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Wedding bells and Pride protests

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A whirlwind week of LGBTQ action in San Francisco

rebecca@sfbg.com ; steve@sfbg.com

The city of San Francisco was a complete whirlwind from June 26 to June 30. First came the historic Supreme Court ruling that ended the ban on same-sex marriage in California and struck down the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. The historic decision, handed down just before the city's Pride festivities got underway and as a rare heat wave gripped the city, unleashed widespread celebration June 26, culminating with a rally and dance party in the streets of the Castro.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal recognition of same-sex marriage, "is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment." According to the majority opinion, "DOMA's principal effect is to identify a subset of state sanctioned marriages and make them unequal."

Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Prop 8 case, was dismissed on standing due to the fact that the State of California refused to defend it in court. That meant the previous ruling invalidating Prop 8, by Judge Vaughan Walker and upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court, was upheld.

City Hall was totally packed at 7am when the Court convened, with hordes of journalists, gay and lesbian couples, and sign-wielding activists in the crowd. Cheers erupted when the decision was announced striking down DOMA. When the Prop 8 statement came down, the room went nuts.

"It feels good to have love triumph over ignorance," said Mayor Ed Lee, who joined Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom in escorting a fragile Phyllis Lyon down the stairway. When Lyon married the late Del Martin, they became the first same-sex couple to get legally married in California in 2004.

"San Francisco is not a city of dreamers, but a city of doers," Newsom said. "Here we don't just tolerate diversity, we celebrate our diversity." He thanked City Attorney Dennis Herrera and others who'd contributed to the fight to for marriage equality. "It's people with a true commitment to equality that brought us here."

When Herrera took the podium, he turned to Newsom, and said, "Now you can say, 'Whether you like it or not!'"— a joking reference to Newsom's same-sex marriage rallying cry, which some blamed for boosting the anti-same-sex marriage cause. "We wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for Gavin Newsom's leadership," Herrera continued. "I remember in 2004 when people were saying it was too fast, too soon, too much." Herrera also pledged to continue the fight that began here in City Hall more than nine years ago: "We will not rest until we have marriage equality throughout this country."

Later that afternoon, clergy from a variety of faiths including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and the Church of Latter Day Saints gathered on the steps of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill for a buoyant press conference to celebrate the court's rulings.

"For 20 years I've been marrying gay and lesbian couples, because in the eyes of God, that love and commitment was real, even when it wasn't in the eyes of the state," said Rabbi Michael Lerner of the Beyt Tikkun Synagogue. "We as religious people have to apologize to the gay community," he added, for religious texts that gave opponents of gay marriage ammunition to advance an agenda of discrimination.

He added that the take-home message of the long fight for marriage equality is, "don't be 'realistic.' Thank God the gay community vigorously fought for the right to be married — because they were not 'realistic,' the reality changed. Do not limit your vision to what the politicians and the media tell you is possible."

Mitch Mayne introduced himself as "an openly gay, active Mormon," which is significant since the Mormon Church was a major funder of Prop 8. He called it "one of the most un-Christlike things we have ever done as a religion," but noted that the sordid affair had brought on "a mighty change in heart from inside the Mormon community, with greater tolerance than ever before," with many Mormons going out and marching in solidary with gay and lesbian couples, he said.

Then on June 28, earlier than expected, the County Clerk started issuing same-sex marriage licenses. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, plaintiffs in the case against Prop. 8, became the first of dozens of happy couples to be married at City Hall that evening, and the marriages continued in the days that followed.

And as if that weren't enough excitement, it all happened before the weekend, when Pride festivities got underway. This year featured not only the official Pride parade and myriad performances, but also an "Alternative to Pride Parade," signifying that a radical Pride-questioning movement has been reawakened in San Francisco.

"Have you had enough with the poor political choices of some community leaders that claim to represent you? Are you over the over-corporatizing of SF Pride? Or just tired of the same old events that don't reflect who you are, and how you want to celebrate your queer pride?" organizers wrote in a statement announcing the event.

The parade itself, meanwhile, also featured some dissenters. The third annual Bradley Manning Support Network contingent swelled in ranks this year, due to the political maelstrom touched off when the Pride Board rescinded Manning's appointment as Grand Marshal.

The Bradley Manning Support Network contingent attracted more than 2,000 supporters who marched to show solidarity with the openly gay whistleblower, comprising the largest non-corporate contingent in the Parade. Former military strategist Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked secret government documents known as the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, donned a pink boa and rode alongside his wife, Patricia, in a pick-up truck labeled "Bradley Manning Grand Marshal." Patricia told the Bay Guardian,"There is something about the energy and triumph of this beautiful event ... Just as the gays have made a tremendous difference with marriage, we have to do the same with wars and aggression" in U.S. foreign policy.

Pride's legal counsel, Brooke Oliver — who resigned over the Pride Board's handling of the Manning debacle — marched along with the Bradley Manning contingent. Bevan Dufty, former SF Supervisor and now the mayor's point person on homelessness, stepped down as a Grand Marshal, also because of the Pride Board's actions, but didn't march with the contingent.

Nor were the Bradley Manning supporters the only protest contingent to take part in the parade. A group seized the opportunity to make a political statement by marching with a faux Google bus, an action meant to call attention to gentrification and evictions in San Francisco. They rented a white coach and covered it with signs printed up in a similar font to Google's corporate logo, proclaiming: "Gentrification & Eviction Technologies (GET) OUT: Integrated Displacement and Cultural Erasure."

Some trailed the faux Google bus with an 8-foot banner depicting a blown-up version of an Ellis Act evictions map. Others donned red droplets stamped with "evicted" to signify Google map markers, while a few toted suitcases to represent tenants who'd been sent packing. However, their ranks were thin in comparison with the parade contingents surrounding them, which included crowds of workers representing eBay, DropBox, and, of course, Google — the largest corporate contingent in the parade.

"The organizers of this anti-gentrification and displacement contingent are not 'proud' that folks are being kicked out of this city that was once their refuge," organizers of the faux Google bus contingent wrote in a press statement. "The 2013 SF Homeless Count and Survey shows that 29 percent of the city's homeless population is 'LGB and other.' The Castro is experiencing the highest number of evictions in the city. Meanwhile, the SF Pride Parade is becoming as gentrified as SF. This group is calling on Pride to remember its roots."

 


Parents, behind bars

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New programs acknowledge that strengthening the parent-child bond reduces recidivism

By Ross Mirkarimi

OPINION Nearly 50 percent of the 2.7 million people incarcerated in US prisons and jails are mothers and fathers. In San Francisco, about 40 percent of the prisoners are parents. For their children, the punishment does not fit the crime.

Federal and state recidivism registers at 78 percent; locally the rate is 65 percent and dropping. If we're serious about breaking the cycle of incarceration, we must get serious about restoring the family ties of the incarcerated.

Studies support what common sense suggests — strengthening the parent-child bond reduces recidivism. It also reduces the prospect that children of the incarcerated are more likely to violate the law. While maintaining appropriate safety and legal protocols, the San Francisco Sheriff's Department is reexamining policies that invariably damage or strain relationships between an inmate parent and child, starting with birth. In honor of Mother's Day, on May 9, the Community Works Jail Arts Program, with our department, converted the lobby of the SF women's jail into a temporary gallery of art created by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated mothers.

That provided a warm environment to announce a policy first in California: The Birth Justice Project, designed to affirm the reproductive rights of all incarcerated women and provide prenatal and postpartum care during the transformative experience of pregnancy, birth and parenthood. With the stewardship of Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, an OB/GYN from UCSF, along with the Department of Public Health, Zellerbach Foundation, and our volunteer doulas (professional birth assistants), we're radically distancing ourselves from the barbaric attitude of 33 states that still shackle women during labor. Rather, we seek to nurture the inimitable bond between mother and child.

While most jails and prisons shun a lactation policy, we've unveiled our pro-lactation program. Breast pumps, refrigeration, and delivery are provided around the clock, facilitated by our jail health professionals. While the arcane national practice is to separate baby and mother after the third day of birth, we're working to maintain the connection. If we can't do it through diversion (alternatives to incarceration), then we'll continue to assess our facility in allowing mother and baby to stay together. I look forward to promoting breast feeding in San Francisco's jails.

For children of incarcerated parents, the absence of a mother is the loss of a primary caregiver. Ninety percent of incarcerated fathers in the US report that while away, their children live with the child's mother. In contrast, only 28 percent of incarcerated mothers report that their children live with their father. Routinely, her children are cared for by a grandparent or relative — and about 11 percent are placed in foster care. Many children are bounced from caregiver to caregiver during their parent's incarceration.

These disruptions to a child's life negatively affect their social and mental development. Acknowledging the sense of disconnection experienced by children whose parents are incarcerated also means we must grapple with the emotional poverty that increases the likelihood of criminal behavior. In San Francisco, we're taking steps to bridge this disconnection by reforming visitation policies to facilitating regular contact between children and incarcerated parents.

The people in our jails will eventually be released and will return to communities that historically have been underserved. We're trying to intensify resources toward exit planning for newly incarcerated parents and guardians. Depending on individuals cases, that could include a regiment of parenting classes, substance abuse and mental health treatment, domestic violence counseling, reunification counseling for parent and child, reading and writing comprehension, high school completion, life skills such as financial literacy, and vocational training.

Many people don't know what the Sheriff's Department does or the difference between us and the SFPD; we've launched a monthly e-newsletter to keep the public informed. To sign up or contact us at: Ross.Mirkarimi@SFgov.org

Ross Mirkarimi is sheriff of San Francisco

So now what?

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The city celebrates equality, but still leaves many behind

EDITORIAL The scene at City Hall on Friday, June 28 could have been a video rewind of 2004's Winter of Love: a surprise announcement granting same-sex marriage licenses; a breathless rush of couples to the civic altar, led by two brave, symbolic women (lesbian groundbreakers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in 2004 and anti-Prop 8 plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier in 2013), a city erupting with good will and cheer, dazed by the speed of luck and history. Earlier, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, teeth and hair and all, was making grand pronouncements, strutting about like he was mayor of the place again.

Back in 2004, the city was scarred and drained from the first great Internet bust, and still reeling from the losses of AIDS. San Francisco was a mess, but it was starting to recover. People who had been forced to move out by the city's skyrocketing rents and evictions in the early 2000s were beginning to trickle back in, and many of those beached by the boom's collapse were turning into the very freaks, artists, and innovators they had helped displace. When Newsom launched SF's same-sex marriage rebellion, it was an act of great civic uplift, burnishing SF's progressive image in the eyes of the world, while boosting the city's self-confidence. (Not to mention its economy, which benefited greatly from the wedding explosion.)

The act also burnished Newsom's own reputation. Previously reviled for his "Care Not Cash" policies that demonized the poor and homeless, a significant percentage of LGBTQ people among them, he was suddenly a posterboy for civil rights. Now of course, San Francisco is supposedly on the arc of an economic boom, skyrocketing evictions included, and not in the dregs of a bust. So it was with a regretful shudder that we noticed some more ominous similarities between 2004 and 2013.

A week before this year's Pride, and right before the wave of marriage elation overtook the festivities, the city's homeless census was released. Out of the total count of 6,436 homeless people, a figure emerged that stunned many: 29 percent of 1000 people specifically asked identified themselves as LGBTQ, and it's assumed that the actual percentage of queer homeless people is in fact higher, due to factors like closeting and mental health. A large portion of LGBTQ homeless are youth, still drawn here by San Francisco's promise of inclusion and shelter from abusive and rejective backgrounds.

While the city celebrates the achievement of grand ideals of equality, we are failing the very people for whom those ideals may be most valuable. Currently, Dolores Street Services, along with help from Sup. David Campos and the city's "homeless czar" Bevan Dufty, is working towards the building of a 24-bed shelter specific aimed to service LGBTQ homeless people. But that's just a drop in the bucket. We need much more.

Now that DOMA has been overturned and Prop. 8 kicked to the curb, there's a lot of discussion about what the powerful, energized "gay lobby" should take on next. Righting the horrible Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act and achieving marriage equality in 37 more states are valiant, necessary goals. But turning toward the actual problems in our own backyard is another imperative.

