Still no plan

There’s still no plan for how the city hopes to deal with Halloween in the Castro. It’s like watching a train wreck, in slow motion. You know it’s going to be mayhem, yet you can’t help but watch the disaster unfold.

The privatization of war, part 4 (Foreign policy, privatized)

Here’s a reprint, in full, from the New York Times. You might be asked to subscribe if you click on the link. The accompanying graphic is excellent.

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Foreign Policy, Privatized
By ALLISON STANGER and OMNIVORE
Published: October 5, 2007

WHILE most Americans are aware of the controversy over the role of the private security company Blackwater in Iraq, probably few understand that armed contractors in Iraq are just the tip of an iceberg. Across the globe, in everything from diplomacy to development to intelligence, contractors are a major American presence, and only a small fraction of them carry weapons. American foreign policy, to a great extent, has been privatized.

The charts below, based on figures from the Federal Procurement Data System, tell the story. In 2005, federally financed contractors were working in every United Nations-recognized country except Bhutan, Nauru and San Marino.

It has become conventional wisdom to blame the Bush administration for the “hollowing out” of government, but this misses the mark. While contract spending has more than doubled since 2001, serious federal efforts to outsource began under President Bill Clinton.

Nor is contracting necessarily bad: United States money creates jobs for the local population, and humanitarian organizations like Save the Children, CARE and Catholic Relief Services have relied heavily on dollars from Washington. Outsourcing can play to America’s strengths, exploiting our capacity for innovation, flexibility and efficiency.

Yes, as we have seen in Iraq, hiring contractors can lead to severe problems with accountability and fraud. And while steps like making contractors liable for civil penalties may manage some symptoms, they will not cure the disease. We need to devise far better ways of overseeing contractors worldwide.

Some are tempted to turn back the clock and reassert traditional government authority, denouncing private-sector greed and the “coalition of the billing.” But that would be a terrible mistake, for outsourcing is in part a rational response to the new possibilities of the information age. The challenge will be to manage creative forms of collaboration between government and the private sector in ways that serve the public interest.

Allison Stanger, a professor of political science at Middlebury College, is writing a book on the privatization of American power. Omnivore is a graphic design firm in New York City.

The privatization of war, part 3.9 (Blackwater aids terrorists)

In one of the more amazing stories to date, Blackwater is being investigated by Federal prosecutors for illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq that may have been sold on the black market and then wound up in the hands of terrorists. So, there’s a distinct possibility that, when Blackwater contractors are under attack in Iraq, they’re being fired upon with their own weapons. You can’t make this stuff up!

The privatization of war, part 3.7 (Business as usual)

This should come as no surprise, but Blackwater is back at work in Iraq. The US government is allowing Blackwater operations “limited to essential missions only outside Baghdad’s heavily-fortified Green Zone.” This is being done in consultation with the Iraqi government, according to the BBC. Wonder who and how much the US had to bribe to get this deal?

Saving Halloween in the Castro

A community group, Citizens for Halloween, is attempting to save the Castro Halloween party both from Mayor Gavin Newsom and from a potential riot. For further info, check the above website, or come to the C4H meeting this Saturday, September 22, at 1 pm, in the Eureka Valley Recreation Center, 100 Collingwood St.

The privatization of war, part 3.5 (CIA shut down in Iraq)

Movements of key CIA station personnel in Baghdad—along with most State department diplomats and teams building police stations and schools—have been frozen for the second day in a row, according to a State department source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Essentially, the CIA, State department and government contractors are stuck inside the International Zone, also known as “the Green Zone,” in Central Baghdad. Even travel inside that walled enclave is somewhat restricted.

So reads an article by Richard Miniter on Pajamasmedia.com. Apparently, the CIA, State Department, and government contractors all rely on Blackwater for security.

“By jamming up Blackwater, they [the Iraqi government] shut down the movements of the embassy and the [CIA] station,” a State department source told Pajamas Media. He is not cleared to talk to the press. 

The privatization of war, part 3.2 (Blackwater banned)

The Iraqi government has suspended Blackwater’s license to operate, and demanded that the company leave the country, as a result of a firefight in which several civilians and a police officer were killed (story here). Blackwater contractors (read mercenaries) were protecting a convoy of US State Department officials when they supposedly came under attack and, according to the Iraqis, started firing indiscrimately at surrounding civilians. The Iraqi government has said it is considering prosecuting Blackwater employees for the deaths, and that it will review the status of all Private Security Firms in the country as a result of the incident. Here’s a profile of Blackwater from the BBC.

Recipe for disaster or party organizing opportunity

This report in the SF Chronicle details the ongoing trainwreck of city government efforts to deal with the infamous Halloween party in the Castro. After last year’s shootings and stabbing, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Supervisor Bevan Dufty promised to convene a task force to look into how to make the Castro party safer this year. But the task force never met because the consensus in city government was to cancel the event altogether. Then, an effort was made to set up a diversionary event on the waterfront to draw people away from the Castro and give them a party to go to on Halloween. The promoter for that event cancelled however, and now the city insists that there will be no Halloween party in the Castro, and no alternative party anywhere else.

The problem with this, of course, is that people are going to show up in the Castro on Halloween anyway. Many of those who attend might even be a little pissed off at Newsom’s and Dufty’s bad faith in all of this. The police won’t block off the streets or provide porta-potties for the Halloween party, but that won’t stop thousands of people from showing up and taking over the streets. The perfect scenario for a riot.

I propose that people consider this the perfect opportunity to organize Halloween in the Castro against the wishes of San Francisco’s city government instead. Here’s how it could be done:

1) Get together all the pro-party/pro-entertainment forces in the city, from folks like SF Party Party to promoters of other SF events shut down or hassled by the city (How Weird Street Fair, Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, etc.) to like-minded individuals and organizations in the LGBT community. Put together a statement openly defying Newsom and Dufty that calls for people to come to the Castro on Halloween to celebrate. Publicize this statement, and the ongoing debate about Halloween in the Castro, in sympathetic local media like the SF Bay Guardian. Maybe get a few of the mayoral candidates (Josh Wolf, Chicken John, Chris Daly) to endorse the statement.

2) Organize outreach to businesses in the Castro asking them to defy Newsom and Dufty, and to stay open late on Halloween. Reward them with increased patronage before, during, and after Halloween.

3) Use sympathetic local media, email, websites, word-of-mouth, etc. to publicize that there will indeed be a party on Halloween in the Castro, and give those who wish to attend suggestions on how to deal with problems, to include gang and police violence.

4) Ask for volunteers to help with security on Halloween, then have a number of training sessions to organize and prepare these volunteers. Give them something distinctive to wear, and make sure they can cope, not just with crowd problems, but with a potentially hostile police force.

5) Organize alternative entertainment for Halloween in the Castro. This might require highly mobile, guerrilla events that stay one step ahead of the police. It also might involve enlisting willing local merchants to provide venues for acts and events. From portable streetcorner stages to roving DJs, all of this entertainment will be strictly DIY.

The only way people are going to be able to save Halloween in the Castro is to take it away from SF city officials and the SFPD and run it themselves.

