut $3,818
North Dakota $3,604
New Jersey $3,526
Minnesota $3,509
Mass. $3,360
Delaware $3,357
New York $3,356
California $3,193

Imagine — good ol’ conservative red-state don’t-tax-me Wyoming has higher per-capita taxes than California. Alaska, home to Sarah Palin, has the high oil-severance tax (which California still lacks, despite being an oil-producing state). I guess it’s cold in Minnesota, so they need higher taxes to heat all those state buildings — but wait! It’s warm in Hawaii, and they have higher taxes, too.

As Calitics notes:

The chart shows little overall trend – big states and small states, states with high unemployment and low unemployment, they’re all there. One cannot draw a conclusion from this chart that there’s any correlation between high taxes and high unemployment or poverty rates.

Of course, no amount of evidence or fact is likely to change the minds of California conservatives and their fellow travelers, who continue to cling to 30 years of failed policy and insist that any tax increase is going to destroy our state.

And none of that includes the fact that overall, people and businesses in the United States pay far lower taxes than just about any other industrialized country. Which may be why the recession isn’t as bad in Europe, where there’s a solid social-safety net:

The Europeans say they have no need for further stimulus right now because their social safety nets, derided in good times by free market disciples as sclerotic impediments to growth, are automatically providing the spending programs that the United States Congress has to legislate.

Something to think about.

Fiona Ma joins the Pentagon

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By Tim Redmond

Nice piece by Marc Norton on BeyondChron about the upcoming pro-JROTC rally in Sacramento. He points out that Assemblymember Fiona Ma of San Francisco is joining with some serious right-wing types to force the military-recruitment program back into the San Francisco public schools.

If you want to let Ma know how screwed up this is, you can call her at (415) 557-2312 or email Assemblymember.ma@asm.ca.gov.

The BART police committee mess

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By Tim Redmond

In the wake of the shooting of Oscar Grant, which was captured on videotape and inflamed the community, and 17 years after the shooting of Jerrold Hall, which was reported only by me and roundly ignored by BART’s establishment, the BART Board finally agreed to set up a subcommittee to look at police oversight and procedures. But if you haven’t heard much from that panel, it’s not surprising — Sweet Melissa reported last week that the police oversight committee hadn’t yet held any public meetings.

But wait — it gets even better.

I called Linton Johnson, the BART spokesperson, and asked him if Melissa had it right. “No, not at all,” he said. “The committee meets in public all the time.” When would that be? “At the regular BART Board meetings, every other Tuesday and Thursday.” Huh? I admit, I haven’t been to a BART Board meeting in a while, but it turns out, according to Johnson, that the committess all meet simultaneously with the full board. “The board goes into recess then reconvenes to hear reports from the various committees,” he explained.

That’s odd, I told him — no other agency I know of does that. Why BART? Well, he explained, the board members only get paid “their miserable $1,000” when they attend full meetings, and most of them didn’t want to take the time to come to an additional meeting on a different day.

Jesus, that’s lame. The San Francisco School Board members go to weekly meetings AND committee meetings AND spend about 30 hours a week working on school stuff, and they get $500 a MONTH. The BART Board members make four times as much and are too lazy to get to more than two meetings?

Wait — there’s more. Melissa told me that Linton’s story “was completely different from what he told me. He said he didn’t even know when the next meeting was.” And more: Quintin Mecke, who works for Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, was actually at the last BART Board meeting, and he told me that the police oversight committee reported that they had, in fact, been meeting on their own, with various community leaders and experts on police oversight — but they hadn’t given any public notice of those meetings and the sessions had been private.

I called BART Board member Tom Radulovich, who is on the committee, and he told me that “we will start having public meetings soon.” But he said he worried that public sessions might not be as productive — “I’ve been to a lot of public hearings at CIty Hall, and people say things differently in public than they do in private. We want to have conversations, and public hearings are not always conversations.”