As the Pride celebration in the Civic Center was winding down on the evening of Sunday, June 30, a group of young women emerged seemingly out of nowhere among the trash-strewn streets and beeping trucks being loaded with the party's massive detritus. The women quietly dispersed among the leftover crowd, hauling sacks of bread on their shoulders. They made their way toward those lying on the street or huddled in doorways, distributing loaves in a matter-of-fact manner to people in need. It was a perfect reminder of the real spirit of Pride — an inclusivity that benefits all, empowered by actions on a one-to-one, human scale.

Political Alerts

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Thursday 4

San Francisco Mime Troupe: Oil and Water Dolores Park, 18thand Dolores, SF. www.sfmt.org. 2pm, free. This free performance by San Francisco's beloved Mime Troupe actually incorporates two shorter plays, Crude Intentions and Deal with the Devil. Dealing with issues such as climate change, pollution, water scarcity and fossil fuel dependence, the plays involve a poisoned rainforest river, a senator mysteriously murdered in his office and, true to life, an oil refinery ablaze in the Bay Area.

 

Saturday 6

Laborfest bike tour of historic SF 518 Valencia, SF. (415) 608-9035, www.laborfest.net. noon-4pm, donation suggested. Led by local author and activist Chris Carlsson, this bike tour will delve into San Francisco's working-class history, featuring stops at landmarks and tales of dozens of epic battles between owners and workers, culminating in the 1934 General Strike and its aftermath. Join this event for a different look at San Francisco labor history and a new perspective on San Francisco.

 

Sunday 7

Innocent! The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal 518 Valencia, SF. www.laborfest.net. 2-6pm, free. You may or may not know the story behind the campaign to free America's most famous political prisoner, former Black Panther and revolutionary journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal. But whatever your level of knowledge, here's your chance to hear from experts including Rachel Wolkenstein, investigative attorney for Mumia; family spokesperson Bob Wells; Oakland Teachers for Mumia and ILWU organizer Jack Heyman of the San Francisco longshore union on the West Coast port shutdown organized in defense of Mumia.

Walking tour: Empires, Kings, and Labor Cable-car turnaround, Powell and Market, SF. commonwealth1234@yahoo.com, laborfest.net. 11am, free. Join this hour and fifteen minute tour of Union Square and surrounding blocks, where one can learn the history of labor struggles that unfolded in San Francisco. Tour is led by David Giesen.

 

Monday 8

Chinatown walk Portsmouth Square, Washington near Kearny, SF. www.laborfest.net. 10am, free. Join SF City Guide Mae Schoening in a walk through Chinatown to learn about Chinese labor history in California, where discrimination by governments and unions, sweatshops, housing issues and other problems have shaped experiences throughout the decades. Learn how immigrant labor struggled for fair treatment while mining gold, building railroads, and working in the garment and building trades. Meet inside Portsmouth Square Park in front of Parking Garage Elevators adjacent corner of Walter P. Lum Place and Washington.

"Eviction Free Summer" activists show up outside a landlord's office to protest an eviction

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On July 2, activists from "Eviction Free Summer," formed to defend tenants facing eviction, gathered outside landlord Rick Holman's South Park office building in San Francisco to protest an eviction he'd initiated against a Mission-based activist collective.

Organizer Fred Sherburn-Zimmer said it was one of many peaceful protests the housing activists plan to stage against property owners this summer. "We're taking it to the landlord's homes and offices," Sherburn-Zimmer said. "They can't pretend they're not ruining people's lives by displacing them."

This past April, collective members from In The Works, an organization that rents space in what is often called the "17 Reasons" building, at 17th and Mission streets, received an eviction notice from Holman alleging illegal subletting.

Holman is a managing partner at Asher Investment Group, and from the perspective of Sherburn-Zimmer and other protesters, his move to evict the collective is helping to propel a trend of gentrification in the Mission. "We need this space, and if the whole neighborhood is high-end realty, then it's not really helping the community," Sherburn-Zimmer said.

The In The Works Collective bills itself as an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist arts and events collective, which regularly hosts skill-sharing workshops and other activism-oriented events. A collective member who introduced herself as Madeline said Holman has not been the most hospitable landlord.

"When he first came to talk to us, he said we had bad posture and body language," she recounted. "The day after we got the three-day notice, the locks were changed." 

When the Guardian reached Holman this past May seeking comment for a longer article about widespread evictions, he declined to comment on the matter but emphasized that he planned to keep the building as commercial office space rather than convert it into high-end condos, and said his other tenants had expressed no complaints.

Like many folks facing eviction from San Francisco rental properties, In The Works may be forced to find another space. Currently, Madeline says the collective is paying 72 cents a square foot for the 5,200 square foot place -- and it’s highly unlikely that they’ll find a place in the Mission for a similar price. That's why they welcomed support from the activists at Eviction-Free Summer.

"I totally respect them helping us out," Madeline said. "It's important that we stick together. Our place has always been big on solidarity and community building." 

Eviction Free Summer hasn’t revealed what other landlords they might target, yet they plan to continue staging protests outside landlords' homes and offices in coming months. "This is just the beginning of this direct action group," Sherburn-Zimmer said. "We will do anything to prevent people from losing their homes and spaces."

City College loses accreditation, throwing its future into doubt

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A student registers for classes at City College shortly before the announcement was made about revoking its accreditation.
Joe Fitzgerald

City College of San Francisco will lose its accreditation, it was announced today, and the venerable local college may not survive. With its impending death, the future of thousands of San Franciscans seeking education and a better life are in limbo.

The loss of accreditation becomes effective in one year, and the decision is being appealed, during which time local control is being transferred to a state trustee. The California Community College Chancellor's Office has not yet named the trustee that it will appoint, and officials say the trustee will be given full authority to make decisions in the place of the current Board of Trustees.

"I think state intervention is going to be necessary,” said Mayor Ed Lee told reporters this afternoon.

“It's imperative City College stay open for business and education the 85,000 students it serves" Lee said in a conference call with reporters. "I'm concerned about the devastating impact City College's termination would have on our great city."

The long-awaited decision was expected sometime around this long holiday weekend, and officials knew losing the accreditation was a possibility, but most said privately that they didn’t think the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges would actually pull the trigger. So right now, everyone is still reeling from the news.

"It’s too soon to say who that special trustee will be at that point," State Community College Chancellor Brice Harris said. 

Locally elected Trustee Rafael Mandelman said that the locally elected board will continue operating until July of 2014, when the termination of the accreditation becomes effective, but it's unclear what authority it will now have. 

“It’s disappointing, it’s outrageous, I don't think it’s called for. I don't think it’s the right outcome. I don’t think the state is going to do a better job running the school than a local board could,” he told us.

“We believe that the best way to bring the college from certain closure is to put the college under trusteeship of certain powers,” Harris said, adding that the search for a new chancellor for CCSF will now be accelerated. The current chancellor is an interim chancellor, the second one in a year after chancellor Don Griffin left the school due to an illness.

“We are disappointed in the Commission’s decision. We will be filing a request for review and will do everything in our power to have this decision reversed,” Chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman said in a prepared statement. “What is of utmost importance at this time is that City College remains open, and instruction and services will continue. We want to assure our students and their families that we will serve them and continue to provide the high quality education that they expect from City College. We will continue to register new and returning students for the Fall semester and look forward to their arrival on campus in August.”

City College was put on sanction by the commission back in July of 2012 after allegedly failing to fix issues identified by the commission six years prior. Since then, the college has been in panic mode. 

The threat of closure brought drastic changes at whip lash speed over the past few months: two campuses shuttered, over 40 counselors and support staff were laid off, faculty took a 7 percent pay cut and student enrollment has plummeted.

Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance Peter Goldstein put the college's finances this way, "This has been a nightmare of a fiscal year."

But there were positive improvements as well, said Alisa Messer, an English teacher and faculty union president of City College's local AFT 2121. 

"Faculty have banded together and worked hard to address the requirements around student learning outcomes," Messer said. SLOs, as they're commonly known, measure student learning over the course of a class and in a student's college career. 

"The accrediting commission felt it wasn't integrated throughout the college, but they would be hard pressed to say it isn't now," she said.

Despite City College's improvements the California Federation of Teachers is set on fighting the accreditation commission's decision. They filed a massive 280-plus page complaint to the U.S. Department of Education alleging that the accreditation commission violated many of its own rules in evaluating CCSF.

The commission responded by locking out over 30 faculty and concerned citizens from its most recent public meeting, even barring a reporter from the SF Chronicle from entering.  

Now the commission has asked visiting accreditation teams, who evaluate colleges on site, to shred their documentation to make such complaints harder to research, which was originally reported on by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"The work you do here is a position of trust, the documents you receive are given to you in that light." said a faculty member who had served on prior accreditation teams, but did not wish to be named because they are not approved to speak on behalf of the accreditation commission. "When you're done fulfilling your responsibility its good policy to dispose of them, and its the commission's expectation."

Some of the documents are proprietary information at for-profit colleges, such as Heald. It makes sense to protect that private information. The visiting team has "a look behind the curtain," the faculty member said. 

But Messer isn't buying it. "We've asked they be more transparent, they've done the opposite of that," Messer said.

On the college's Ocean campus, just outside the Chancellor's office in a retro brown speckled hallway, Dennis Garcia walked by with his City College registration info in hand.

He's ready for his next semester, and unlike the thousands of students that didn't enroll in City College this year, he forged ahead.  

"I decided to come because I'm not scared or nervous about the school going down," he said.

Garcia is an 18-year-old criminal justice major and SF native who dreams of transferring to San Francisco or San Jose State Universities. He wants to be a star soccer player while in school.

But why did he stay when so many others fled? 

"Why City College? It's home," he said. "People say, coming here is not successful, but I mean, sometimes you don't have money and you're not an A or B student, but you get your math and English done and you go from there. College is college."

Now, whether City College remains a college this time next year is still an open question.

 

The Fourth of July: Remembering the good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa, circa 1940s to 1950s

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Note: In July of 1972, when the Bay Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter. I now reprint it each year on the Bruce blog, with some San Francisco updates and postscripts.)

Back where I come from, a small town beneath a tall standpipe in northwestern Iowa, the Fourth of July was the best day of a long, hot summer.

The Fourth came after YMCA camp and Scout camp and church camp, but before the older boys had to worry about getting into shape for football. It was welcome relief from the scalding, 100-degree heat in a town without a swimming pool and whose swimming holes at Scout Island were usually dried up by early July. But best of all, it had the kind of excitement that began building weeks in advance.

The calm of the summer dawn and the cooing of the mourning doves on the telephone wires would be broken early on July Fourth: The Creglow boys would be up by 7 a.m. and out on the lawn shooting off their arsenal of firecrackers. They were older and had somehow sent their agents by car across the state line and into South Dakota where, not far above the highway curves of Larchwood, you could legally buy fireworks at roadside stands.<!--break-->

Ted Fisch, Jim Ramsey, Wiener Winters, the Cook boys, Hermie Casjens, Jerry Prahl, Elmer Menage, and the rest of the neighborhood gang would race out of  their houses to catch the action. Some had cajoled firecrackers from their parents or bartered from the older boys in the neighborhood: some torpedoes (the kind you smashed against the sidewalk); lots of 2 and 3-inchers, occasionally the granddaddy of them all, the cherry bomb (the really explosive firecracker, stubby, cherry red, with a wick sticking up menacingly from its middle; the kind of firecracker you’d gladly trade away your best set of Submariner comics for.)

Ah, the cherry bomb. It was a microcosm of excitement and mischief and good fun. Bob Creglow, the most resourceful of the Creglow boys, would take a cherry bomb, set it beneath a tin can on a porch, light the fuse, then head for the lilac bushes behind the barn.

“The trick,” he would say, imparting wisdom of the highest order, “is to place the can on a wood porch with a wood roof. Then it will hit the top of the porch, bang, then the bottom of the porch, bang. That’s how you get the biggest clatter.”