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PS — Here’s SF Party Party’s take on Newsom cancelling Halloween in the Castro. A touch rabid, but a voice worth listening to nevertheless.

City living

I couldn’t have said this better myself. You can find the original commentary here in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

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CITY LIVING

By Steven Jones

City living isn’t for everyone. It gets messy, crowded, stinky, loud, scary, and downright weird. Sometimes people block your car even when you have a green light and pound their fists on your hood if you honk. They wear outrageous costumes, play silly games, and follow ridiculous trends. They yell and laugh too loud right outside your window when you’re trying to sleep. Occasionally they pee in your doorway, graffiti your wall, grab your ass, or barf on your shoes.

But that’s city living, and I love it.

If you want clean and orderly, there are plenty of small towns and suburbs to choose from. You can probably even get front and back yards and a roomy house big enough for 2.5 children and assorted pets for what you’re paying for your apartment here. Tempting? Then you should do it. Really. We’ll all be very supportive of your decision to leave if it comes to that, no hard feelings. I might even help you pack and find a new occupant for your place.

But if you want to shut down our party or expect us to dance around your delicate sensibilities, we’re gonna have to fight. And guess what? We’ll win. There are more of us in this crazy town than there are of you … and we aren’t afraid. We dodge SUVs on bicycles, brush past ranting lunatics, stand tall against cops in riot gear, pierce painful parts, bring strange people home to do unspeakable things, cavort with revolutionaries, and take way too many drugs. So there’s no way we’re caving in to the NIMBYs, the conservatives, or the complainers who want to banish our beloved chaos.

The Guardian has long embraced true city living, from the Summer of Love and its hordes of hippies to the summer of 2007, when our glorious urban messiness is being threatened by the forces of gentrification, corporatization, homogenization, normalization, and stagnation. Once-radical neighborhoods like the Castro and the Haight are increasingly filled with aging homeowners, some of whom have grown frustrated with aspects of city living they once embraced.

Increasingly, however, these tragic naysayers are being confronted by groups such as the San Francisco Party Party, which was created to oppose the forces that are suburbanizing our great city. Last Halloween I donned a beard and stovepipe hat and joined the Party Party’s Abe Lincoln brigades as they cruised the Castro. Why Abe? Why not? Two dozen Abes strolled past the phalanxes of cops on overtime whose presence the nervous Nellies had urged (and who couldn’t stop violence from breaking out anyway), whooping it up until the party was shut down at the ridiculously early hour of 10:30 p.m. and city water trucks chased the partyers away, a sight that almost made us weep – and provoked the crowd into a state of restless frustration.

City living is about keeping the party going, not ending it. It’s a massive pillow fight in Justin Herman Plaza. It’s placing your body and bike in front of the angry guy in the Hummer who wants to cut through Critical Mass. It’s the drunken decision to get another tattoo or the hungry impulse to try an unfamiliar taquería. It’s wearing a chicken suit to confront a cowardly mayor. It’s watching Willy Wonka or the World Cup on massive screens in Dolores Park that somebody set up just because they thought it would be cool. It’s a bonfire on Ocean Beach, a blog argument over the latest city hall scandal, a giant purple head suddenly appearing in Golden Gate Park, street dancing at the late, lamented How Weird Street Faire, a bunch of wasted Santas bar crawling through North Beach, a sunny afternoon at Zeitgeist, a shopping trip to the Haight for a good pair of Burning Man goggles.

Or maybe for you it’s something else, something I’ve never thought or heard of, just some eccentric thing you and your freaky friends like to do. San Francisco has thousands of dynamic social pockets, big and small, each with its own passions, routines, and language. And not all civically spirited events are exotic, either. I’ve felt the abstract joy of the Bay descend during the most pedestrian of tasks, like when this great old guy in the Mission fixed the loose soles on my combat boots (bought used on Haight for $20 a few months ago and walked down many wild paths since) and made me a new key for my dog walker, a woman whose control over a large and combustible crew of canines borders on the miraculous.

Whatever our ideas of city living may be, there’s a reason we’re all living in the city, making San Francisco what it is. Some of the corporate-owned publications in town seem to enjoy mocking the free-living, forward-thinking sensibilities we embrace, dismissively deploying their “only in San Francisco” eye roll or casting progressives as somehow floating outside the country’s political spectrum.

Don’t let them put a ding in your wa, as my DJ friend Syd Gris likes to say. We know that it’s the rest of the country that’s the problem, not us. Luckily, there are a million things to do in this beautiful and bountiful city while we wait for the rest of the world to catch up

Old Blue Eyes is gone

photo: © kay taneyhill

I had to put down Archy, my cat, yesterday. For the past two weeks I’ve been dealing with his steadily deteriorating health, all the while contemplating having to end his life. I’ve been extremely sad, and a little depressed, because of this. Needless to say, I haven’t been in the mood to blog.

I had Archy for thirteen years. He was a rescue cat, abandoned in a dumpster, probably because he wasn’t pure Siamese. As the above photo reveals, he had the bluest eyes, yet wasn’t deaf as are most blue-eyed cats. I named him after the cockroach archy in Don Marquis’s archy and mehitabel.

Archy was a grouchy cat to almost everyone except me. I knew him as affectionate, playful, and downright cuddly. He was a complete lap cat, though he didn’t like to have his belly touched. My wife got to know him over the past five years and was able to see his sweet side.

He was fascinated with my wife’s cat — now an eighteen-year-old female long-haired orange tabby named Daisy — when we moved in together. Archy was always trying to make friends and play with Daisy, but she would have none of it. No doubt, it was one his great disappointments in life.

Archy got to be over twenty pounds, and became diabetic about four years ago. The diabetes contributed to neuropathy in his hind legs, which only got worse over the years. In addition, he had a deteriorated disc in his spine that also made it difficult for him to walk. And, he had severe constipation. He was on a half dozen medications toward the end of his life, none of which seemed to do much to improve his condition. His diabetes, in particular, was never fully regulated. He had a couple of sugar crises as one type of insulin after another became ineffective in treating his diabetes.

About nine months ago, Archy found it harder and harder to have a bowel movement in the litter box. He just didn’t have the strength in his back legs to support himself, and so had to lie down on his side on the carpet to take a shit. I bought a large cage for him, outfitting it with a litter box, a place for food and water complete with carpet samples, and a bed on a perch. I put him in the cage at night, and when we were away and couldn’t watch him. For a while, the cage forced him to use the litter box, but only for a while. Soon, he was shitting on the rug samples. Then he started urinating more and more outside the litter box, finding it harder and harder to stand to take a pee. He used the bottom of his cage, and for the last two weeks the carpet samples, and often Archy himself, would be covered in excrement.

That cats are such incredibly fastidious animals only made it worse. His quality of life was approaching nil, so the decision to end his life, while difficult, was inevitable. I didn’t want him to kick it all terrified in a veterinary clinic, so I had the Vet on Wheels euthanize him at home. With my wife and I holding him. As I said, that was yesterday, and I dismantled his cage that evening.

I’m sad and grieving and a bit relieved at the same time. Unlike humans, animals are unconditional in their love for their people, yet care giving for a sick animal is very stressful. I will miss my little companion deeply. At the same time, Archy no longer has to suffer the pain and indignities of his various illnesses.