Sure — but private meetings aren’t good, either. That’s why the state’s Brown Act requires most public agencies to do most of their work in public. How is BART getting away with this? Well, Johnson says, the folks at BART HQ have conveniently decided that the police oversight committee is actually just a subcommitee, and since it has four members, and there are nine BART Board members, a meeting of the subcommittee doesn’t include a quorum of BART Board members and thus doens’t require public notice.

Give me a fucking break.

I like Tom Radulovich, and he’s one of the very few decent members of a generally miserable board, but he’s missing the point here. Legal or not, it looks terrible for this committee to be holding secret meetings. This nonsense has to end.

Immigration battle at the DCCC

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By Tim Redmond
The issue before the Democratic
County Central Committee tonight is immigration, and delegates will face a pair of conflicting resolutions. In reality, though, the two resolutions are a referendum on the city’s — that is, mayor Newsom’s — shift in immigration policy.

The milder, watered-down measure is sponsored by Scott Wiener, one of the centrist leaders on the DCCC, and more-or-less endorses what Newsom has been doing. His consponsors are Connie O’Connor, Mary Jung, Arlo Hale Smith, and Matt Tuchow.

The competing measure takes not-so-subtle issue with City Hall’s position and urges greater respect and tolerance for immigrants of all legal status. It’s backed by Aaron Peskin, Debra Walker, David Campos, Robert Haaland, Rafael Mandelman, Chris Daly, Joe Julian, Michael Goldstein, Hene Kelly and Michael Bornstein.

You can read both resolutions and the politics of this after the jump.

Editor’s Notes

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› Tredmond@sfbg.com

I spent the weekend with my head under the kitchen sink, experiencing that loop of doom that makes old San Francisco houses so charming. The drain was stopped up, so I figured I’d pull the trap and clean it out, but the pipe broke in half the minute I tried to unscrew it. When I bought a new one, the pipe it attached to started to crumble, and when I replaced that one, the seals on the next pipe were shot, and after the third trip to Cole Hardware, I realized that I was going to have to pull out all of the kitchen plumbing and replace everything.

So I was lying there on my back, with dirty water and little pieces of whatever foul gunk had adhered to the insides of the old pipes dripping into my eyes, and all of the Sunday ads and advertorial sections of the Chronicle next to me to sop up the mess, and I started thinking about why I subscribe to The New York Times.

We’ve considered cutting it off — it costs a lot of money, and we’re trying not to spend a lot of money these days. Also, if I want to, I can find all the entire paper on the Web anyway. I don’t even get most of my world news from the Times; I read the British papers, the Guardian and The Independent.

But every morning while I’m sitting at the counter eating my breakfast, I turn to the Times op-ed page and get some of the most intelligent, interesting insight and commentary you’re going to find on a single sheet of paper anywhere in the world. And I thought: If the Times was in such dire financial straights that it had to fire half its staff, and Bob Herbert was one of the unfortunate souls chosen for a pink slip, I’d be joining the national uproar. There would be petitions, and editors’ inboxes would be jammed with e-mail, and marchers would mass in Times Square.

Ditto Paul Krugman, who is one of the few prominent economists in America who isn’t full of shit. And Thomas Freidman, who is sometimes full of shit but thinks so clearly and makes such cogent arguments that it’s a pleasure to get mad at him. And Nicholas Kristof, who routinely travels to some of the nastiest places on the planet to bring back the stories of how American policy affects human beings who otherwise would have remained in the shadows for life. That page alone is worth $1 a day; in fact, it’s one of the greatest bargains on Earth.

I don’t know whom the Chronicle is going to fire March 31 when the cutbacks are supposed to happen. I have kinda, sorta friends there, and there are some good, honest reporters, and I hope they all survive. But is there any political opinion columnist whose pending demise would get me out of my chair to a rally? Uh, no.