So I trudged off to the Linkenheil house, the nearest front porch suitable for cherry bombing, to try my hand at small-town demolition. Bang went the firecracker. Bang went the can on the roof. Bang went the can on the floor. Bang went the screen door as Karl Linkenheil roared out in a sweat, and I lit out for the lilacs behind the barn with my dog, Oscar.

It was glorious stuff - not to be outdone for years, I found out later, until the Halloween eve in high school when Dave Dietz, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Bob Babl, and rest of the Hermie Casjens gang and I made the big time and twice pushed a boxcar loaded with lumber across Main Street and blocked it for hours. But that’s another story for my coming Halloween blog.

Shooting off fireworks was, of course, illegal in Rock Rapids, but Chief of Police Del Woodburn and later Elmer “Shene" Sheneberger used to lay low on the Fourth. I don’t recall ever seeing them about in our neighborhood and I don’t think they ever arrested anybody, although each year the Lyon County  Reporter would carry vague warnings about everybody cooperating to have “a safe and sane Fourth of July.”

Perhaps it was just too dangerous for them to start making firecracker arrests on the Fourth – on the same principle, I guess, that it was dangerous to do too much about the swashbuckling on Halloween or start running down dogs without leashes (Mayor Earl Fisher used to run on the platform that, as long as he was in office, no dog in town would have to be leashed. The neighborhood consensus was that Fisher’s dog, a big, boisterous boxer, was one of the few that ought to be leashed).

We handled the cherry bombs and other fireworks in our possession with extreme care and cultivation; I can’t remember a single mishap. Yet, even then, the handwriting was on the wall. There was talk of cutting off the fireworks supply in South Dakota because it was dangerous for young boys. Pretty soon, they did cut off the cherry bomb traffic and about all that was left, when I came back from college and the Roger boys had replaced the Creglow boys next door, was little stuff appropriately called ladyfingers.

Fireworks are dangerous, our parents would say, and each year they would dust off the old chestnut about the drugstore in Spencer that had a big stock of fireworks and they caught fire one night and much of the downtown went up in a spectacular shower of roman candles and sparkling fountains.

The story was hard to pin down, and seemed to get more gruesome every year – but, we were told, this was why Iowa banned fireworks years before, why they were so dangerous and why little boys shouldn’t be setting them off. The story, of course, never made quite the intended impression; we just wished we’d been on the scene.  My grandfather was the town druggist (Brugmann’s Drugstore, “Where drugs and gold are fairly sold, since 1902") and he said he knew the Spencer druggist personally. Fireworks put him out of business and into the poorhouse, he’d say, and walk away shaking his head.

In any event, firecrackers weren’t much of an issue past noon – the Fourth celebration at the fairgrounds was getting underway and there was too much else to do. Appropriately, the celebration was sponsored by the Rex Strait post of the American Legion (Strait, so the story went, was the first boy from Rock Rapids to die on foreign soil during World War I); the legionnaires were a bunch of good guys from the cleaners and the feed store and the bank who sponsored the American Legion baseball team each summer.

There was always a big carnival, with a ferris wheel somewhere in the center for the kids, a bingo stand for the elders, a booth where the ladies from the Methodist Church sold homemade baked goods, sometimes a hootchy dancer or two, and a couple of dank watering holes beneath the grandstand where the VFW and the Legion sold Grainbelt and Hamms beer  at 30¢ a bottle to anybody who looked of age.

Later on, when the farmboys came in from George and Alvord, there was lots of pushing and shoving, and a fist fight or two.

In front of the grandstand, out in the dust and the sun, would come a succession of shows that made the summer rounds of the little towns. One year it would be Joey Chitwood and his daredevil drivers. (The announcer always fascinated me: “Here he comes, folks, rounding the far turn…he is doing a great job out there tonight…let’s give him a big, big hand as he pulls up in front on the grandstand…”)

Another year it would be harness racing and Mr. Hardy, our local trainer from Doon, would be in his moment of glory. Another year it was tag team wrestling and a couple of barrel-chested goons from Omaha, playing the mean heavies and rabbit-punching their opponents from the back, would provoke roars of disgust from the grandstand. ( The biggest barrel-chest would lean back on the ropes, looking menacingly at the crowd and yell, “ Aw, you dumb farmers. What the hell do you know anyway? I can beat the hell out of any of you."  And the crowd  would roar back in glee.)

One year, Cedric Adams, the Herb Caen of Minneapolis Star-Tribune, would tour the provinces as the emcee of local  variety shows. “It’s great to be in Rock Rapids,” he would say expansively, “because it’s always been known as the ‘Gateway to Magnolia.” (Magnolia, he didn’t need to say, was a little town just over the state line in Minnesota which was known throughout the territory for its liquor-by-the-drink roadhouses. It was also Cedric Adams’ hometown: his “Sackamenna," as Caen would say.  Adams kissed each girl (soundly) who came on the platform to perform and, at the end, hushed the crowd for his radio broadcast to the big city “direct from the stage of the Lyon County Fairgrounds in Rock Rapids, Iowa.”

For a couple of years, when Rock Rapids had a “town team,” and a couple of imported left-handed pitchers named Peewee Wenger and Karl Kletschke, we would have some rousing baseball games with the best semi-pro team around, Larchwood and its gang of Snyder brothers: Barney the eldest at shortstop, Jimmy the youngest at third base, John in center field, Paul in left field, another Snyder behind the plate and a couple on the bench. They were as tough as they came in Iowa baseball.

I can remember it as if it were yesterday at Candlestick, the 1948 game with the Snyders of Larchwood. Peewee Wenger, a gawky, 17-year-old kid right off a high school team, was pitching for Rock Rapids and holding down the Snyder artillery in splendid fashion. Inning after inning he went on, nursing a small lead, mastering one tough Larchwood batter after another, with a blistering fastball and a curve that sliced wickedly into the bat handles of the right-handed Larchwood line-up.

Then the cagey Barney Snyder laid a slow bunt down the third base line. Wenger stumbled, lurched, almost fell getting to the ball, then toppled off balance again, stood helplessly holding the ball. He couldn’t make the throw to first. Barney was safe, cocky and firing insults like machine gun bullets at Peewee from first base.

Peewee, visibly shaken, went back to the mound. He pitched, the next Larchwood batter bunted, this time down the first base line. Peewee lurched for the ball, but couldn’t come up with it. A couple more bunts, a shot through the pitcher’s mound, more bunts and Peewee was out. He could pitch, but, alas, he was too clumsy to field. In came Bill Jammer, now in his late 30’s, but in his day the man who beat the University of Iowa while pitching at a small college called Simpson.

Now he was pitching on guts and beer, a combination good enough for many teams and on good days even good enough  to take on the Snyders. Jammer did well for a couple of innings, then he let two men on base, then came a close call at the plate. Jammer got mad. Both teams were off the bench and onto the field and, as Fred Roach wrote in the Reporter, “fisticuffs erupted at home plate.” When the dust cleared, Jammer had a broken jaw, and for the next two weeks had to drink his soup through a straw at the Joy Lunch cafe, John Snyder, it was said later, came all the way in from center field to throw the punch, but nobody knew for sure and he stayed in the game. I can’t remember the score or who won the game, but I remember it as the best Fourth ever.

At dusk, the people moved out on their porches or put up folding chairs on their lawns. Those who didn’t have a good view drove out to the New Addition or parked out near Mark Curtis’ place or along the river roads that snaked out to the five-mile bridge and Virgil Hasche’s farm.

A hush came over the town. Fireflies started flickering in the river bottom and, along about 8:30, the first puff of smoke rose above the fairgrounds and an aerial bomb whistled into the heavens. BOOM! And the town shook as if hit by a clap of thunder.

Then the three-tiered sky bombs – pink, yellow, white, puff, puff, puff. The Niagara Falls and a gush of white sparks.

Then, in sudden fury, a dazzling display of sizzling comets and aerial bombs and star clusters that arched high, hung for a full breath and descended in a cascade of sparks that floated harmlessly over the meadows and cornfields. At the end, the flag – red, white and blue – would burst forth on the ground as the All-American finale in the darkest of the dark summer nights. On cue, the cheers rolled out from the grandstand and the cars honked from the high ground and the people trundled up their lawn chairs and everybody headed for home.

Well, I live in San Francisco now, and I drive to Daly City with my son, Danny, to buy some anemic stuff in gaudy yellow and blue wrapping and I try unsuccessfully each year to get through the fog or the traffic to see the fireworks at Candlestick. But I feel better knowing that, back where I come from, everybody in town will be on their porches and on the backroads on the evening of the Fourth to watch the fireworks and that, somewhere in town, a little boy will put a big firecracker under a tin can on a wood porch, then light out for the lilacs behind the barn.

P.S. Our family moved in l965 from Daly City to a house in the West Portal area of San Francisco. There are, I assure you, few visible fireworks in that neighborhood. However, down at the bottom of Potrero Hill, the professional and amateur action is spectacular on the evening of the Fourth of July.

From any Potrero Hill height, you can see the fireworks in several directions: the waterfront fireworks in the city, fireworks on the Marin side of the Golden Gate bridge, fireworks at several points in the East Bay, fireworks along the Peninsula coast line.

And for the amateur action, parents with kids, kids of all ages, spectators in cars and on foot, congregate after dusk along Terry Francois Boulevard in San Francisco along the shoreline between the Giants ballpark and the  Mission Rock restaurant.

The action is informal but fiery, fast, and furious: cherry bombs, clusters, spinning wheels, high flying arcs, whizzers of all shapes and sizes. The cops are quite civilized and gingerly patrol the perimeter but don't bother anybody. I go every year. I think it's the best show in town. B3.

8 Washington opponents try to torpedo counter-initiative

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You sir are hereby accused of circulating a petition with fatal legal flaws!
ED SCHIPUL VIA FLICKR

Opponents of 8 Washington, a hotly contested development project that would erect 134 new condos priced at $5 million apiece and up along the San Francisco waterfront, are seeking to thwart a counter-initiative developers have launched to solicit voter approval for the project on the November ballot.

In a July 1 letter from The Sutton Law Firm to Hanson Bridgett LLP, a firm representing the project proponents, political lawyer and fixer Jim Sutton highlights “fatal legal flaws” he claims would invalidate each and every signature collected in support of the 8 Washington initiative. It’s likely a precursor to a lawsuit. Apparently, Sutton got involved through his connection with former City Attorney Louise Renne, who opposes the 8 Washington plan.

Organized under No Wall on the Northeast Waterfront, opponents circulated petitions of their own earlier this year to challenge San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ approval of 8 Washington, asking voters to weigh in on the Board’s waiver of building height limit restrictions. Polling has indicated they'll succeed (a win in their case is a majority of “no” votes), effectively sinking the project. That prompted 8 Washington proponents to generate their own counter-initiative.

Sutton’s letter demands that 8 Washington proponents not submit the initiative to the Department of Elections for signature verification, unless they first re-circulate the petitions. Of course, that would torpedo the whole endeavor, since there’s no way proponents could gather enough signatures in time for the imminent filing deadline.

The aforementioned “fatal legal flaws,” meanwhile, seem to illustrate why high-powered attorneys like Sutton rake in the big bucks. Apparently, the initiative proponents neglected to attach a few maps detailing the height limit increases, in violation of a requirement that proponents present the “full text” of a proposal to voters. And then there’s this:

Whether it’s a photocopying error or an attempt at obfuscation, the map on the left (circulated by the pro-development camp) makes it impossible to read the height limit increase. (The map on the right was circulated by opponents.) This seemingly minute detail matters, according to No Wall on the Northeast Waterfront spokesperson Jon Golinger, because “the whole point of this is the height increase.”

David Beltran, a spokesperson for the pro- 8 Washington folks, responded to a Guardian request for comment by saying, “Our opponents are offering up yet another baseless claim.” He called it a distraction “from having to justify why they are asking our City to give up new parks, jobs, and housing and millions of dollars in city benefits that includes $11 million for new affordable housing—to protect an asphalt parking lot and private club,” referencing a recreational center that’s served a predominantly middle class clientele for years that would be razed to make way for 8 Washington.