Goodbye, my sweet boy.

Coyote ugly

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Personal issues got the better of my time, but now I’m back with a followup to the shooting of two coyotes in Golden Gate Park. All the stories come from the San Francisco Chronicle.

First, there’s this about the fact that city dwellers often must share their urban space with a lot of wildlife, not just coyotes but raccoons, skunks, squirrels, bats, opossums, foxes, etc. Frequently, there are clashes between this vestigial wildlife that’s just trying to survive, and the humans who presume to have dominion over everything. Needless to say, the wildlife loses out most of the time.

Then, there’s this story that coyotes get underfoot in many urban settings, from southern California to Chicago, and not just San Francisco. An interesting side story is that the supposedly wild geese around Oakland’s Lake Merritt have become such a nuisance, or to be exact, their shit has become such a health hazard, that city officials are looking for ways to control the birds, to include importing coyotes as predators.

SF Animal Control officials speculate that the Golden Gate Park coyotes that supposedly attacked two leashed dogs were being regularly fed raw meat by humans, in violation of park regulations. The regular feedings made them more aggressive, it is claimed. Finally, a female coyote pup was found dead, apparently run over by a car, near where the two other coyotes were shot and killed. This seems to support the claim by pro-coyote folks that the two coyotes that were shot were simply protecting their young.

Coyote killings defended

The followup story in the Chronicle about the killing of two coyotes in Golden Gate Park. The comments are also worth reading, including one from Peter Coyote.

The privatization of war, part 3

Here’s a collection of recent articles and stories, all on private contractors becoming more prominent in Iraq as that war is progressively privatized.

First off is an On The Media radio story, “Have Gun Will Travel,” that comes with four related newspaper articles.

Then there is this quite extensive Christian Science Monitor story, “Silent surge in contractor ‘armies’” by Brad Knickerbocker, about private contractors in Iraq, and how their role will likely grow more prominent as the US draws down its troops.

Finally, The Monthly Review offers a very long Marxist analysis by James M. Cypher of the privatization of the US military that sees it as part of the shift from Keynesianism to Global Neoliberalism in the US economy.

Urban coyote saga continues

A pair of coyotes in Golden Gate Park attacked two leashed dogs on Saturday. Today, US Department of Agriculture officials shot and killed the two coyotes. “City officials and wildlife researchers estimate that about five to eight coyotes live in San Francisco. These include at least two in Golden Gate Park and one on Bernal Hill. There have also been sightings in McLaren Park, Lake Merced and the Presidio.”

Scratch two from Golden Gate Park, which means three to six city wide.

Neva again!

One of the few reasons to pick up and read the San Francisco Chronicle, Neva Chonin’s column “Live! Rude! Girl!”, is no more. Her last column appeared in yesterday’s Pink Section. The Chron is currently losing $50 million a year, and is in the process of axing 25% of its staff. There won’t be much left of the print edition once the cuts have gone through, and speculation is rife (here and here) that the Chron will stop printing altogether, and rely solely on its web page. Neva can be found on myspace, here.

Radical news

IndyMedia is touted as a good source for radical news. I find it inconsistent in quality and coverage. Its attempt to cover the laundry list of leftist causes and categories often makes it unwieldy and not very relevant. The regionally-based IndyMedias occasionally yield useful local news, but suffer from the same problems as the umbrella site. For my money, and my interests, LibCom’s news is first rate. It has a very strong labor component, and seems to be updated quite frequently.

Surprises from the government

So, I went to the PO Box today, and had a rather large envelope from the Department of the Army. Seems that a parcel of high desert land near Victorville that my parents purchased in the 1960s, and which I inherited after they died, “may be located on the former Victorville PBR no. 3 Target Area and Buffer Zone.” They want my permission to enter the property and search for unexploded munitions.

Cute.

Of course, I intend to give them my permission. If I had the energy and outrage however, I’d surely like to find out how the fuck my parents purchased land in a military weapons testing range. Incredible.

PS — Here’s a link to a Sacramento Bee database of California’s former defense sites.

Chicken John for Mayor

 

Here’s the SF Chronicle’s story on Chicken John’s bid for the mayor of San Francisco. It also mentions other “fringe” candidate like Josh Wolf. I didn’t knew that, because of Jello Biafra’s run for mayor in 1979, Chicken John will have to use his real name, John Rivaldi, on the ballot.

New Deal in the East Bay

I’m often stunned by the turn to the right that politics in this country has taken in the last twenty-five years. And I lived through Nixon’s presidency. It’s been said that Richard Nixon was our last great liberal president, in that he still had a fundamental commitment to the policies and principles of the New Deal. The turn to the right I’m talking about is the one that began with Ronald Reagan, a turn away from the New Deal and all it represented in government planning and intervention, towards the fool’s paradise of free markets. The social infrastructure of the country has been deliberately underfunded and allowed to crumble, providing the justification for increased privatization of social services and government functions. So successful has this conservative counterrevolution been, there are proposals to replace Franklin Roosevelt’s portrait on the dime with that of Ronald Reagan.

Which brings me to this story in the Berkeley Daily Planet, about the not-so-hidden New Deal legacy to be found in the East Bay.

A recent wedding party at the Berkeley Rose Garden, one of the many local New Deal projects. Photograph by Gray Brechin.

Mayor Josh Wolf?

Josh Wolf, the journalist who refused to hand over DVR outtakes of a 2005 anti-G8 riot in SF to a grand jury and was jailed for his efforts, announced on July 4 that he’s running for mayor. He attended the Progressive Convention last month and was apparently dismayed that no major SF progressive stepped forward to take on Gavin Newsom. Without further comment, here is his platform:

1) Open Government: As mayor I will wear a mounted streaming camera while working on all official business so that the public can take part in a truly open and transparent government. It may be possible that city codes dictate that certain meetings be confidential, in which case I will have a notice posted explaining why I am offline.

2) Crime: The homicide rate in San Francisco is out of control, and the Board’s plan for neighborhood policing is vital towards staving off this deplorable trend. I would like to adopt the Board’s plan and will work to expand it further to make foot patrols the dominant form of policing in the city and county of San Francisco.

3) Homelessness: There are far too many people in this city living without permanent shelter and something must be done to support these residents as they struggle to put their lives back together. As mayor I will work to develop a series of city beautification and beatification programs which will provide employment for those able to work. Unfortunately some significant portion of the homeless population is not physically or psychologically fit to join the work force, and I will be calling for the scores of homeless support organizations in San Francisco to join me and The City for a caucus to discuss how we can best work together to solve homelessness in San Francisco.

4) Public Transportation: Muni needs to be free for city residents, and I would like to see it free for visitors as well. I will look into passing on the additional cost to downtown business interests as well as exploring possible approaches towards taxing those who elect to use automobiles in The City. This could be done by establishing a fee for driving into the city or perhaps attaching fees to all vehicles registered within San Francisco.

5) Federal Funding: I will work to establish a ten-year plan to sever all federal funding from the city budget. While this is obviously an economically uncertain approach, the federal government’s money creates an unfortunate means for the Feds to intervene in all sorts of city business. My own incarceration is one such example, but far more pressing concerns include the mandates established under No Child Left Behind.