I love Jon Carroll, but he writes a lot about cats and mondegreens and there’s a good reason he isn’t on the op-ed page. Debra Saunders? Sorry, she’s an idiot. (And not just because I disagree with her — William Safire is one of my favorite writers ever. Saunders? Idiot.) C.W. Nevius? Belongs in the suburbs. John Diaz? Eh. Whatever.

I still pay for the Chron, but I’m not surprised that hardly anyone else I know does.

Norman Yee and JROTC

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By Tim Redmond

Well, this is pretty fucked. I can’t reach school board member Norman Yee, but the Examiner says he supports bringing back JROTC.

That’s absolutely NOT what he told us when we endorsed him last fall.

Yee was the swing vote to end JROTC. The issue was phys ed credit, but the politics were clear: Voting to stop allowing kids to fulfill their gym requirement with JROTC would spell the end of the program. He did the right thing.

He later told us that if the issue were simply up or down on JROTC, he might have voted to save it, but it’s clear that the JROTC program fails to meet state standards for physical education.

But here’s the rub: Yee told us — told me, personally — that he wasn’t going to bring this issue back up again, that as far as he was concerned it was done. Technically, he hasn’t brought it up again — Jill Wynns and Rachel Norton did. (BTW, lots of people criticized us for not endorsing Norton. I hope you now see why we didn’t.) But if Yee votes to save the program, it will be a slap in the face to all the progressives who supported him.

JROTC, whatever its supporters say, is a military recruitment program. After our school board endorsements last fall, I got comments like this one:

No one’s forcing your kids to join the JROTC. But not having a JROTC forces other kids not to join. That’s wrong.

That’s what all the supposedly liberal people who say they support JROTC talk about: choice. Why not let the students who want to be recruited by the Army on a public high school campus have the right to do that?

And here’s what I — the parent of two public-school kids — have to say:

If I asked my kids if they’d rather have Pepsi or milk with their lunch, they’d say Pepsi in a second. My kids are still in elementary school, but most high school kids would say the same thing. The reason you take soda machines out of high schools is precisely so that kids DON’T have that choice. The reason you don’t let 15-year-olds buy alcohol is that society has decided they aren’t old enough to make that choice. Sometimes, you have to tell impressionable young people that certain things just aren’t good for them.

You can’t join the military until you’re 18. That’s because even the Pentagon has to accept that minors aren’t ready to make those sorts of life decisions. (If it were up to me, I’d raise the age to 25.) If military recruiters want to solicit young people and rope them into that culture before they have enough sense to think twice about what they’re signing on to, I sure as hell don’t want to make it easy. And I don’t want to let them do it in public schools.

Norman — This is madness. Don’t do it.

We can’t trust the BART Board

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So the BART Board is looking at whether BART cops should carry handguns. Nice. They don’t do too well with shotguns, either.

Seriously, what that department needs, more than anything, is civilian oversight, and if this study is about deflecting that, then it’s a worthless idea.

Assembly member Tom Ammiano has a bill that would force the BART Board to create a San Francisco-style oversight agency.

Ideally, the state Legislature wouldn’t have to spend time on this issue; the BART Board would just do it. But the BART Board is made up largely of lame, lazy hacks who have ignored this issue for years. I called Tom Radulovich, one of the few decent members of that board, and he told me he’d support the bill, but wanted it amended. “It’s too prescriptive,” he said. “We all agree on what the elements should be, but I’m not sure locking a variety of the San Francisco Office of Citizen Complaints into state law is the best idea.”

Radulovich had some suggestions — audits, ways to measure how well the system is working, etc. — which all make sense. And I’m sure there are all sorts of ways that Ammiano’s bill can be improved. But here’s the bottom line:

The final measure that comes out of Sacramento MUST be prescriptive. It must outline in very clear detail exactly what the BART Board has to do. The very fact that Ammiano is pushing this issue, and that the BART Board hasn’t already established an effective oversight plan, is all the evidence you need that it simply won’t happen without a firm state mandate.