Beltran also attached a complaint Hanson Bridgett had filed with the San Francisco Ethics Commission, charging that No Wall on the Northeast Waterfront had failed to meet campaign filing deadlines, and urging city officials to “immediately investigate the delay” and impose fines of $5,000 per violation.


Celebrating independence, embracing wage slavery

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America, fuck yeah!

On the eve of Independence Day, too many San Franciscans seem eager to give up on the very idea of independence, instead willingly buying into the divide and conquer strategies of those who seek to control and exploit us. Just consider the big news of the day.

On Day Three of the BART strike, mainstream and social media are once again awash with angry anti-union diatribes by people who are resentful of the fact that some workers in this society still manage to earn the pensions and decent salaries that most of us wage slaves are being denied.

Pensions are the one thing that allows the working class some degree of independence during its twilight years. And the average BART salary of $72,000 annually shouldn’t be considered excessive in an expensive city that will chew up at least a third of that in housing costs.

But they are each more than most of us are getting, so it’s easy to turn many people against their fellow workers, even though the real targets of our ire should be the bosses and economic system that are denying us our independence and the means to pursue our happiness.

It’s a similar story with the breaking news of the day: City College of San Francisco losing its accreditation and being turned over to state control. While there are some reasons to criticize how this important institution has been managed over the years, it was still being managed by locally elected trustees who made the best decisions they could under bad circumstances.

They made decisions to maintain a broad-based curriculum that this community wanted and needed, and to avoid exploiting the faculty like so many other educational institutions are doing, in the process taking a gamble with lower reserves than may be needed. And the voters of San Francisco stepped up to support CCSF with a parcel tax that was helping to ease it away from the brink, acting as a proud and independent community does during troubled times.

But a commission of unelected bureaucrats on a ideological mission to transform educational institutions into something less than the broad-based community resources that CCSF has strived to be decided to make an example of San Francisco. And they did so with the full support of Mayor Ed Lee, who issued a statement today criticizing local officials for not embracing even harsher austerity measures than they did, and saying “I fully support” the state takeover.

Lee’s hand-picked panel recommending reforms of the Housing Authority is also proposing to sacrifice the independence of poor San Franciscans in favor of ever-more subsidies to real estate developers, according to a story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Among the “reforms” is a proposal to divert federal money from the Section 8 program that offers rent-subsidies to the poor, as Chron reporter John Cote described like this: “A terribly run program that provides low-income residents with vouchers for private housing would be administered by the city, rather than the federally funded public housing agency. The vouchers would be prioritized for certain affordable housing projects, creating dedicated revenue to help secure loans to build them.”

So the vouchers that allow low-income people some independence -- rather than living in squalid, chronically mismanaged public housing projects in San Francisco -- will instead subsidize development projects. Yes, we do need to subsidize affordable housing development, which this city is underfunding, but we shouldn’t be taking the meager resources of society’s least fortunate families to do so.  

I have no doubts that Lee will jump at this suggestion (although its unlikely to be so eagerly embraced by federal regulators at HUD) given his penchant for shady real estate schemes that line the pockets of the powerful, like the one that the Center for Investigative Reporting uncovered this week.

CIR reported that the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Center -- a for-profit company connected to Willie Brown that is arranging immigration visas for Chinese nationals who invest in Lennar’s Hunters Point housing development -- is getting key help from Lee and members of his staff.

This project was already looking like a bait-and-switch scam, as we also reported this week, with Lennar being guaranteed profits without even putting up its own money, thanks to Lee’s willingness to use the power of his office to solicit funds on behalf of the country’s biggest residential developer.

If Lennar wasn’t going to build the affordable housing we need on the front end, or put up the money itself, why didn’t the city just administer this project and give the work to local contractors? What exactly is this Florida-based corporation doing in exchange for being handed some of the most valuable real estate in the city, except for helping its powerful local friends who pulled strings on its behalf?

What’s motivating Lee these days? Well, considering that Brown and other power brokers placed him in the Mayor’s Office after a career at City Hall doing their bidding -- a role he seems to be still playing today in his powerful new role -- I’d say it was a lack of independence.

It’s all pretty depressing, but at least we have a holiday tomorrow to celebrate our independence. Happy Fourth of July, comrades.  

Dick Meister: Celebrating July Fourth with the enemy

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By Dick Meister
Dick Meister is a veteran Guardian columnist and freelance writer.

The Fourth of July, as we all know, is Independence Day. Hurray for George
Washington and the revolutionaries, down with King George and the British.
That sort of thing.

But have you ever wondered what it's like on the other side? Have you ever
celebrated the Fourth across the border in Canada, in that territory settled
by pro-British "Loyalists" who fled the United States after the
Revolutionary War? It is a most peculiar experience for one accustomed to
the American way of viewing the events of 1776.

My wife Gerry and I observed the Fourth on the other side a few years back
-- in Fredericton, the beautiful little capital of New Brunswick, named in
honor of King George's second son, Frederic. Going into Fredericton meant
going into the camp of a former enemy -- a friend now, but a former enemy
who openly hails the "Loyalists" who fought for them against us. I mean
people who opposed our revolution and never even said they were sorry.<!--break-->

Our first stop was the hallowed Loyalist Cemetery near the banks of the
Saint John River at the far end of Waterloo Row, burial ground of
Fredericton's revered founders -- anti-American tories, the lot of them. We
trudged down a muddy path to a ring of trees around a swampy grass clearing
in which the tory heroes lay, prepared to utter a revolutionary sentiment or
two over them in honor of the holiday.

We managed to get a quick look at a couple of thin, well-worn, tottering
slate headstones -- but that was all. Before we could even open our mouths,
they struck -- angry swarms of dread North woods mosquitoes. Backwards we
dashed. Quickly. Very quickly. We slapped at each other as we squished
awkwardly over the wet ground, batting mosquitoes off hair, face, neck,
arms, clothes. Much buzzing. Much stinging. They were everywhere. The
tories' revenge. For days afterward, we bore the swollen red marks of the
Loyalists.

More insults were to come, in the Legislative Assembly chambers downtown.
The chambers are elegant: ornately carved desks, elaborately patterned silk
wall covering, thick crimson carpeting. But look up on the walls, in the
places of honor on either side of the Speaker's chair. To the left there's a
portrait of George III, the very monarch we made a revolution against, to
the right a portrait of his queen, Charlotte -- and both painted by no less
a master than Joshua Reynolds.

George is in fact treated much better in New Brunswick than he generally is
in Great Britain. Historians there ridicule him for being a bit of a loon
and for such loony acts as overtaxing the American colonists and
overreacting to their protests by then waging war against them. In
Fredericton, they think George did the right thing.

In the United States, of course, we celebrate the end of colonialism. But in
Fredericton they seem to yearn for its return. Union Jacks fly from staffs
all over town and portraits of Queen Elizabeth and her consort hang in
government and private buildings everywhere. Ceremonial guards outside City
Hall wear the white pith helmets, long crimson jackets and black uniform
trousers of the British colonial soldier.

Just behind City Hall stand the restored quarters of the British garrison
that was stationed in the city for more than a century, one of the buildings
now housing a museum full of anti-revolutionary twaddle. Captions below
portraits of leading Loyalists praise them for "faith, courage, sacrifices"
against Yankees, who are for the most part described as violent, crude, rude
and vulgar. Here, too, a portrait of George III hangs in a place of honor.
Among the Loyalists singled out is that other fine fellow, Benedict Arnold,
who lived in New Brunswick before slinking off to Mother England in 1791. At
least the museum keepers have the decency to own up to Arnold's "reputation
for crookedness."

Loyalists also are favorites in New Brunswick's neighboring province of Nova
Scotia, particularly in the capital of Halifax. There, the American
revolutionaries are portrayed as bad guys who would have made Nova Scotia a
U.S. colony if the British hadn't beefed up their garrison on Citadel Hill,
a massive fortress that towers high above the city, guarding every access,
be it by land or by sea.

The champion Loyalist stronghold is the New Brunswick city of Saint John.
"Loyalist City," it's called. It has a Loyalist Burial Ground, naturally,
but also a Loyalist Trail, Loyalist Apartments, Loyalist Coin & Collectibles
shop, Loyalist Pub and, among many other things loyalistic, Loyalist Days,
an annual week-long festival honoring Saint John's founders. At a high point
in the festival 100 or so appropriately costumed Loyalists -- "His Majesty's
Loyal Troops" -- fend off a brigade of actors portraying American rebels
attempting to "capture" Saint John.

The latter-day Loyalists claimed to like us nevertheless. In Fredericton,
for instance, a half-dozen U.S. flags fluttered smartly outside the Lord
Beaverbrook Hotel, the city's finest, and the marquee proclaimed, "We Salute
our American Friends. Happy 4th of July."

Sure thing. But watch out for the mosquitoes.

Dick Meister is a veteran Guardian columnist and freelance writer.

(Bruce B. Brugmann, or B3 as he signs his emails and blogs, is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and former editor and co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012. He can be reached at the Bruce blog at sfbg.com.)

    

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Hungry for reform

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California prisoners prepare for another hunger strike to protest persistently deplorable conditions

Sitawa Jamaa is a prisoner at Pelican Bay who helped organize the hunger strikes.

news@sfbg.com

Sitawa Jamaa is among the thousands of California inmates who, two years ago this summer, took part in the largest prison hunger strike in US history to protest harsh conditions and their invisibility to those outside prison walls.

Now, Jamaa and other prisoners are about to launch another hunger strike to highlight the system's unfulfilled promises and the persistence of inhumane conditions.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) counted 6,000 prisoners throughout the state who refused food over several weeks in July 2011. During a follow-up strike that September, the number of prisoners missing meals swelled to 12,000, according to the federal receiver who was appointed by the courts to oversee reforms in the system. At least one inmate starved to death.

As one of four inmates who call themselves the Short Corridor Collective, Jamaa was a key organizer of the hunger strike. The group of inmates drafted a list of core demands calling for the strike when they weren't met.

That was no easy task for Jamaa, who has spent most of the last 28 years alone in a windowless, 8-by-10 foot concrete cell in Pelican Bay State Prison, a supermax facility not far from the Oregon border, where some 1,200 men are held in similar conditions.

Inmates held in solitary confinement (in government lingo: "Segregated Housing Units", or "SHU" for short) aren't supposed to communicate with each other, verbally or through the mail. But they were able to organize with the help of their lawyers, who they are allowed to communicate with, and prison reform advocates outside.

Jamaa and other inmates are planning to launch a second hunger strike on July 8. The Short Corridor Collective has drafted a list of 45 demands, reflecting concerns ranging from inadequate health care to extreme solitary confinement—conditions that prison advocates characterize as cruel and unusual punishment.

The list is an extension of the five initial demands that Pelican Bay inmates presented in 2011 before initiating a hunger strike. Most of those demands were never met, or they were met only with lip service, leading prisoners back to where they started.

 

 

CONFINEMENT AS TORTURE

High on the list are concerns about conditions in the SHU, the amount of time prisoners can be made to spend in isolation, and the public's inability to monitor the situation.

"I feel dead. It's been 13 years since I have shaken someone's hand and I fear I'll forget the feel of human contact," Pelican Bay prisoner Luis Esquivel told attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights in an interview.

Along with Jamaa and others, Esquivel is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the state of California that would effectively cap the time someone can spend in solitary confinement to 10 years.

"The hunger strike is an extreme act," says Terry Kupers, a Piedmont-based psychology professor and clinical psychiatrist who has testified before the California State Assembly on long-term solitary confinement. "It's very dangerous, and you can die. So when a group of prisoners go on hunger strike, it means they've exhausted all ways of expressing themselves and having their demands considered. And that's very much the case here—some of these guys have been in SHU for 30 or 40 years."

Kupers believes solitary confinement in California prisons violates the 8th Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, a view echoed by activists who've launched a statewide effort called the Stop the Torture Campaign.