6) Gay Marriage: It is a shame that San Francisco is no longer offering marriage license’s to gay and lesbian couples. I propose that San Francisco look into offering a county marriage license to supplement the state documents The City now provides. Although the state of California refuses to support and honor gay marriage, the city and county of San Francisco should provide a way for people who love each other to formalize that love through marriage.

7) Medicinal Marijuana: The people of San Francisco have come out in support of medicinal marijuana in previous elections and it is of critical importance that The City continue to respect the voters’ wishes. San Francisco must make every effort to prevent Federal Law enforcement from interfering with state and local law and work to stop the harassment and intimidation of patients, their caregivers, and the dispensaries that serve our community.

8 ) Biking: I will partner with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition to see that bike lanes are constructed on all major traffic thoroughfares.

9) Halloween: The annual Castro celebration has grown too large to safely accommodate the partygoers who gather each year. I will propose a plan to encourage every neighborhood that’s interested to host their own Halloween celebration. Doing so will decrease the massive crowds in the Castro and allow each neighborhood to develop an event that fits its own character. While this approach will certainly increase the demand on police resources I am convinced that it will actually result in safer and more enjoyable revelry for all.

10) Independence: As an avid supporter of a free and independent San Francisco, I will introduce a city ballot measure to provide an opportunity for the people of San Francisco to attain city sovereignty which I hope to derive from the ballot measure I helped draft three years ago. The residents of our city have united around at least three issues that are in direct contradiction with US policy (Iraq, gay marriage, and medical marijuana) and we should be given the opportunity to divorce ourselves from federal intervention on these and other issues of vital importance to our community.

His blog can be found here.

State of retail music

Here’s an article on the state of the retail music industry, from Tower to HMV. The sub-theme is about how very small retail stores can survive by exploiting a niche market or remaining on the avant garde of a particular musical genre. It’s from The Guardian (7-6-07).

To quote: “These days, a small independent store dabbling in anything remotely mainstream would be commercial suicide…”

San Francisco Mime Troupe, LaborFest announcements

The San Francisco Mime Troupe always begins its new season on July 4. The schedule for the current play, “Making a Killing,” can be found here.

The LaborFest film series begins today. An annual labor cultural, film and arts festival, the schedule can be found here.

The privatization of war, part 2

I’m reprinting this article from the LA Times in its entirety, because it’s that revealing. The online version makes you register. It can be read on the Common Dreams website here.

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Published on Wednesday, July 4, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times
Private Contractors Outnumber US Troops in Iraq
by T. Christian Miller

The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government’s capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns.

More than 180,000 civilians – including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis – are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Including the recent troop buildup, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq.

The total number of private contractors, far higher than previously reported, shows how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of Iraq – a mission criticized as being undermanned.

“These numbers are big,” said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written on military contracting. “They illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops. This is not the coalition of the willing. It’s the coalition of the billing.”

The numbers include at least 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreign contractors and about 118,000 Iraqis – all employed in Iraq by U.S. tax dollars, according to the most recent government data.

The array of private workers promises to be a factor in debates on a range of policy issues, including the privatization of military jobs and the number of Iraqi refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S.

But there are also signs that even those mounting numbers may not capture the full picture. Private security contractors, who are hired to protect government officials and buildings, were not fully counted in the survey, according to industry and government officials.

Continuing uncertainty over the numbers of armed contractors drew special criticism from military experts.

“We don’t have control of all the coalition guns in Iraq. That’s dangerous for our country,” said William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert. The Pentagon “is hiring guns. You can rationalize it all you want, but that’s obscene.”

Although private companies have played a role in conflicts since the American Revolution, the U.S. has relied more on contractors in Iraq than in any other war, according to military experts.

Contractors perform functions including construction, security and weapons system maintenance.

Military officials say contractors cut costs while allowing troops to focus on fighting rather than on other tasks.

“The only reason we have contractors is to support the war fighter,” said Gary Motsek, the assistant deputy undersecretary of Defense who oversees contractors. “Fundamentally, they’re supporting the mission as required.”

But critics worry that troops and their missions could be jeopardized if contractors, functioning outside the military’s command and control, refuse to make deliveries of vital supplies under fire.

At one point in 2004, for example, U.S. forces were put on food rations when drivers balked at taking supplies into a combat zone.

Adding an element of potential confusion, no single agency keeps track of the number or location of contractors.

In response to demands from Congress, the U.S. Central Command began a census last year of the number of contractors working on U.S. and Iraqi bases to determine how much food, water and shelter was needed.

That census, provided to The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, shows about 130,000 contractors and subcontractors of different nationalities working at U.S. and Iraqi military bases.

However, U.S. military officials acknowledged that the census did not include other government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department.

Last month, USAID reported about 53,000 Iraqis employed under U.S. reconstruction contracts, doing jobs such as garbage pickup and helping to teach democracy. In interviews, agency officials said an additional 300 Americans and foreigners worked as contractors for the agency.

State Department officials said they could not provide the department’s number of contractors. Of about 5,000 people affiliated with the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, about 300 are State Department employees. The rest are a mix of other government agency workers and contractors, many of whom are building the new embassy.

“There are very few of us, and we’re way undermanned,” said one State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We have significant shortages of people. It’s been that way since before [the war], and it’s still that way.”

The companies with the largest number of employees are foreign firms in the Middle East that subcontract to KBR, the Houston-based oil services company, according to the Central Command database. KBR, once a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., provides logistics support to troops, the single largest contract in Iraq.

Middle Eastern companies, including Kulak Construction Co. of Turkey and Projects International of Dubai, supply labor from Third World countries to KBR and other U.S. companies for menial work on U.S. bases and rebuilding projects. Foreigners are used instead of Iraqis because of fears that insurgents could infiltrate projects.

KBR is by far the largest employer of Americans, with nearly 14,000 U.S. workers. Other large employers of Americans in Iraq include New York-based L-3 Communications, which holds a contract to provide translators to troops, and ITT Corp., a New York engineering and technology firm.

The most controversial contractors are those working for private security companies, including Blackwater, Triple Canopy and Erinys. They guard sensitive sites and provide protection to U.S. and Iraqi government officials and businessmen.

Security contractors draw some of the sharpest criticism, much of it from military policy experts who say their jobs should be done by the military. On several occasions, heavily armed private contractors have engaged in firefights when attacked by Iraqi insurgents.

Others worry that the private security contractors lack accountability. Although scores of troops have been prosecuted for serious crimes, only a handful of private security contractors have faced legal charges.

The number of private security contractors in Iraq remains unclear, despite Central Command’s latest census. The Times identified 21 security companies in the Central Command database, deploying 10,800 men.

However, the Defense Department’s Motsek, who monitors contractors, said the Pentagon estimated the total was 6,000.

Both figures are far below the private security industry’s own estimate of about 30,000 private security contractors working for government agencies, nonprofit organizations, media outlets and businesses.

Industry officials said that private security companies helped reduce the number of troops needed in Iraq and provided jobs to Iraqis – a benefit in a country with high unemployment.