I like the OCC model; it’s as imperfect as any government system, and a weak or compromised director and a police chief who refuses to cooperate can undermine its effectiveness. But it does the right thing, which is to take all internal affairs-type civilian complaints out of the hands of the police.

I’m sure Ammiano would be more than open to amendments, but if the BART Board members try to argue that the state should simply set broad guidelines and let them handle the details themselves, the answer is simple:

You’ve had more than 20 years to do that, and you’ve failed, and at least three people who ought to be alive today are dead because of that. No way we’re trusting you to get it right this time.

Why I (sometimes) love the NY Post

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Says it all.

Will drug cartels buy the Chron?

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By John Ross

Ink drizzles through my punctured veins. Indeed, the toxins that ooze from chemical inks and pulp during a lifetime of reading and writing for newspapers may well have contributed to the tumor that now weighs upon my liver.

Genetics predisposed me to such contamination. My dad was a founding member of the Newspaper Guild when he toiled with Hayward Broun at the old New York World-Telegram (later the World Telegram & Sun.) On December 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy for more than one reason, George Ross, the WT’s drama critic, restaurant reviewer, Broadway columnist, and general lout-about-town, pushed my stroller into the Telly’s frantic newsroom in lower Manhattan and there, wedged between knobby-kneed reporters, I was introduced to the frenzy of a big-city paper at a maximum moment of world crisis. I was hooked for life.

Newspapers provoke liver cancer. It’s not just the ink and the pulp. Reporters are forever hunched over the bar at the dark dives that abut the rags where they slave, morosely drowning their resentment at editors who just eviscerated their big scoops, in an excess of cirrhosis-generating booze.

Here in San Francisco, working saloons like Hano’s and the M&M, where the newshounds once gathered, have been yuppified into oblivion in this suddenly one-newspaper town. I mourn them as deeply as I mourn my liver.

Although I was on staff at the Examiner (now free and “worth every penny of it”), I never spent much time pounding out my stories on the premises. I had an editor named Jack McCarthy, bless his soul, who insisted that the paper paid me to run away from the pack. The “Monarch of the Dailies” had just been handed over to Willie Hearst, Patty’s cousin, and I found myself a frequent contributor (ten front pages during the stolen 1988 Mexican election) along with Hunter S. Thompson and Zippy the Pinhead as the scion of Citizen Kane commited to going head to head with the Chron. This didn’t last long.

My M.O. at the Zam, much as it had been at the Bay Guardian and Pacific News Service was to ir al lugar de los hechos – to go to the place where it happens – rather than hanging around the phones doing dumb desk stories. I was always on the road. But whether they ran in the dailies (I was big in the Chron-Zam Sunday bulldog edition), Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the Northcoast Environmental Center Econews or the National Horseshoe Pitching Journal, my reportage always appeared in print. Your thumb got inked with the words I wrote.

Now I’m reduced to bloodless ciphers streaming across Internet pages. Counterpunch serves a function but it hardly satisfies my craving for real live chemical inks and pulp.

By a synchronistic twist of fate, newspapering in the U.S. is dying as fast as my liver. Pretty soon they both will be heirlooms, yellowing ancient slabs like the binders of Mexican newspapers at my corner library in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, El Gran Monstruo, to which my neighbors return time and time again to revisit the heartbreaks of the past.

CJR slams the Chronicle

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By Tim Redmond

The Columbia Journalism Review trashed the Chronicle this week, in a harsh, pointed and entirely on-target piece by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter David Cay Johnston.

Johnston’s chief complaint: The Chronicle has done a miserable job of reporting on its own possible demise. In sharp contrast, he says, the Seattle P-I ran some well-reported stories about the papers’s closing that let readers know what was actually going on.

The blog post raises some interesting journalistic questions, though, that are going to be echoing through this entire debate about the future of newspapers.