United Nations Special Rapporteur Juan Méndez, an expert on torture, has called for a ban on solitary confinement where inmates are kept in isolation for 22 hours a day or more, saying the practice should only be used in very exceptional circumstances and for short time periods.

The CDCR has made some concessions and reforms since the 2011 hunger strikes, but critical issues have gone unaddressed. In Pelican Bay's SHU, the men are now allowed beanie caps for when it gets cold. They can now have wall calendars to track time and bring a human touch to their surroundings.

Some prisoners have received exercise equipment, such as a handball or pull-up bar. Each year, they now have permission to have one photograph of themselves taken to send to family members, and prison administrators have signaled that they are looking into extending Pelican Bay's visitation hours.

But more pressing issues have yet to be resolved, so the prisoners who drafted the 45 demands are resorting to starvation once again, despite official statements that it will do little to improve their conditions.

"Negotiation is something the department does not do," says Terry Thornton, a spokesperson for CDCR. But the department has met periodically with a mediation team, consisting of lawyers and prison activists, who have communicated the inmates' concerns and gone over their demands with prison authorities.

 

 

RESISTING REFORM

In 2002, the state of California was sued, and lost, in an 8th Amendment class-action lawsuit: Plata v. Davis. The federal judge overseeing the case called the medical treatment in California prisons "horrifying," sinking "below gross negligence to outright cruelty," ordering improved treatment and reductions in severe prison overcrowding.

A court-appointed doctor found that out of 193 deaths over the course of one year, 34 were "probably preventable," but medical staff gave "well below even minimal standards of care." Eleven years later, the state is still under federal receivership, until it can show that conditions have actually improved.

Court-appointed consultant Dr. Raymond Patterson wrote his 14th annual assessment report last April, blaming high suicide rates behind bars on a lack of "adequate assessment, treatment or intervention." After it was released, he quit the post in frustration, writing: "It has become apparent that continued repetition of these recommendations would be a further waste of time and effort."

So inmates are taking in upon themselves to accomplish what the courts and consultants have failed to do: reform conditions in the prisons.

As happened in 2011, in spite of what is planned to be a peaceful protest, prisons housing strikers will be, according to Thornton, on "modified program" (or "lockdown," as prisoners call it). Generally, that means inmates aren't allowed to leave their cells, even to shower.

New regulations created after the 2011 strikes call for no visits for striking prisoners, and for their canteen food to be confiscated. In addition, "inmate(s) identified as strike leaders, instrumental in organizing, planning, and perpetuating a hunger strike, shall be isolated from non-participating inmates."

Since March of this year, the Guantanamo Bay prisoner hunger strike has made news around the world for highlighting alleged violations of international law. There, when a striker goes below 85 percent Ideal Body Weight, regulations dictate that he or she be shackled to a chair, fitted with a mask, and have tubes inserted through their nostrils into their stomachs for up to two hours at a time.

That didn't happen in California back during the 2011 strikes, but the Division of Correctional Health Care Services devotes five pages of its policy handbook to outlining specific instructions for dealing with hunger strikers, including transfers to prison medical facilities where they could potentially be force-fed, another practice the UN regards as torture.

Prisoners and activists believe the policy was instituted as preemptive attack on the upcoming hunger strike. "We are concerned that, under the pretext of 'welfare' checks, prisoners are being harassed, targeted, and deprived of sleep as the date of planned hunger strikes and work stoppages approaches," said Isaac Ontiveros of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity group. "Whatever the case, new CDCR Secretary Jeffery Beard has an opportunity to avoid the strike and begin to undo the indescribable harm that the California prison system has caused."

 

 

DANGEROUS ASSOCIATIONS

Problems associated with solitary confinement are closely connected to CDCR's most commonly used tool for sending prisoners like Jamaa into the SHU: the controversial "gang validation" process.

Once an inmate is listed in prison records as a gang member, he or she loses multiple rights on the assumption that they're a threat to the order of the prison. With no disciplinary write-ups since 1995, Jamaa would have been eligible for parole in 2004, except for the gang validation that led to his indefinite SHU sentence.

Getting pegged as a member of a gang can happen easily. Guards can write prisoners up for anything from the possession of artwork deemed to be gang-related, to information obtained from confidential informants whose claims prisoners often aren't allowed to refute and whose identities remain unknown to the targeted prisoners.

Last year, in the wake of hunger strikes, CDCR announced a "complex retooling" of the gang validation practices. The so-called Step Down process, created in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, is meant to transition inmates out of gangs over the course of four years, with privileges gained over that time.

It might be the most significant of the reforms that followed the last hunger strike, but prisoners and their advocates criticize it as too lengthy of a process, subject to the arbitrary whims of the correctional officers overseeing a given prisoner. In fact, they say it may widen the definition of who counts as a gang member.

Manuel Sanchez, who is participating in the Step Down program at Corcoran State Prison, wrote in a letter that he is "seriously considering returning to SHU, where I'd be less harassed and I'd get more yard access more consistently."

Compounding the problems in the prisons is a lack of transparency and public accountability.

"It's like mentioning July 8 is anathema," says San Francisco Bay View Editor Mary Ratcliff, whose African American-focused newspaper has been a CDCR censorship target.

From January to April of this year, Ratcliff said papers were being returned from Pelican Bay undelivered because they included articles about the hunger strikes, representing "material inciting participation in a mass disturbance," and "a serious threat to the safety and security" of the prison, according to CDCR Administrator R.K. Swift.

"I think it's remarkable that hunger strikes are considered a 'disturbance,'" says Ratcliff. "A disturbance is supposed to mean a fight—something that threatens people. A hunger strike is a threat to no one except the people who are participating in it."

Just as inmates can't get news from the outside, they are also walled off from journalists who might cover them and the conditions they live in.

Since 1996, the CDCR has limited reporters to only interviewing prisoners they've selected. Last September, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed legislation that would have opened up media access to the prisons. "Giving criminals celebrity status through repeated appearances on television will glorify their crimes and hurt victims and their families," he wrote, citing the media spectacle around Charles Manson.

But activists say the nearly $2 million Brown received from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) during his successful bid for governor in 2010 had more to do with it than infamous serial killers.

Assembly member Tom Ammiano, who authored the most recent bill, stressed that "Press access isn't just to sell newspapers. It's a way for the public to know that the prisons it pays for are well-run. I invite the governor to visit the SHU to see for himself why media access is so important."

 

 

DRASTIC MEASURES

Last time around, Jamaa lost 19 pounds. Deprived of sunlight, the Oakland-born man has developed melanin and vitamin D deficiencies that have lightened his normally dark brown skin. He suffers stomach problems and swollen thyroid glands that he didn't have before prison. Starvation is a possibly lethal proposition. "Make no mistake, none of us wants to die. But we are prepared to, if that's what it takes to force a real reform," he and other strike leaders wrote in a statement last December. Jamaa's sister, Marie Levin, who has organized monthly vigils for the strikers at Oakland's monthly First Fridays/Art Murmur event, is worried about how her brother's body will cope this time around. "It's something that we as family members don't want them to have to experience again," she notes with anxiety. Yet both the prisoners and their advocates on the outside say they can't simply let dehumanizing conditions in California's prison system continue indefinitely. "I think things have changed, but not substantially in terms of actual conditions," Kupers argues. "What is changed is the CDCR had to recognize the strikers, and conceded some of the things. And subsequently, the various prisoner groups have come together and made a commitment not to have violence between groups inside the prisons. This is huge advancement." But unless all 45 demands are met, they say the strike will commence July 8. For now, Jamaa and others are readying their bodies for hunger, for a cause they believe goes far beyond prison walls. "Know this," he wrote from SHU, words that needed to be smuggled out through unconventional means to get around an official wall of silence. "I am a ... Prisoner of War, and I serve the interest of all people."

Wedding bells and Pride protests

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A whirlwind week of LGBTQ action in San Francisco

rebecca@sfbg.com ; steve@sfbg.com

The city of San Francisco was a complete whirlwind from June 26 to June 30. First came the historic Supreme Court ruling that ended the ban on same-sex marriage in California and struck down the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. The historic decision, handed down just before the city's Pride festivities got underway and as a rare heat wave gripped the city, unleashed widespread celebration June 26, culminating with a rally and dance party in the streets of the Castro.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal recognition of same-sex marriage, "is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment." According to the majority opinion, "DOMA's principal effect is to identify a subset of state sanctioned marriages and make them unequal."

Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Prop 8 case, was dismissed on standing due to the fact that the State of California refused to defend it in court. That meant the previous ruling invalidating Prop 8, by Judge Vaughan Walker and upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court, was upheld.

City Hall was totally packed at 7am when the Court convened, with hordes of journalists, gay and lesbian couples, and sign-wielding activists in the crowd. Cheers erupted when the decision was announced striking down DOMA. When the Prop 8 statement came down, the room went nuts.

"It feels good to have love triumph over ignorance," said Mayor Ed Lee, who joined Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom in escorting a fragile Phyllis Lyon down the stairway. When Lyon married the late Del Martin, they became the first same-sex couple to get legally married in California in 2004.

"San Francisco is not a city of dreamers, but a city of doers," Newsom said. "Here we don't just tolerate diversity, we celebrate our diversity." He thanked City Attorney Dennis Herrera and others who'd contributed to the fight to for marriage equality. "It's people with a true commitment to equality that brought us here."

When Herrera took the podium, he turned to Newsom, and said, "Now you can say, 'Whether you like it or not!'"— a joking reference to Newsom's same-sex marriage rallying cry, which some blamed for boosting the anti-same-sex marriage cause. "We wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for Gavin Newsom's leadership," Herrera continued. "I remember in 2004 when people were saying it was too fast, too soon, too much." Herrera also pledged to continue the fight that began here in City Hall more than nine years ago: "We will not rest until we have marriage equality throughout this country."

Later that afternoon, clergy from a variety of faiths including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and the Church of Latter Day Saints gathered on the steps of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill for a buoyant press conference to celebrate the court's rulings.

"For 20 years I've been marrying gay and lesbian couples, because in the eyes of God, that love and commitment was real, even when it wasn't in the eyes of the state," said Rabbi Michael Lerner of the Beyt Tikkun Synagogue. "We as religious people have to apologize to the gay community," he added, for religious texts that gave opponents of gay marriage ammunition to advance an agenda of discrimination.

He added that the take-home message of the long fight for marriage equality is, "don't be 'realistic.' Thank God the gay community vigorously fought for the right to be married — because they were not 'realistic,' the reality changed. Do not limit your vision to what the politicians and the media tell you is possible."

Mitch Mayne introduced himself as "an openly gay, active Mormon," which is significant since the Mormon Church was a major funder of Prop 8. He called it "one of the most un-Christlike things we have ever done as a religion," but noted that the sordid affair had brought on "a mighty change in heart from inside the Mormon community, with greater tolerance than ever before," with many Mormons going out and marching in solidary with gay and lesbian couples, he said.

Then on June 28, earlier than expected, the County Clerk started issuing same-sex marriage licenses. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, plaintiffs in the case against Prop. 8, became the first of dozens of happy couples to be married at City Hall that evening, and the marriages continued in the days that followed.

And as if that weren't enough excitement, it all happened before the weekend, when Pride festivities got underway. This year featured not only the official Pride parade and myriad performances, but also an "Alternative to Pride Parade," signifying that a radical Pride-questioning movement has been reawakened in San Francisco.

"Have you had enough with the poor political choices of some community leaders that claim to represent you? Are you over the over-corporatizing of SF Pride? Or just tired of the same old events that don't reflect who you are, and how you want to celebrate your queer pride?" organizers wrote in a statement announcing the event.

The parade itself, meanwhile, also featured some dissenters. The third annual Bradley Manning Support Network contingent swelled in ranks this year, due to the political maelstrom touched off when the Pride Board rescinded Manning's appointment as Grand Marshal.