“A guy who is working for a [private security company] is not out on the street doing something inimical to our interests,” said Lawrence Peter, director of the Private Security Company Assn. of Iraq.

Not surprisingly, Iraqis make up the largest number of civilian employees under U.S. contracts. Typically, the government contracts with an American firm, which then subcontracts with an Iraqi firm to do the job.

Stan Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, a contractors’ trade group, said the number of Iraqis reflected the importance of the reconstruction and economic development efforts to the overall U.S. mission in Iraq.

“That’s not work that the government does or has ever done…. That’s work that is going to be done by companies and to some extent by” nongovernmental organizations, Soloway said. “People tend to think that these are contractors on the battlefield, and they’re not.”

The Iraqis have been the most difficult to track. As recently as May, the Pentagon told Congress that 22,000 Iraqis were employed by its contractors. But the Pentagon number recently jumped to 65,000 – a result of closer inspection of contracts, an official said.

The total number of Iraqis employed under U.S. contracts is important, in part because it may influence debate in Congress regarding how many Iraqis will be allowed to come to the U.S. to escape violence in their homeland.

This year, the U.S. planned to cap that number at 7,000 a year. To date, however, only a few dozen Iraqis have been admitted, according to State Department figures.

Kirk Johnson, head of the List Project, which seeks to increase the admission of Iraqis, said that the U.S. needed to provide a haven to those who worked most closely with American officials.

“We all say we are grateful to these Iraqis,” Johnson said. “How can we be the only superpower in the world that can’t implement what we recognize as a moral imperative?”

The back story

Information in this article is based in part on a database of contractors in Iraq obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows the public access to government records.

The database is the result of a census conducted earlier this year by the U.S. Central Command.

The census found about 130,000 contractors working for 632 companies holding contracts in Iraq with the Defense Department and a handful of other federal agencies.

The Times received the database last month, four months after first requesting it. Because the Freedom of Information Act law requires an agency to provide only information as of the date of the request, the census is based on figures as of February. During interviews, Pentagon officials said the census had since been updated, and they provided additional figures based on the update.

Contractors in Iraq

There are more U.S.-paid private contractors than there are American combat troops in Iraq.

Contractors: 180,000

U.S. troops: 160,000

–

Nationality of contractors*

118,000 Iraqis

43,000 non-U.S. foreigners

21,000 Americans

–

Top contractors

Company: Kulak Construction Co.

Description: Based in Turkey, supplies construction workers to U.S. bases

Total employees: 30,301

–

Company: KBR

Description: Based in Houston, supplies logistics support to U.S. troops

Total employees: 15,336

–

Company: Prime Projects International

Description: Based in Dubai, supplies labor for logistics support

Total employees: 10,560

–

Company: L-3 Communications

Description: Based in New York, provides translators and other services

Total employees: 5,886

–

Company: Gulf Catering Co.

Description: Based in Saudi Arabia, provides kitchen services to U.S. troops

Total employees: 4,002

–

Company: 77 Construction

Description: Based in Irbil, Iraq, provides logistics support to troops

Total employees: 3,219

–

Company: ECC

Description: Based in Burlingame, Calif, works on reconstruction projects

Total employees: 2,390

–

Company: Serka Group

Description: Based in Turkey, supplies logistics support to U.S. bases

Total employees: 2,250

–

Company: IPBD Ltd.

Description: Based in England, supplies labor, laundry services and other support

Total employees: 2,164

–

Company: Daoud & Partners Co.

Description: Based in Amman, Jordan, supplies labor for logistics support

Total employees: 2,092

–

Company: EOD Technology Inc

Description: Based in Lenoir City, Tenn., supplies security, explosives demolition and other services

Total employees: 1,913

–

Note: Data are as of February, which is most current available.

*Approximate – numbers rounded

Sources: U.S. Central Command, Times reporting

Paul Duginski Los Angeles Times

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

Giuliani time by the bay

After some thought, I don’t believe suburbanization is the right word for what Mayor Gavin Newsom has in mind for San Francisco. Newsom fancies himself a “new democrat,” someone who is moderate, centrist, and capable of creative solutions to social problems that are business-friendly at the same time. He has repeatedly cast his eyes toward New York City, and in particular, Giuliani’s time as its mayor. He has emulated NYC’s efforts to clean up Central Park with respect to problems in Golden Gate Park. Newsom has asked New York officials for advice on how to handle the homeless. And his latest idea has been to propose setting up special courts for “quality of life” crimes. Gavin Newsom wants to Giulianize San Francisco.

Newsom’s special courts idea has hit a snag with the SF Board of Supervisors. Board President Aaron Peskin reduced the proposed court’s budget from $750,000 to $500,000, then agreed with other supervisors on the Budget Committee to put the money on reserve. This has increased tensions between the Mayor’s office and the Board of Supervisors, as well as split the Mayor’s own people as to how to handle the Board.

That “quality of life” crimes are committed by folks with little quality of life should be apparent to all. There needs to be more of an effort to debunk the myths of Giulianism. Jennifer Roesch’s excellent piece “The Mussolini of Manhattan” is a start, as is Robert Lederman’s vendor and artist news from New York City. That Giuliani might be our next president scares the bejesus out of me.

Medea’s response to being pied

Medea’s response to being pied can be read here.

I find some of her statement, in particular the pop psychological stuff about the people who pied her being resentful and angry and not having the love of family and friends, to be a bit disingenuous. It’s a common ploy for defenders of the status quo to reduce youthful rebelliousness to a matter of hating one’s parents. Revolutionary socialism is thus dismissed as problems with authority that stem from the revolutionary’s family of origin, a smug Freudian put down that could apply to Medea as well as to those who pied her.

In turn, this is part of a broader critique of psychology and psychiatry as mechanisms to help fucked-up people fit into an even more fucked-up society. That’s the subject for a book, not a post. For the moment, I want to note that Medea’s dichotomy between resentment and anger on the one hand, and love and empowerment on the other hand, is extremely simplistic, and not very useful.

Or, to quote Johnny Lydon from the PiL song “Rise:” “Anger is an energy.”

You’ll get pie in the sky…

Medea Benjamin got pied yesterday at the United States Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia by the Bakers Without Borders and Co-optation Watch.

From Global Exchange to Code Pink, Medea Benjamin impresses me as a grandstander who, as the Bakers correctly point, acts “as self-appointed spokesperson of the ‘American Left’.” Whether she should have been pied is a different matter.

The incident certainly brought something to my attention that has corrected a false impression I had of Medea. Her infamous quote from Seattle 1999 ["Here we are protecting Nike, McDonald's, The Gap, and all the while I'm thinking, 'Where are the police? These anarchists should have been arrested.'] left the impression that she wanted all the black bloc anarchists tossed into jail. Benjamin’s statement from Z Magazine, as quoted in the comments section to the pie throwing piece, is worth reprinting.