The first thing I noticed when I read Johnston’s piece was that he singled out the Chron’s editor, Ward Bushee:

under editor Ward Bushee the Chronicle has provided little actual news reporting about its prospects for dissolution unless its unions agree to drastic job cuts and givebacks for those who remain on the payroll.* Mostly, Bushee gave Chronicle readers unsigned “staff reports”—actually rewritten Hearst press releases.

He later attacks Phil Bronstein, the former Chron editor who is still a top Hearst executive:

At least the careful reader found out that Phil Bronstein, the journalist who is now editor-at-large, has abandoned that role to become an unregistered lobbyist seeking political favors for his employers.

Johnston is a careful, weidely respected reporter who does his homework. And in this case, his analysis of the situation seems entirely accurate. The Chron hasn’t been giving us the real story of what’s going on — and the stuff left off the news pages is really interesting.

But I was surprised that neither Bushee nor Bronstein were quoted in the piece; I’ve always thought that before you attack someone in print (or online) — particularly when you call into question their professionalism or ethics — you should call first to get that person’s response. It’s not only common courtesy and standard journalistic practice; it makes for a better story.

So I emailed both Bushee and Bronstein, and both confirmed that Johnston had never contacted them. Bushee:

I will not comment about the Chronicle’s situation during the union negotiation period. I’ve told this to every reporter who has called to ask.
I have never been asked for comment by the (sic) David Cay Johnson. I was called by him one evening several weeks ago to tell me to look up another story on CJR.com — and then he promptly hung up.
In his latest posting on CJR, he continues to get my name wrong (my father, who has been dead for seven years, was Ward Bushee Jr.). But that is only the start of his errors.

Bronstein:

I’m not going to debate someone who has no real information and hasn’t tried to get any.

In general, we all ought to be talking about the value newsrooms and journalists bring to society – as Bruce Bruggman (sic) did very articulately the other night – to anyone who is willing to listen.

As columnist J.R. Labbe wrote in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about that paper, “This newspaper gave more ink to the campaign to save the Texas Ballet Theater than it has to making this case for its own future. Time for that to change.”

Okay, fair enough. But here’s where it gets interesting.

I called Johnston to discuss all of this, and he was happy to talk to me. “This was a blog,” he said. “If I were writing a story for the New York Times, I would have absolutely called them.”

Why is a blog at CJR any different from a newspaper story? Johnston:

“I’m the definintion of a dinosaur, but I’m trying to embrace the idea that this is a new era. This is an experiment for me. I’m trying to see what happens when we embrace the values of the blog world. What if we just write what we see? I’ll take some slings and arrows, but I’m trying it out.”

He promised to correct the error on Bushee’s name, and did.

David Cay Johnston has done some phenomenal work He’s a perfect example of the value of a major newspaper — the New York Times had the money to pay him to spend weeks and months digging into the federal tax code so he could tell the world how government policies were helping the rich screw the poor. We’d all be a lot less informed without him.

But I have to say, with all due respect to one of the great reporters of our time, I don’t think a blog for CJR is any different than a story in the Times. The world of journalism is changing, and in a few years, none of us will be putting stories on dead trees any more — but the delivery vehicle isn’t the issue. There will be millions of bloggers who comment on things, which is a positive development and I love it, but there will also have to be real news institutions that pay staff people to report stories. And those reporters still have an obligation to call the objects of their attacks and scorn and get a response.

The future isn’t going to be about newspapers vs. online publications. It’s gong to be about journalists doing one kind of job, and others using the web to do something different. Not bad, not wrong — just different.

Ma leads fight against Tibet resolution

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By Tim Redmond

San Francisco Assembly member Fiona Ma led the battle in Sacramento to derail a pro-Tibet resolution, leaving some activists scratching their heads.

Sure, the measure was sponsored by a Republican, Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, and sure, that made some Democrats nervous. But frankly, it wasn’t that big a deal — the Assembly passed a virtually identical resolution last year, honoring the Dalai Lama. The U.S. Congress has passed stronger pro-Tibet resolutions.