The Bradley Manning Support Network contingent attracted more than 2,000 supporters who marched to show solidarity with the openly gay whistleblower, comprising the largest non-corporate contingent in the Parade. Former military strategist Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked secret government documents known as the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, donned a pink boa and rode alongside his wife, Patricia, in a pick-up truck labeled "Bradley Manning Grand Marshal." Patricia told the Bay Guardian,"There is something about the energy and triumph of this beautiful event ... Just as the gays have made a tremendous difference with marriage, we have to do the same with wars and aggression" in U.S. foreign policy.

Pride's legal counsel, Brooke Oliver — who resigned over the Pride Board's handling of the Manning debacle — marched along with the Bradley Manning contingent. Bevan Dufty, former SF Supervisor and now the mayor's point person on homelessness, stepped down as a Grand Marshal, also because of the Pride Board's actions, but didn't march with the contingent.

Nor were the Bradley Manning supporters the only protest contingent to take part in the parade. A group seized the opportunity to make a political statement by marching with a faux Google bus, an action meant to call attention to gentrification and evictions in San Francisco. They rented a white coach and covered it with signs printed up in a similar font to Google's corporate logo, proclaiming: "Gentrification & Eviction Technologies (GET) OUT: Integrated Displacement and Cultural Erasure."

Some trailed the faux Google bus with an 8-foot banner depicting a blown-up version of an Ellis Act evictions map. Others donned red droplets stamped with "evicted" to signify Google map markers, while a few toted suitcases to represent tenants who'd been sent packing. However, their ranks were thin in comparison with the parade contingents surrounding them, which included crowds of workers representing eBay, DropBox, and, of course, Google — the largest corporate contingent in the parade.

"The organizers of this anti-gentrification and displacement contingent are not 'proud' that folks are being kicked out of this city that was once their refuge," organizers of the faux Google bus contingent wrote in a press statement. "The 2013 SF Homeless Count and Survey shows that 29 percent of the city's homeless population is 'LGB and other.' The Castro is experiencing the highest number of evictions in the city. Meanwhile, the SF Pride Parade is becoming as gentrified as SF. This group is calling on Pride to remember its roots."

 

Parents, behind bars

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New programs acknowledge that strengthening the parent-child bond reduces recidivism

By Ross Mirkarimi

OPINION Nearly 50 percent of the 2.7 million people incarcerated in US prisons and jails are mothers and fathers. In San Francisco, about 40 percent of the prisoners are parents. For their children, the punishment does not fit the crime.

Federal and state recidivism registers at 78 percent; locally the rate is 65 percent and dropping. If we're serious about breaking the cycle of incarceration, we must get serious about restoring the family ties of the incarcerated.

Studies support what common sense suggests — strengthening the parent-child bond reduces recidivism. It also reduces the prospect that children of the incarcerated are more likely to violate the law. While maintaining appropriate safety and legal protocols, the San Francisco Sheriff's Department is reexamining policies that invariably damage or strain relationships between an inmate parent and child, starting with birth. In honor of Mother's Day, on May 9, the Community Works Jail Arts Program, with our department, converted the lobby of the SF women's jail into a temporary gallery of art created by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated mothers.

That provided a warm environment to announce a policy first in California: The Birth Justice Project, designed to affirm the reproductive rights of all incarcerated women and provide prenatal and postpartum care during the transformative experience of pregnancy, birth and parenthood. With the stewardship of Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, an OB/GYN from UCSF, along with the Department of Public Health, Zellerbach Foundation, and our volunteer doulas (professional birth assistants), we're radically distancing ourselves from the barbaric attitude of 33 states that still shackle women during labor. Rather, we seek to nurture the inimitable bond between mother and child.

While most jails and prisons shun a lactation policy, we've unveiled our pro-lactation program. Breast pumps, refrigeration, and delivery are provided around the clock, facilitated by our jail health professionals. While the arcane national practice is to separate baby and mother after the third day of birth, we're working to maintain the connection. If we can't do it through diversion (alternatives to incarceration), then we'll continue to assess our facility in allowing mother and baby to stay together. I look forward to promoting breast feeding in San Francisco's jails.

For children of incarcerated parents, the absence of a mother is the loss of a primary caregiver. Ninety percent of incarcerated fathers in the US report that while away, their children live with the child's mother. In contrast, only 28 percent of incarcerated mothers report that their children live with their father. Routinely, her children are cared for by a grandparent or relative — and about 11 percent are placed in foster care. Many children are bounced from caregiver to caregiver during their parent's incarceration.

These disruptions to a child's life negatively affect their social and mental development. Acknowledging the sense of disconnection experienced by children whose parents are incarcerated also means we must grapple with the emotional poverty that increases the likelihood of criminal behavior. In San Francisco, we're taking steps to bridge this disconnection by reforming visitation policies to facilitating regular contact between children and incarcerated parents.

The people in our jails will eventually be released and will return to communities that historically have been underserved. We're trying to intensify resources toward exit planning for newly incarcerated parents and guardians. Depending on individuals cases, that could include a regiment of parenting classes, substance abuse and mental health treatment, domestic violence counseling, reunification counseling for parent and child, reading and writing comprehension, high school completion, life skills such as financial literacy, and vocational training.

Many people don't know what the Sheriff's Department does or the difference between us and the SFPD; we've launched a monthly e-newsletter to keep the public informed. To sign up or contact us at: Ross.Mirkarimi@SFgov.org

Ross Mirkarimi is sheriff of San Francisco

So now what?

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The city celebrates equality, but still leaves many behind

EDITORIAL The scene at City Hall on Friday, June 28 could have been a video rewind of 2004's Winter of Love: a surprise announcement granting same-sex marriage licenses; a breathless rush of couples to the civic altar, led by two brave, symbolic women (lesbian groundbreakers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in 2004 and anti-Prop 8 plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier in 2013), a city erupting with good will and cheer, dazed by the speed of luck and history. Earlier, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, teeth and hair and all, was making grand pronouncements, strutting about like he was mayor of the place again.

Back in 2004, the city was scarred and drained from the first great Internet bust, and still reeling from the losses of AIDS. San Francisco was a mess, but it was starting to recover. People who had been forced to move out by the city's skyrocketing rents and evictions in the early 2000s were beginning to trickle back in, and many of those beached by the boom's collapse were turning into the very freaks, artists, and innovators they had helped displace. When Newsom launched SF's same-sex marriage rebellion, it was an act of great civic uplift, burnishing SF's progressive image in the eyes of the world, while boosting the city's self-confidence. (Not to mention its economy, which benefited greatly from the wedding explosion.)

The act also burnished Newsom's own reputation. Previously reviled for his "Care Not Cash" policies that demonized the poor and homeless, a significant percentage of LGBTQ people among them, he was suddenly a posterboy for civil rights. Now of course, San Francisco is supposedly on the arc of an economic boom, skyrocketing evictions included, and not in the dregs of a bust. So it was with a regretful shudder that we noticed some more ominous similarities between 2004 and 2013.

A week before this year's Pride, and right before the wave of marriage elation overtook the festivities, the city's homeless census was released. Out of the total count of 6,436 homeless people, a figure emerged that stunned many: 29 percent of 1000 people specifically asked identified themselves as LGBTQ, and it's assumed that the actual percentage of queer homeless people is in fact higher, due to factors like closeting and mental health. A large portion of LGBTQ homeless are youth, still drawn here by San Francisco's promise of inclusion and shelter from abusive and rejective backgrounds.

While the city celebrates the achievement of grand ideals of equality, we are failing the very people for whom those ideals may be most valuable. Currently, Dolores Street Services, along with help from Sup. David Campos and the city's "homeless czar" Bevan Dufty, is working towards the building of a 24-bed shelter specific aimed to service LGBTQ homeless people. But that's just a drop in the bucket. We need much more.

Now that DOMA has been overturned and Prop. 8 kicked to the curb, there's a lot of discussion about what the powerful, energized "gay lobby" should take on next. Righting the horrible Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act and achieving marriage equality in 37 more states are valiant, necessary goals. But turning toward the actual problems in our own backyard is another imperative.

As the Pride celebration in the Civic Center was winding down on the evening of Sunday, June 30, a group of young women emerged seemingly out of nowhere among the trash-strewn streets and beeping trucks being loaded with the party's massive detritus. The women quietly dispersed among the leftover crowd, hauling sacks of bread on their shoulders. They made their way toward those lying on the street or huddled in doorways, distributing loaves in a matter-of-fact manner to people in need. It was a perfect reminder of the real spirit of Pride — an inclusivity that benefits all, empowered by actions on a one-to-one, human scale.

Political Alerts

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Thursday 4

San Francisco Mime Troupe: Oil and Water Dolores Park, 18thand Dolores, SF. www.sfmt.org. 2pm, free. This free performance by San Francisco's beloved Mime Troupe actually incorporates two shorter plays, Crude Intentions and Deal with the Devil. Dealing with issues such as climate change, pollution, water scarcity and fossil fuel dependence, the plays involve a poisoned rainforest river, a senator mysteriously murdered in his office and, true to life, an oil refinery ablaze in the Bay Area.

 

Saturday 6

Laborfest bike tour of historic SF 518 Valencia, SF. (415) 608-9035, www.laborfest.net. noon-4pm, donation suggested. Led by local author and activist Chris Carlsson, this bike tour will delve into San Francisco's working-class history, featuring stops at landmarks and tales of dozens of epic battles between owners and workers, culminating in the 1934 General Strike and its aftermath. Join this event for a different look at San Francisco labor history and a new perspective on San Francisco.

 

Sunday 7

Innocent! The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal 518 Valencia, SF. www.laborfest.net. 2-6pm, free. You may or may not know the story behind the campaign to free America's most famous political prisoner, former Black Panther and revolutionary journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal. But whatever your level of knowledge, here's your chance to hear from experts including Rachel Wolkenstein, investigative attorney for Mumia; family spokesperson Bob Wells; Oakland Teachers for Mumia and ILWU organizer Jack Heyman of the San Francisco longshore union on the West Coast port shutdown organized in defense of Mumia.

Walking tour: Empires, Kings, and Labor Cable-car turnaround, Powell and Market, SF. commonwealth1234@yahoo.com, laborfest.net. 11am, free. Join this hour and fifteen minute tour of Union Square and surrounding blocks, where one can learn the history of labor struggles that unfolded in San Francisco. Tour is led by David Giesen.

 

Monday 8

Chinatown walk Portsmouth Square, Washington near Kearny, SF. www.laborfest.net. 10am, free. Join SF City Guide Mae Schoening in a walk through Chinatown to learn about Chinese labor history in California, where discrimination by governments and unions, sweatshops, housing issues and other problems have shaped experiences throughout the decades. Learn how immigrant labor struggled for fair treatment while mining gold, building railroads, and working in the garment and building trades. Meet inside Portsmouth Square Park in front of Parking Garage Elevators adjacent corner of Walter P. Lum Place and Washington.


"Eviction Free Summer" activists show up outside a landlord's office to protest an eviction

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On July 2, activists from "Eviction Free Summer," formed to defend tenants facing eviction, gathered outside landlord Rick Holman's South Park office building in San Francisco to protest an eviction he'd initiated against a Mission-based activist collective.

Organizer Fred Sherburn-Zimmer said it was one of many peaceful protests the housing activists plan to stage against property owners this summer. "We're taking it to the landlord's homes and offices," Sherburn-Zimmer said. "They can't pretend they're not ruining people's lives by displacing them."

This past April, collective members from In The Works, an organization that rents space in what is often called the "17 Reasons" building, at 17th and Mission streets, received an eviction notice from Holman alleging illegal subletting.

Holman is a managing partner at Asher Investment Group, and from the perspective of Sherburn-Zimmer and other protesters, his move to evict the collective is helping to propel a trend of gentrification in the Mission. "We need this space, and if the whole neighborhood is high-end realty, then it's not really helping the community," Sherburn-Zimmer said.

The In The Works Collective bills itself as an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist arts and events collective, which regularly hosts skill-sharing workshops and other activism-oriented events. A collective member who introduced herself as Madeline said Holman has not been the most hospitable landlord.

"When he first came to talk to us, he said we had bad posture and body language," she recounted. "The day after we got the three-day notice, the locks were changed." 