“There has been some controversy about a quote from me that appeared in the New York Times Dec. 2. The quotation implied that I was calling for the arrest of those people who destroyed property in downtown Seattle during the WTO protest. I want to make it clear that the quote was distorted, taken out of context, and not reflective my true feelings. I did not call for the arrest of anyone, though I did point out the irony that the police were attacking nonviolent protesters while ignoring those destroying property. Do I wish the people causing the damage had been arrested? No. Would I have helped to get them out of jail if they had been? Yes. And I certainly apologize if the statement attributed to me has caused any harm to the anarchist community in general. Do I approve of the tactics that this particular group of self-described anarchists used in Seattle Nov. 30? Definitely not. That, not the distorted quote, is the real issue here. There are certainly occasions in which the destruction of property furthers the cause of social justice and helps garner public support, but this was not one of them. The Boston Tea Party is an example of the destruction of property a shipment of tea. When the Zapatistas rose up in 1994, they destroyed army posts and other symbols of a repressive state. Members of the religious community in the United States have destroyed weapons of mass destruction to express their profound moral opposition to war. And forest activists have destroyed the engines of bulldozers to prevent the clear-cutting of old-growth forests. “The list of tactically thoughtful and politically principled property destruction goes on and on. What these acts have in common is that they were the result of a long process of working with and gaining the support of the affected community. This was not the case in Seattle.”

– Medea Benjamin, Z Magazine

Fillmore Jazz Festival

We walked around the Fillmore Jazz Festival for several hours today. It’s still a lively, two day, twelve-block long party with at least three large, live stages, a half dozen corner venues like Marcus Books, lots of artist/merchant booths, plenty of unhealthy food, and beer and wine aflowing. The stores, restaurants, and bars along the street are brimming with customers, there’s a staggering amount of unsanctioned booze around in brown paper bags, and the friendly crowd is something rare for San Francisco — racially mixed.

I wonder what hoops the Festival organizers are jumping through to keep this tradition alive?

Latest British bombing attempts

Here’s a rather well-done, not to mention on-the-spot analysis of the latest attempted bombings in Britain, which can be found here on the Guardian UK website.

—————————

New face of the bomber

Jason Burke analyses eight key issues already emerging from the attacks
Sunday July 1, 2007

Observer
1. Islamic militants are almost certainly responsible.
This will become finally clear when the identity of the men arrested at Glasgow airport becomes known. The police are still working on gathering images of the London attacks, but will hope the Scottish strike will lead them to any fugitive bombers.

2. The attacks are linked.
They are probably the work of the same loose network. The strike on Glasgow is unlikely to be the result of the pure ‘copycat effect’ for the simple reason that it takes longer than 36 hours to assemble in secrecy a car, petrol and gas canisters.

3. The bombs are amateurish.
We are a long way from the technologically advanced devices and the painstaking preparation work of 9/11, the 1998 bombings of US embassies in east Africa, or even the 7 July attacks on London. This is good news, in that it means Islamic militants are short on expertise and find running sophisticated operations very difficult, not least due to public vigilance and the work of the security services. But it is bad news in that it means that the threat is coming from the people who are hardest to stop: ordinary citizens angry or disturbed enough to become radicalised. Terrorist organisations can have a highly trained, structured, disciplined body of very competent militants or a diffuse network of less skilled and less disciplined individuals, but not usually both. The former is more effective, the latter more resistant.

4. No suicide bombings.
The fact that the London attacks, at least, did not involve the death of the bomber points to a domestic source. Almost all strikes directly commissioned by the al-Qaeda ‘hard core’ of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri involve the death of the bombers. This change may be the result of a lack of long-term psychological preparation of the attackers.

5. Plots involve British citizens or immigrants who have spent some time in the UK.
However the cell behind the recent attacks could be heterogeneous: one emerging theme is a new mix of ethnicities and even languages within groups. The internet remains extremely important to the radicalisation process, with British security services desperately trying to track the moment when ‘the virtual goes real’. Following recent trends, the bombers are likely to be young (possibly in their late teens) and radicalised very rapidly.

6. Too much can be made of the ‘Iraq link’.
Yes, vehicle bombs with gas cans and petrol have been used extensively in Baghdad, but car bombs are hardly an innovation. There were massive vehicle-borne bombs in Pakistan in the Nineties, in Lebanon in the early Eighties – and of course in the UK.

7. Bands of brothers.
Though not yet identified – reports about a ‘clean image’ of one bomber were not correct – officials say there is a strong chance that anyone involved in last week’s events will be linked to other plots. Islamic militant terrorism works through personal associations, which means that everyone eventually has a connection to everyone if you follow enough links.

8. Message to the UK.
The attacks are something that say: what we are engaged in is far bigger than politics. This is about a battle between good and evil. The timescale is long, the cause is far greater than the arrival or departure of a Prime Minister or even a single war, even those in Iraq or Afghanistan. The threat will remain high for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of Iraq

This war was not thought through. It was not only mismanaged, it was an historic strategic blunder to begin with.

– Patrick J. Buchanan, “The Retreat of the GOP Old Bulls,” 6/26/07

I’m an avid reader of political propaganda, left, right, and wingnut. You’re as likely to find me perusing David Horowitz’s FrontPageMagazine as scanning AlterNet. I usually find the neocon stuff insufferably arrogant and not a little rabid. In contrast, I’m often impressed with the integrity, though not the arguments, of old-school conservatives. Despite the man’s pro-life, homophobic, anti-immigrant, love-it-or-leave-it nationalism, Pat Buchanan has nailed the Iraq war with a realism that is commendable.

What are they thinking?

It has taken thousands of lives, and ruined many thousands more. It has cost billions of dollars and squandered the country’s resources. It has been a failure, with no end in sight.

No, I’m not talking about the Iraq War. What I’m referring to is the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs has been an unmitigated disaster that has lasted for decades. No, generations. Given such a dismal track record, what do the Feds propose to do? Why, make even more substances illegal.

Fucking idiots!

The SF Chronicle reported yesterday that a legal hallucinogen, Salvia divinorum is under scrutiny by the Federal government, with a strong possibility that it will be made illegal. Given the government’s success with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, et al, it can be expected that salvia’s popularity and availability will skyrocket once it’s made illegal, and that a lucrative black market will spring up, leading to greater crime, misery and corruption, not to mention a bigger, more invasive government.

The stupidity here is just breathtaking.

On the road

Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Offissa Pup by George Herriman

I’m going to LA Monday through Wednesday. I don’t blog from the road, don’t even take my laptop, and I may not have time to post tomorrow. If not, I’ll post when I get back.

I moderate all comments to the blog, so if you don’t see yours, it’s because I’m away.

Punk Planet, RIP

Punk Planet has printed its last issue. #80. A sad day, indeed.

As a writer for PP’s chief rival, Maximum Rocknroll, I always sneered that PP was “punk lite.” Tim Yohannan’s assertion that MRR was the bible of punk rock, and his heavy-handed attempts at defining what was and wasn’t punk, in part motivated Dan Sinker to start PP, and later for Jeff Bale to start Hit List. To Sinker’s everlasting credit, PP was never merely a reaction to MRR. It had its own style, focus, and audience, not to mention its own understanding of what punk was all about.

PP’s demise comes on the heels of Clamor publishing its last issue. It’s never good news when a small independent magazine goes under. Punk Planet will be missed.