Ma, however, insisted it would harm U.S.-China relations:

“[The Obama] administration has been proactively engaging in diplomacy with China including human rights,” Ma said. “I believe we shouldn’t undermine the proactive efforts being done at the federal level.”

I asked her by email why it was fine to pass a pro-Tibet resolution last year, but not okay this year. Her response:

Last year was a different time and situation. I asked to send this Resolution back to committee for further review. I’m proposing amendments so will let you know what happens.

Tom Ammiano, who also represents San Francisco, scoffed at the move to send the measure to the Rules Committee, which typically means a bill is dead. “I wanted it voted on on the floor,” he told me. “It had the votes to pass.”

Typically, sending a bill

Editor’s Notes

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› Tredmond@sfbg.com

My sister did a sociology project in college that involved the culture of laundromats. Nothing revolutionary, and I suspect it’s been done before, but she hung out in coin-ops and watched what happened when somebody ran out of money before the final load. What she discovered (again, nothing that sociologists haven’t written about for years) was that the less money patrons had, the more likely they were to lend it to someone else. You can imagine what the poorer folks told her: "Hey, last week that was me needing a quarter."

I know this is a huge, vast, sweeping generalization, but I’ll cop to it: Poor people are better at building communities than rich people. If you’re someone who is always living on the edge, always one step away from economic disaster, you’re more likely to play a role in a community that helps others in your situation.

So check out our cover story this week, because it gives some perspective on the evils of gentrification.

In the 1980s, lower Polk Street had an active sex-worker community. Hustlers and bartenders and guys looking for hustlers took care of each other. New kids in town, many of them runaways fleeing homophobic and abusive situations, got connections, work (not always sex work), and a chance to build a life. There are quite a few prominent, successful San Franciscans who came out of that world. It wasn’t always pretty, and was often dangerous, but it was a legitimate community.

But as more upscale businesses and residents started to displace the hustler bars and push the kids off the streets, the community fell apart. It didn’t help that the drug of choice was changing from pot to meth, and that AIDS was ravaging queer San Francisco, particularly places like Polk Street, and a lot of the damage would have occurred anyway. Still, the gentrification made it worse.

And as organic, self-sustaining communities made up of people who help each other are riven by economic displacement, the costs are shifted to the public sector. In other words, gentrification is bad for the taxpayers.

I saw this happening way back in the early 1980s, when I was a volunteer with the Haight Ashbury Switchboard. We saved the city millions, mostly by helping people in the neighborhood help each other. My friend Jasin, who was living on SSI, had a flat with some extra space, and we sent homeless crashers to stay with her while they got on their feet. A few of the local communes took in crashers too. We told people how to work the system, how to say out of trouble, how to survive in the big city.

But as rents went up, and people who had plenty of time to volunteer either left town or had to take full-time jobs, and the communes and food conspiracies disappeared, and SSI no longer paid for a five-room flat — as the Haight gentrified — that model fell apart. There are still plenty of community-based services and organizations in the Haight and elsewhere, but it’s harder, much harder. And the sense that we’re all in this together, that we’re all kind of struggling but we’re all going to help each other make it through, is almost gone.

I don’t know. Maybe the depression brings it back. *

Should California be split up?

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By Tim Redmond

It’s an interesting question. Nothing new, really — folks up in the northern part of the state have been talking about secession since the 1940s.

But these days, the talk has shifted from North-South to Central Valley-Coast.

There’s plenty of discussion going on — the New York Times
reports on a move by farmers in Visalia, who say those of us in the more liberal western regions don’t understand what it’s like in the center of the state:

Frustrated by what they call uninformed urban voters dictating faulty farm policy, Mr. Rogers and the other members of the movement have proposed splitting off 13 counties on the state’s coast, leaving the remaining 45, mostly inland, counties as the “real” California.