When the Guardian reached Holman this past May seeking comment for a longer article about widespread evictions, he declined to comment on the matter but emphasized that he planned to keep the building as commercial office space rather than convert it into high-end condos, and said his other tenants had expressed no complaints.

Like many folks facing eviction from San Francisco rental properties, In The Works may be forced to find another space. Currently, Madeline says the collective is paying 72 cents a square foot for the 5,200 square foot place -- and it’s highly unlikely that they’ll find a place in the Mission for a similar price. That's why they welcomed support from the activists at Eviction-Free Summer.

"I totally respect them helping us out," Madeline said. "It's important that we stick together. Our place has always been big on solidarity and community building." 

Eviction Free Summer hasn’t revealed what other landlords they might target, yet they plan to continue staging protests outside landlords' homes and offices in coming months. "This is just the beginning of this direct action group," Sherburn-Zimmer said. "We will do anything to prevent people from losing their homes and spaces."

City College loses accreditation, throwing its future into doubt

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A student registers for classes at City College shortly before the announcement was made about revoking its accreditation.
Joe Fitzgerald

City College of San Francisco will lose its accreditation, it was announced today, and the venerable local college may not survive. With its impending death, the future of thousands of San Franciscans seeking education and a better life are in limbo.

The loss of accreditation becomes effective in one year, and the decision is being appealed, during which time local control is being transferred to a state trustee. The California Community College Chancellor's Office has not yet named the trustee that it will appoint, and officials say the trustee will be given full authority to make decisions in the place of the current Board of Trustees.

"I think state intervention is going to be necessary,” said Mayor Ed Lee told reporters this afternoon.

“It's imperative City College stay open for business and education the 85,000 students it serves" Lee said in a conference call with reporters. "I'm concerned about the devastating impact City College's termination would have on our great city."

The long-awaited decision was expected sometime around this long holiday weekend, and officials knew losing the accreditation was a possibility, but most said privately that they didn’t think the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges would actually pull the trigger. So right now, everyone is still reeling from the news.

"It’s too soon to say who that special trustee will be at that point," State Community College Chancellor Brice Harris said. 

Locally elected Trustee Rafael Mandelman said that the locally elected board will continue operating until July of 2014, when the termination of the accreditation becomes effective, but it's unclear what authority it will now have. 

“It’s disappointing, it’s outrageous, I don't think it’s called for. I don't think it’s the right outcome. I don’t think the state is going to do a better job running the school than a local board could,” he told us.

“We believe that the best way to bring the college from certain closure is to put the college under trusteeship of certain powers,” Harris said, adding that the search for a new chancellor for CCSF will now be accelerated. The current chancellor is an interim chancellor, the second one in a year after chancellor Don Griffin left the school due to an illness.

“We are disappointed in the Commission’s decision. We will be filing a request for review and will do everything in our power to have this decision reversed,” Chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman said in a prepared statement. “What is of utmost importance at this time is that City College remains open, and instruction and services will continue. We want to assure our students and their families that we will serve them and continue to provide the high quality education that they expect from City College. We will continue to register new and returning students for the Fall semester and look forward to their arrival on campus in August.”

City College was put on sanction by the commission back in July of 2012 after allegedly failing to fix issues identified by the commission six years prior. Since then, the college has been in panic mode. 

The threat of closure brought drastic changes at whip lash speed over the past few months: two campuses shuttered, over 40 counselors and support staff were laid off, faculty took a 7 percent pay cut and student enrollment has plummeted.

Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance Peter Goldstein put the college's finances this way, "This has been a nightmare of a fiscal year."

But there were positive improvements as well, said Alisa Messer, an English teacher and faculty union president of City College's local AFT 2121. 

"Faculty have banded together and worked hard to address the requirements around student learning outcomes," Messer said. SLOs, as they're commonly known, measure student learning over the course of a class and in a student's college career. 

"The accrediting commission felt it wasn't integrated throughout the college, but they would be hard pressed to say it isn't now," she said.

Despite City College's improvements the California Federation of Teachers is set on fighting the accreditation commission's decision. They filed a massive 280-plus page complaint to the U.S. Department of Education alleging that the accreditation commission violated many of its own rules in evaluating CCSF.

 

The commission responded by locking out over 30 faculty and concerned citizens from its most recent public meeting, even barring a reporter from the SF Chronicle from entering.  

Now the commission has asked visiting accreditation teams, who evaluate colleges on site, to shred their documentation to make such complaints harder to research, which was originally reported on by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"The work you do here is a position of trust, the documents you receive are given to you in that light." said a faculty member who had served on prior accreditation teams, but did not wish to be named because they are not approved to speak on behalf of the accreditation commission. "When you're done fulfilling your responsibility its good policy to dispose of them, and its the commission's expectation."

Some of the documents are proprietary information at for-profit colleges, such as Heald. It makes sense to protect that private information. The visiting team has "a look behind the curtain," the faculty member said. 

But Messer isn't buying it. "We've asked they be more transparent, they've done the opposite of that," Messer said.

On the college's Ocean campus, just outside the Chancellor's office in a retro brown speckled hallway, Dennis Garcia walked by with his City College registration info in hand.

He's ready for his next semester, and unlike the thousands of students that didn't enroll in City College this year, he forged ahead.  

"I decided to come because I'm not scared or nervous about the school going down," he said.

Garcia is an 18-year-old criminal justice major and SF native who dreams of transferring to San Francisco or San Jose State Universities. He wants to be a star soccer player while in school.

But why did he stay when so many others fled? 

"Why City College? It's home," he said. "People say, coming here is not successful, but I mean, sometimes you don't have money and you're not an A or B student, but you get your math and English done and you go from there. College is college."

Now, whether City College remains a college this time next year is still an open question.

 

The Fourth of July: Remembering the good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa, circa 1940s to 1950s

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Note: In July of 1972, when the Bay Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter. I now reprint it each year on the Bruce blog, with some San Francisco updates and postscripts.)

Back where I come from, a small town beneath a tall standpipe in northwestern Iowa, the Fourth of July was the best day of a long, hot summer.

The Fourth came after YMCA camp and Scout camp and church camp, but before the older boys had to worry about getting into shape for football. It was welcome relief from the scalding, 100-degree heat in a town without a swimming pool and whose swimming holes at Scout Island were usually dried up by early July. But best of all, it had the kind of excitement that began building weeks in advance.

The calm of the summer dawn and the cooing of the mourning doves on the telephone wires would be broken early on July Fourth: The Creglow boys would be up by 7 a.m. and out on the lawn shooting off their arsenal of firecrackers. They were older and had somehow sent their agents by car across the state line and into South Dakota where, not far above the highway curves of Larchwood, you could legally buy fireworks at roadside stands.<!--break-->

Ted Fisch, Jim Ramsey, Wiener Winters, the Cook boys, Hermie Casjens, Jerry Prahl, Elmer Menage, and the rest of the neighborhood gang would race out of  their houses to catch the action. Some had cajoled firecrackers from their parents or bartered from the older boys in the neighborhood: some torpedoes (the kind you smashed against the sidewalk); lots of 2 and 3-inchers, occasionally the granddaddy of them all, the cherry bomb (the really explosive firecracker, stubby, cherry red, with a wick sticking up menacingly from its middle; the kind of firecracker you’d gladly trade away your best set of Submariner comics for.)

Ah, the cherry bomb. It was a microcosm of excitement and mischief and good fun. Bob Creglow, the most resourceful of the Creglow boys, would take a cherry bomb, set it beneath a tin can on a porch, light the fuse, then head for the lilac bushes behind the barn.

“The trick,” he would say, imparting wisdom of the highest order, “is to place the can on a wood porch with a wood roof. Then it will hit the top of the porch, bang, then the bottom of the porch, bang. That’s how you get the biggest clatter.”

So I trudged off to the Linkenheil house, the nearest front porch suitable for cherry bombing, to try my hand at small-town demolition. Bang went the firecracker. Bang went the can on the roof. Bang went the can on the floor. Bang went the screen door as Karl Linkenheil roared out in a sweat, and I lit out for the lilacs behind the barn with my dog, Oscar.

It was glorious stuff - not to be outdone for years, I found out later, until the Halloween eve in high school when Dave Dietz, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Bob Babl, and rest of the Hermie Casjens gang and I made the big time and twice pushed a boxcar loaded with lumber across Main Street and blocked it for hours. But that’s another story for my coming Halloween blog.

Shooting off fireworks was, of course, illegal in Rock Rapids, but Chief of Police Del Woodburn and later Elmer “Shene" Sheneberger used to lay low on the Fourth. I don’t recall ever seeing them about in our neighborhood and I don’t think they ever arrested anybody, although each year the Lyon County  Reporter would carry vague warnings about everybody cooperating to have “a safe and sane Fourth of July.”

Perhaps it was just too dangerous for them to start making firecracker arrests on the Fourth – on the same principle, I guess, that it was dangerous to do too much about the swashbuckling on Halloween or start running down dogs without leashes (Mayor Earl Fisher used to run on the platform that, as long as he was in office, no dog in town would have to be leashed. The neighborhood consensus was that Fisher’s dog, a big, boisterous boxer, was one of the few that ought to be leashed).

We handled the cherry bombs and other fireworks in our possession with extreme care and cultivation; I can’t remember a single mishap. Yet, even then, the handwriting was on the wall. There was talk of cutting off the fireworks supply in South Dakota because it was dangerous for young boys. Pretty soon, they did cut off the cherry bomb traffic and about all that was left, when I came back from college and the Roger boys had replaced the Creglow boys next door, was little stuff appropriately called ladyfingers.

Fireworks are dangerous, our parents would say, and each year they would dust off the old chestnut about the drugstore in Spencer that had a big stock of fireworks and they caught fire one night and much of the downtown went up in a spectacular shower of roman candles and sparkling fountains.

The story was hard to pin down, and seemed to get more gruesome every year – but, we were told, this was why Iowa banned fireworks years before, why they were so dangerous and why little boys shouldn’t be setting them off. The story, of course, never made quite the intended impression; we just wished we’d been on the scene.  My grandfather was the town druggist (Brugmann’s Drugstore, “Where drugs and gold are fairly sold, since 1902") and he said he knew the Spencer druggist personally. Fireworks put him out of business and into the poorhouse, he’d say, and walk away shaking his head.

In any event, firecrackers weren’t much of an issue past noon – the Fourth celebration at the fairgrounds was getting underway and there was too much else to do. Appropriately, the celebration was sponsored by the Rex Strait post of the American Legion (Strait, so the story went, was the first boy from Rock Rapids to die on foreign soil during World War I); the legionnaires were a bunch of good guys from the cleaners and the feed store and the bank who sponsored the American Legion baseball team each summer.

There was always a big carnival, with a ferris wheel somewhere in the center for the kids, a bingo stand for the elders, a booth where the ladies from the Methodist Church sold homemade baked goods, sometimes a hootchy dancer or two, and a couple of dank watering holes beneath the grandstand where the VFW and the Legion sold Grainbelt and Hamms beer  at 30¢ a bottle to anybody who looked of age.

Later on, when the farmboys came in from George and Alvord, there was lots of pushing and shoving, and a fist fight or two.

In front of the grandstand, out in the dust and the sun, would come a succession of shows that made the summer rounds of the little towns. One year it would be Joey Chitwood and his daredevil drivers. (The announcer always fascinated me: “Here he comes, folks, rounding the far turn…he is doing a great job out there tonight…let’s give him a big, big hand as he pulls up in front on the grandstand…”)

Another year it would be harness racing and Mr. Hardy, our local trainer from Doon, would be in his moment of glory. Another year it was tag team wrestling and a couple of barrel-chested goons from Omaha, playing the mean heavies and rabbit-punching their opponents from the back, would provoke roars of disgust from the grandstand. ( The biggest barrel-chest would lean back on the ropes, looking menacingly at the crowd and yell, “ Aw, you dumb farmers. What the hell do you know anyway? I can beat the hell out of any of you."  And the crowd  would roar back in glee.)