Oaktown revisited

People talk shit about Oakland: poverty-stricken, crime-ridden, gang-plagued, drug-infested, with a brutal police department and a corrupt city government. I moved to Oakland when I came up to the Bay Area in 1991, and I thoroughly enjoyed the eleven years I lived in the city. I spent many a “dark night of the soul” walking about downtown or around Lake Merritt, grieving after my parents died. Not once was I mugged or robbed or even harassed. I liked Oaktown’s racial diversity and pleasant weather and radical history and the fact that I was only a BART ride away from Berkeley or San Francisco.

I didn’t like Mayor Jerry Brown much. I considered him a faux progressive and a crass opportunist. I have a soft spot for Ron Dellums ever since the Vietnam War years, but he seems to be struggling to find his stride as the new mayor. He is criticized for being an absentee mayor, a charge that he denies. His website features a report of his accomplishments in his first six months in office. Maybe I’m a sucker, but I’m willing to give Mayor Dellums a little more time to prove himself.

Grains of salt

The previous post, in particular the quote from the SF Party Party website, isn’t quite accurate. There was a 2007 Haight Ashbury Street Fair and How Weird Street Fair. I do know that, thanks to Newsom, fees have gone up for street fairs, the sale of beer and wine — often the only way these events make any money — has been restricted or eliminated, and live music has been scaled back and made to end earlier.

The madness…

San Francisco’s LGBT Pride Celebration is this weekend, and we’re bracing for the madness. The Trans March Friday night, Pink Saturday celebrations in the Civic Center, the Dyke March Saturday night, the main Pride Parade on Sunday, and a gazillion parties, concerts, and other events in between. Not to mention that every bar in the Castro, and there are a hell of a lot of bars, will be spilling celebrants out into the streets. (check here for a calendar)

It’s been almost a year since my wife and I moved from SOMA to upper Eureka Valley. We’re not in the center of the maelstrom, but comfortably perched above it. That said, there’s city “no parking” signs up all along Castro and 18th, and there’s not likely to be any parking for blocks and blocks around. More important to me as a user of public transportation, the buses are fucked up, or nonexistent, for two days. That means anything we do in the neighborhood will have to be done on foot.

You know what though? That’s city living. I chose to live in San Francisco in part because I would be in proximity to lots of exciting events and activities.

I’m particularly disturbed by the NIMBYism that has swept the city in recent years, and which is personified by the Newsom administration. Folks who purchased very expensive homes are complaining about the noise and nuisance of traditional events held in their neighborhoods, getting them shut down. The San Francisco Party Party website summarizes the casualties in warning about a threat to the Mission’s Carnaval celebrations.

More bad news: hot off the press. One of our editors just had a flyer placed under her door from a NIMBY group that is organizing to kill Carnaval next year. Apparently Mission NIMBY (not.in.my.back.yard) neighbors are inspired by NIMBYs in other parts of town that have killed Haight Street Fair, How Weird Street Fair, Halloween, and many other popular events.

We will have more information as this story develops. But for now please send an email to Tom Ammiano, Gavin Newsom, and the Board of Supervisors demanding that the city protect public events from NIMBY suburbanites (June 17th, 2007)

If I’d wanted to live in Walnut Creek, I’d have moved there.

The problem with progressives #1

Why is it that progressives think that the best person to rally the troops and lead them to victory is the guy who lost the last time around?

Beyondchron.com in the Bay Area is a mind-numbing example of this problem, with hopeful stories about momentum building for Al Gore to enter the presidential race and the potential for Matt Gonzalez to reunify the SF Left by running for mayor against Gavin Newsom.

Excuse me, but isn’t winning the point? And didn’t these guys demonstrate an inability to do so? In Europe, when the leader of a political party presides over the defeat of his party, frequently the leader steps down and lets someone else have a go at it. Something to consider.

No blue tsunami

Sarkozy and his UMP party didn’t quite achieve the “blue tidal wave” they were hoping for. They have 314 out of 577 seats, a clear majority, but less than the 357 they held under Chirac. Sarkozy is still taking this as a mandate to implement his conservative reforms, and I still predict a lot of social unrest in France for the next five years. Whether workers, students, and banlieue residents will be able to successfully resist those reforms is another matter.

(story here)

Werewolves of London

Sometimes, I don’t find much of interest in the Guardian Weekly.

This issue (June 15-21 2007, Vol 176 No 26) was too preoccupied with the latest British scandal — government involvement in paying a 1 billion pound bribe to a Saudi prince to secure an arms deal for BAE Systems — not to mention the government’s attempts to suppress any reporting or investigation of the matter. It’s front page news, a two-page spread on BAE, and a good percentage of the Comment & Debate section.

I found a pair of articles — Angelique Chrisafis’s “French right poised for parliamentary victory,” and “Sarkozy looks to Mediterranean” by Reverchon and Tuquoi in Le Monde — to have interesting implications. Sarkozy’s UMP party is predicted to sweep elections for the National Assembly, getting up to 500 seats out of 577, ushering in a conservative “blue tide” of “slashing taxes, loosening the 35-hour week, limiting strike powers and cutting the numbers of public sector workers.” Buoyed by victory upon victory, Sarkozy is turning his attention to creating an economic union between Europe and North Africa, on the logic that France and other European countries can discourage immigration from North African countries by encouraging rapid economic development in the Maghreb. That’s, of course, the same logic of NAFTA, supporters of which claimed would help Mexico develop economically, thus cutting down on the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico to the US. We all know how well that worked out. Sarkozy’s victory, and the victory of the UMP, will no doubt heighten class struggle in France. Sarkozy will face a combative working class, rebellious students, and riotous banlieue that should make Margaret Thatcher’s confrontations over striking miners and the poll tax look like a pink tea.

Finally, there’s an item in Derek Brown’s “Week in Britain” about East Sussex police putting more officers on duty during full moons to “combat nocturnal violence and rowdiness.” He mentions Michael Zimecki, of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who wrote a paper linking lunar cycles and criminality. “There is no evidence, as yet, of werewolf activity in either Poland or Sussex.”

What was, what will be

The above map is of the San Francisco peninsula in the 19th century, showing the creeks and original shoreline, before all the development and landfill.

Below are a couple of maps of the San Francisco Bay Area’s future, if sea levels continue to rise as predicted.

(Sources: 19th Century Map, Sea-level maps)

Comfortable communalism

Berkeley Peoples Architecture presented a community plan, in the late 1960s/early 1970s, to transform the city of Berkeley into a groovy communal place to live. The plan involved making most of the streets car-free, people tearing down the fences between their properties to create block-long common spaces, incorporating private property into inalienable publicly-regulated land trusts, and so on.

A well-to-do Berkeley neighborhood has managed to take down the fences separating their backyards to create just such a communal residential space for themselves. A comfortable middle-class commons. It’s a far cry from the city-wide communalism proposed by Berkeley Peoples Architecture, yet an interesting read nevertheless. (here)

All the news that fits

What? No front page story on Paris Hilton’s latest travail?

Well, it is the Guardian Weekly after all. I just wanted to highlight a few items in this week’s edition (June 8-14 2007, Vol. 176 No 25).