The reason, they say, is that people in those coastal counties, which include San Francisco and Los Angeles, simply do not understand what life is like in areas where the sea breezes do not reach.
“They think fish are more important than people, that pigs are treated mean and chickens should run loose,” said Mr. Rogers, who said he hitched a ride in 1940 to Visalia from Oklahoma to escape the Dust Bowl, with his wife and baby son in tow. “City people just don’t know what it takes to get food on their table.”

A former Assembly member is pushing a vertical split, too :

“Citizens of our once Golden State are frustrated and desperately concerned about the imposition of burdensome regulations, taxation, fees, fees and more fees, and bureaucratic intrusion into our daily lives and businesses,” declares downsizeca.org, the movement’s website.

And all of this comes as reformers form both the left and the right are talking about a new Constitutional Convention.

Athough some of the proponents are clearly nutty, the idea isn’t. As the noted political economist Gar Alperovitz wrote two years ago

The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does “participatory democracy” mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable.

He was talking about California becoming its own nation, but I’d argue that the same problem applies here. The budget crisis, the gridlock in Sacramento … all of it suggests that maybe California itself is too big to govern. There’s also clear evidence of dramatic regional differences. If you take the Central Valley from about Redding on down, and wrap in Orange County, you have a red state within a blue state where most of the residents say they want lower taxes and smaller government. Along the coast from about Sonoma County down to the southern part of Los Angeles County, you have people who generally would like to see taxes pay for public services. If the coast were a state, we could repeal Prop. 13 and build world-class schools. We’d have same-sex marriage and single-payer health insurance. And we’d still be one of the biggest states in America.

Now, I’m not sure the people in the central valley quite realize the problem with their plans, which is illustrated in this wonderful chart that comes from the office of Assemblywoman Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa (PDF):

317chart.jpg

The chart shows that the people who dislike and distrust government and don’t want to pay taxes are in fact the beneficiaries of the tax dollars that the rest of us pay. In California, tax money from the coast winds up paying for services in the central valley.

But that’s okay — if they don’t want our money any more, maybe we should tell them we’re fine with that. Maybe we should split the state not just in two but into three: Let the northern counties become the state of Jefferson, where pot will be legal and the residents will be so wealthy from taxes and exports of that cash crop that they’ll make oil-richAlaskans seem like paupers. Pot will be legal in the coastal communities, too, and will generate tax revenue.

We’ll have a Democratic governor, and overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, fewer prisons, better schools, cleaner air, no Ellis Act, rent controls on vacant apartments, more money for transit, strict gun control, support for immigrant rights … and no more of these ugly battles over budgets held hostage by right-wing Republicans.

And in the central valley, they can have their low taxes and conservative values, and watch their roads, schools, and public services go to hell. Maybe eventually they’ll figure it out.

Of course, we’d have to figure out the water rights. The folks in Jefferson would have control over much of the water that now goes South, and there would have to be some long-term water contracts between the states, but that shouldn’t be an insurmountable roadblock.

And the solution would create its own problems; The GOP would control the central state, and would move to abolish the Agricultural Labor Relations Act and make life even more miserable for farmworkers. But then, maybe Jefferson would turn off the water and big agribusiness would be SOL anyway.

As part of the break-up, all parties would have to agree to create a special relocation fund to help lonely, sad liberals from Modesto come west and to help lonely, sad Republicans in San Francisco to move east. I wonder which way the net migration would go.

Meanwhile, Evans has introduced my favorite tax bill of the year, AB 1342, and it’s related to this entire discussion. She wants to allow counties to levy their own income taxes and vehicle license fees. “We went through this difficult process of trying to arrive at a budget,” her spokesperson, Anthony Matthews, told me. “For those communities that have a different view of government [than the Republicans], this bill would let them raise their own taxes to fund their priorities.”

A new tax on smut?