One year, Cedric Adams, the Herb Caen of Minneapolis Star-Tribune, would tour the provinces as the emcee of local  variety shows. “It’s great to be in Rock Rapids,” he would say expansively, “because it’s always been known as the ‘Gateway to Magnolia.” (Magnolia, he didn’t need to say, was a little town just over the state line in Minnesota which was known throughout the territory for its liquor-by-the-drink roadhouses. It was also Cedric Adams’ hometown: his “Sackamenna," as Caen would say.  Adams kissed each girl (soundly) who came on the platform to perform and, at the end, hushed the crowd for his radio broadcast to the big city “direct from the stage of the Lyon County Fairgrounds in Rock Rapids, Iowa.”

For a couple of years, when Rock Rapids had a “town team,” and a couple of imported left-handed pitchers named Peewee Wenger and Karl Kletschke, we would have some rousing baseball games with the best semi-pro team around, Larchwood and its gang of Snyder brothers: Barney the eldest at shortstop, Jimmy the youngest at third base, John in center field, Paul in left field, another Snyder behind the plate and a couple on the bench. They were as tough as they came in Iowa baseball.

I can remember it as if it were yesterday at Candlestick, the 1948 game with the Snyders of Larchwood. Peewee Wenger, a gawky, 17-year-old kid right off a high school team, was pitching for Rock Rapids and holding down the Snyder artillery in splendid fashion. Inning after inning he went on, nursing a small lead, mastering one tough Larchwood batter after another, with a blistering fastball and a curve that sliced wickedly into the bat handles of the right-handed Larchwood line-up.

Then the cagey Barney Snyder laid a slow bunt down the third base line. Wenger stumbled, lurched, almost fell getting to the ball, then toppled off balance again, stood helplessly holding the ball. He couldn’t make the throw to first. Barney was safe, cocky and firing insults like machine gun bullets at Peewee from first base.

Peewee, visibly shaken, went back to the mound. He pitched, the next Larchwood batter bunted, this time down the first base line. Peewee lurched for the ball, but couldn’t come up with it. A couple more bunts, a shot through the pitcher’s mound, more bunts and Peewee was out. He could pitch, but, alas, he was too clumsy to field. In came Bill Jammer, now in his late 30’s, but in his day the man who beat the University of Iowa while pitching at a small college called Simpson.

Now he was pitching on guts and beer, a combination good enough for many teams and on good days even good enough  to take on the Snyders. Jammer did well for a couple of innings, then he let two men on base, then came a close call at the plate. Jammer got mad. Both teams were off the bench and onto the field and, as Fred Roach wrote in the Reporter, “fisticuffs erupted at home plate.” When the dust cleared, Jammer had a broken jaw, and for the next two weeks had to drink his soup through a straw at the Joy Lunch cafe, John Snyder, it was said later, came all the way in from center field to throw the punch, but nobody knew for sure and he stayed in the game. I can’t remember the score or who won the game, but I remember it as the best Fourth ever.

At dusk, the people moved out on their porches or put up folding chairs on their lawns. Those who didn’t have a good view drove out to the New Addition or parked out near Mark Curtis’ place or along the river roads that snaked out to the five-mile bridge and Virgil Hasche’s farm.

A hush came over the town. Fireflies started flickering in the river bottom and, along about 8:30, the first puff of smoke rose above the fairgrounds and an aerial bomb whistled into the heavens. BOOM! And the town shook as if hit by a clap of thunder.

Then the three-tiered sky bombs – pink, yellow, white, puff, puff, puff. The Niagara Falls and a gush of white sparks.

Then, in sudden fury, a dazzling display of sizzling comets and aerial bombs and star clusters that arched high, hung for a full breath and descended in a cascade of sparks that floated harmlessly over the meadows and cornfields. At the end, the flag – red, white and blue – would burst forth on the ground as the All-American finale in the darkest of the dark summer nights. On cue, the cheers rolled out from the grandstand and the cars honked from the high ground and the people trundled up their lawn chairs and everybody headed for home.

Well, I live in San Francisco now, and I drive to Daly City with my son, Danny, to buy some anemic stuff in gaudy yellow and blue wrapping and I try unsuccessfully each year to get through the fog or the traffic to see the fireworks at Candlestick. But I feel better knowing that, back where I come from, everybody in town will be on their porches and on the backroads on the evening of the Fourth to watch the fireworks and that, somewhere in town, a little boy will put a big firecracker under a tin can on a wood porch, then light out for the lilacs behind the barn.

P.S. Our family moved in l965 from Daly City to a house in the West Portal area of San Francisco. There are, I assure you, few visible fireworks in that neighborhood. However, down at the bottom of Potrero Hill, the professional and amateur action is spectacular on the evening of the Fourth of July.

From any Potrero Hill height, you can see the fireworks in several directions: the waterfront fireworks in the city, fireworks on the Marin side of the Golden Gate bridge, fireworks at several points in the East Bay, fireworks along the Peninsula coast line.

And for the amateur action, parents with kids, kids of all ages, spectators in cars and on foot, congregate after dusk along Terry Francois Boulevard in San Francisco along the shoreline between the Giants ballpark and the  Mission Rock restaurant.

The action is informal but fiery, fast, and furious: cherry bombs, clusters, spinning wheels, high flying arcs, whizzers of all shapes and sizes. The cops are quite civilized and gingerly patrol the perimeter but don't bother anybody. I go every year. I think it's the best show in town. B3.

8 Washington opponents try to torpedo counter-initiative

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You sir are hereby accused of circulating a petition with fatal legal flaws!
ED SCHIPUL VIA FLICKR

Opponents of 8 Washington, a hotly contested development project that would erect 134 new condos priced at $5 million apiece and up along the San Francisco waterfront, are seeking to thwart a counter-initiative developers have launched to solicit voter approval for the project on the November ballot.

In a July 1 letter from The Sutton Law Firm to Hanson Bridgett LLP, a firm representing the project proponents, political lawyer and fixer Jim Sutton highlights “fatal legal flaws” he claims would invalidate each and every signature collected in support of the 8 Washington initiative. It’s likely a precursor to a lawsuit. Apparently, Sutton got involved through his connection with former City Attorney Louise Renne, who opposes the 8 Washington plan.

Organized under No Wall on the Northeast Waterfront, opponents circulated petitions of their own earlier this year to challenge San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ approval of 8 Washington, asking voters to weigh in on the Board’s waiver of building height limit restrictions. Polling has indicated they'll succeed (a win in their case is a majority of “no” votes), effectively sinking the project. That prompted 8 Washington proponents to generate their own counter-initiative.

Sutton’s letter demands that 8 Washington proponents not submit the initiative to the Department of Elections for signature verification, unless they first re-circulate the petitions. Of course, that would torpedo the whole endeavor, since there’s no way proponents could gather enough signatures in time for the imminent filing deadline.

The aforementioned “fatal legal flaws,” meanwhile, seem to illustrate why high-powered attorneys like Sutton rake in the big bucks. Apparently, the initiative proponents neglected to attach a few maps detailing the height limit increases, in violation of a requirement that proponents present the “full text” of a proposal to voters. And then there’s this:

Whether it’s a photocopying error or an attempt at obfuscation, the map on the left (circulated by the pro-development camp) makes it impossible to read the height limit increase. (The map on the right was circulated by opponents.) This seemingly minute detail matters, according to No Wall on the Northeast Waterfront spokesperson Jon Golinger, because “the whole point of this is the height increase.”

David Beltran, a spokesperson for the pro- 8 Washington folks, responded to a Guardian request for comment by saying, “Our opponents are offering up yet another baseless claim.” He called it a distraction “from having to justify why they are asking our City to give up new parks, jobs, and housing and millions of dollars in city benefits that includes $11 million for new affordable housing—to protect an asphalt parking lot and private club,” referencing a recreational center that’s served a predominantly middle class clientele for years that would be razed to make way for 8 Washington.

Beltran also attached a complaint Hanson Bridgett had filed with the San Francisco Ethics Commission, charging that No Wall on the Northeast Waterfront had failed to meet campaign filing deadlines, and urging city officials to “immediately investigate the delay” and impose fines of $5,000 per violation.

Celebrating independence, embracing wage slavery

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America, fuck yeah!

On the eve of Independence Day, too many San Franciscans seem eager to give up on the very idea of independence, instead willingly buying into the divide and conquer strategies of those who seek to control and exploit us. Just consider the big news of the day.

On Day Three of the BART strike, mainstream and social media are once again awash with angry anti-union diatribes by people who are resentful of the fact that some workers in this society still manage to earn the pensions and decent salaries that most of us wage slaves are being denied.

Pensions are the one thing that allows the working class some degree of independence during its twilight years. And the average BART salary of $72,000 annually shouldn’t be considered excessive in an expensive city that will chew up at least a third of that in housing costs.

But they are each more than most of us are getting, so it’s easy to turn many people against their fellow workers, even though the real targets of our ire should be the bosses and economic system that are denying us our independence and the means to pursue our happiness.

It’s a similar story with the breaking news of the day: City College of San Francisco losing its accreditation and being turned over to state control. While there are some reasons to criticize how this important institution has been managed over the years, it was still being managed by locally elected trustees who made the best decisions they could under bad circumstances.

They made decisions to maintain a broad-based curriculum that this community wanted and needed, and to avoid exploiting the faculty like so many other educational institutions are doing, in the process taking a gamble with lower reserves than may be needed. And the voters of San Francisco stepped up to support CCSF with a parcel tax that was helping to ease it away from the brink, acting as a proud and independent community does during troubled times.

But a commission of unelected bureaucrats on a ideological mission to transform educational institutions into something less than the broad-based community resources that CCSF has strived to be decided to make an example of San Francisco. And they did so with the full support of Mayor Ed Lee, who issued a statement today criticizing local officials for not embracing even harsher austerity measures than they did, and saying “I fully support” the state takeover.

Lee’s hand-picked panel recommending reforms of the Housing Authority is also proposing to sacrifice the independence of poor San Franciscans in favor of ever-more subsidies to real estate developers, according to a story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Among the “reforms” is a proposal to divert federal money from the Section 8 program that offers rent-subsidies to the poor, as Chron reporter John Cote described like this: “A terribly run program that provides low-income residents with vouchers for private housing would be administered by the city, rather than the federally funded public housing agency. The vouchers would be prioritized for certain affordable housing projects, creating dedicated revenue to help secure loans to build them.”

So the vouchers that allow low-income people some independence -- rather than living in squalid, chronically mismanaged public housing projects in San Francisco -- will instead subsidize development projects. Yes, we do need to subsidize affordable housing development, which this city is underfunding, but we shouldn’t be taking the meager resources of society’s least fortunate families to do so.  

I have no doubts that Lee will jump at this suggestion (although its unlikely to be so eagerly embraced by federal regulators at HUD) given his penchant for shady real estate schemes that line the pockets of the powerful, like the one that the Center for Investigative Reporting uncovered this week.

CIR reported that the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Center -- a for-profit company connected to Willie Brown that is arranging immigration visas for Chinese nationals who invest in Lennar’s Hunters Point housing development -- is getting key help from Lee and members of his staff.

This project was already looking like a bait-and-switch scam, as we also reported this week, with Lennar being guaranteed profits without even putting up its own money, thanks to Lee’s willingness to use the power of his office to solicit funds on behalf of the country’s biggest residential developer.

If Lennar wasn’t going to build the affordable housing we need on the front end, or put up the money itself, why didn’t the city just administer this project and give the work to local contractors? What exactly is this Florida-based corporation doing in exchange for being handed some of the most valuable real estate in the city, except for helping its powerful local friends who pulled strings on its behalf?

What’s motivating Lee these days? Well, considering that Brown and other power brokers placed him in the Mayor’s Office after a career at City Hall doing their bidding -- a role he seems to be still playing today in his powerful new role -- I’d say it was a lack of independence.

It’s all pretty depressing, but at least we have a holiday tomorrow to celebrate our independence. Happy Fourth of July, comrades.  

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