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By Tim Redmond

Heads up: There’s a move in Sacramento to put a new tax on “adult entertainment.” (Scroll down and read the second part of the press release). A couple of thoughts:

1. I’m a tax-and-spend liberal, and I have no problems in general with taxes on services.

2. Still, this is kind of funky. It’s not clear yet how the bill will define “adult entertainment.” As demimonde and labor activist Princess Pandora puts it:

Do they charge Britney Spears concerts? She dances all sexy, including “pelvic undulations,” which are considered a simulated sex act by ABC and can get a club fined/shut down. What about the ballet? Those tights don’t leave much to the imagination. Do you think women love Barishnikov for his dancing? Girlfriend, please! If I do porn, but wear flowers in my hair, and maybe recite some crappy poetry, can I call it “performance art” and avoid the tax?

3. We don’t charge sales tax on newspapers and magazines. When does a magazine become porn, and thus taxable? One nude on the cover (that would include much of the alternative press in America)? What about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? (I know, it’s pretty lame, but Playboy’s pretty lame, too).

4. I don’t love the connection this bill makes, if even implictly, between “adult entertainment” and domestic violence. Don’t want to open a can of worms here, but I think there’s a lot more DV that can be traced to the Super Bowl than to most innocent smut.

I’ve put in a call to Assembly member Torrico’s office, and they promised to get back to me. I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: Jeff Barbosa, a spokesperson for Torrico, just called me. He said the bill is a “work in progress” and that they still haven’t defined what “adult entertainment” will be. But he said right now they’re using Penal Code Section 313 as a working definition.

Here’s the language:

“Harmful matter” means matter, taken as a whole, which to the
average person, applying contemporary statewide standards, appeals to
the prurient interest, and is matter which, taken as a whole,
depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct and
which, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political,
or scientific value for minors.

Ooh, I can see this creating a lot of problems.

I wonder: Perhaps the Assembly could take a page from Tom Ammiano’s pot bill, and legalize prositution, then tax it. Make sense to me.

Oakland activist critically wounded in West Bank

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By Rebecca Bowe

31509tristana.jpg

Oakland activist Tristan Anderson, 38, was critically wounded March 13 in the village of Ni’lin in the West Bank, when he was shot in the head with a high-powered tear-gas canister fired by Israeli forces.

The shooting occurred during a protest over the separation barrier that Israel is erecting between itself and the West Bank, according to a press release from the International Solidarity Movement.

Anderson is a dedicated activist who has traveled to conflict zones in Oaxaca, Iraq and other conflicted regions and reported on the struggles there. He was also among a group of tree-sitters who fought to save a grove of oaks and redwoods next to UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium.

He was taken to an Israeli hospital, Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv, where he underwent brain surgery and is in critical condition. In-depth reports, including a graphic video filmed just after the shooting took place, can be found here, here and here.

The Israeli army began using to use a high velocity tear gas canister in December 2008, according to ISM. The black canister can shoot over 400 meters.

On March 16, at 4 p.m., a protest will be staged in front of the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco, according to a post on IndyBay.org.

Ammiano’s struggle on pot, BART cops

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By Tim Redmond

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano is finding that the moderate Democrats up in Sacramento can be just as annoying as the Republicans. Take two of his top priorities right now, a bill to force the BART police to adopt civilian oversight, and a measure to legalize marijuana.

The BART police measure is going to the Public Safety Committee, chaired by Jose Solorio, a moderate Democrat from Santa Ana.

Some of Ammiano’s Democratic colleagues are nervous about even bringing the bill up for a hearing. “They say is an incendiary situation, that even talking about this could cause riots. I’ve told them the opposite — that if there’s any whisper that we’re screwing around with this bill up here, that when the trouble is going to start.”

The pot bill is scheduled for a hearing in Public Safety March 31, and again, Ammiano worries that “they’re not taking it seriously.” They should — all the signs around the coutnry are changing. The federal government is going to stop chasing after medical pot clinics.
This is a way for the state, which is facing even more serious red ink than the governor admits, to bring in a billion dollars or so in taxes — not to mention the amount saved by not wasting police time (and jail space) on marijuana.

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