– Jean-Jacques Bozonnet has a fascinating story on the Italian state. (”Torrent of criticism has Italian politicians fearing implosion”) Apparently, the Italian political apparatus is ten times the size of its neighboring European countries. A local business leader is quoted as saying: “The cost of political representation is equal to that of France, Germany, the UK and Spain together. The party system alone costs taxpayers 200m euro a year, compared with 73m euro in France.”

– A day in the life of an anonymous private security contractor in Iraq entitled “It’s the wild west: we’re a taxi service with guns.”

– A reprint from the Washington Post by Steven Pearlstein entitled “US middle class doing just fine.” I think I’ll run down a copy of the study in question as it flies in the face of most things I’ve experienced about the American economy.

– “Danger: upheaval down under,” an opinion piece by Will Hutton of the Observer, details striking parallels between the political climate in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, with an emphasis on the state of the social-democratic Left. Here’s two salient quotes: “One answer is being provide by a nascent Australian progressive think-tank, Per Capita. The left has to invest in people, design markets so that companies deliver public-interest outcomes, extend the polluter-pays principle to every form of economic activity where private companies do not pay for the damage they generate and start to develop a story about promoting individual wellbeing. It is a fine wish-list, and the ambition can hardly be faulted. The question remains: how?” And there’s Hutton’s concluding paragraph: “It is not that the right has a better or even good answer to the questions of our times. It is that the modern left, unless it is prepared to say something concrete about how it wants the economy to look in the future and takes steps to shape it, has little to say either. And if it’s the incumbent government, the consequences is staring it in the face.”

– A whole secti0n on the “G8 and the world.” It asks the rhetorical question: “Developed nations’ leaders have promised to give poorer states a better deal. Are they delivering?” The answer is, no.

– A cyberpunk flavored story about how RFID tags are being used to help make sense out of the baffling confusion that is Tokyo. (”Tagging Tokyo’s streets” by Michael Fitzpatrick) “The city with no street names.”

– A well-deserved savaging of Don DeLillo’s latest novel which I think applies to most of the man’s pretentious oeuvre. (”An inevitable DeLillo, an unoriginal DeLillo” by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post)

It’s still probably on the newsstands, in case you’re interested.

Let’s do the time warp, again

The whole GMT time zone default was bugging me, so I adjusted the options to give me the correct time and date for my time zone. I’ll probably have to change it when we go from Daylight Savings Time to Pacific Standard Time, but at least I won’t be posting something on a Sunday night, only to have it publish with a Monday date.

The parrots! The parrots!

We moved from South of Market to upper Eureka Valley ten months ago. We’re two thirds of the way up Twin Peaks, in dense trees and occasional fog. This morning, Sunday morning, the parrots flew by.

(I forget that this blog is set, by default, to GMT. It’s still Sunday evening, nine-thirty-ish, as I write this.)

The “Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” made famous in book and film, paid us a visit. Three flew screeching into the towering buckeye chestnut in the neighbor’s yard, then promptly flew away with much squawking, and then two returned to the buckeye and a nearby pine tree, again with much noise, and color. They were green and red, comical and playful.

Made my day.

Oh joy!

Both my Guardian Weekly and Monthly arrived on Friday of last week. I’m in heaven. There’s nothing more civilized than spending a leisurely Sunday morning reading newspapers over breakfast.

I’ll get to the Weekly later. The Monthly has two articles of particular interest. In “Slogan’s Run,” Catherine Rapley talks with Ji Lee, a disgruntled New York ad man who does these great detournements of billboard and online advertising with cleverly phrased and placed word bubbles. His stuff can be seen here.

Then there’s Ed Vulliamy’s retrospective on the 1967 Summer of Love (”Peace, Love and Understanding”), done through interviews with survivors like Country Joe, Bob Weir, Paul Kantner, and Barry Melton. Generally a worthwhile piece, although I have a few criticisms.

The writing is done in a staccato style that is a bit jumpy, and makes the interviewees all sound the same. He clearly states that the Summer of Love was seen “to reach what was for some the revolution’s climax, for others its nadir.” Yet no one who soured on the hippie ideal is interviewed. What we are left with is at best a flashback, and at worst nostalgia.

Which brings me to my final criticism. For the most part, I’m positive about the hippie counterculture in particular, and about the 1960s in general. However, I just don’t buy the cliched reasons for the collapse of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury that started even before 1967, which Vulliamy repeats ad nauseam. It was the hordes of young people that flooded the Haight which the community wasn’t prepared to handle; it was hard drugs like speed and heroin that started to replace soft drugs like marijuana and LSD; it was the commercialization and exploitation of the hippie experience. To my mind, even all three of these reasons combined don’t entirely explain why the hippie counterculture went bad. Perhaps having a few disgruntled and dissenting voices could have helped shed new light on the subject.

The then-and-now photos of some of those interviewed are fun.

There’s also a horrific article about a ruthless Nigerian militia, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, and a nicely eclectic music section, among many other interesting features. I’m glad I subscribed.

Of Volvos and tanks

I drive a 1990 Volvo 740 GL. I’ve owned the car for five years. It’s a tank. I’ve driven Volvos like it for the past fifteen years, ever since my tiny 1987 Honda Civic was totaled by a 4×4 with those monster truck tires as it ran over my car’s front end in running a red light. I was in LA at the time, playing the tourist, and I had to tow the car up to my parents’ house in Ventura to store it while I arranged to dispose of it.

I bought my first Volvo station wagon after that incident on the basis of a story I’d heard. The Loma-Prieta earthquake in 1989 caused the collapse of the multi-level Cypress Freeway in Oakland. A couple managed to survive, buried under tons of freeway rubble, because their Volvo station wagon held under the weight until rescuers managed to dig them out. Rumor has it that Volvo bought the car from the couple, and it’s now on display in a museum in Stockholm. After having a near-death experience in my flimsy Honda, I told myself, now that’s the car for me.

I’ve been pretty happy driving Volvos ever since. Sure, they have problems. Their heater/air conditioning fans invariably break down. And they cost more, in both parts and labor, to work on if you go to mechanics that specialize in Volvos. But it’s been worth it in peace of mind alone. I’ve had three fender benders, all three involving cars that have run into me from the rear. In two of those incidents, while the car owners wailed over crunched front ends, I casually noted a scratch or two on my rear bumper. When a massive old Chevy Impala rear ended me at a stoplight and drove my car into the vehicle in front of me, I found only a bent license plate on my front bumper. The driver of the Chevy had a dent in his chrome bumper. The car I hit, again some tiny Japanese import, had a torn-off bumper and a dangling wheel well panel.

What brought this up was a little accident I had recently. I was driving my wife’s 2006 Lexus IS 250 last Wednesday when I was sideswiped by a woman driving a Ford Focus. Her side mirror smashed up the side mirror on the Lexus, and left a long black streak down the driver’s side of the car. I won’t go into how the other driver fled the scene and how I chased her down. Nor will I describe the shit she gave me just for wanting her insurance information or the fact that her car suffered almost no damage. The whole process of dealing with insurance companies is such an incredible hassle.

I’m pretty confident that, had I been driving my Volvo at the time, the damage ratio would have been reversed; virtually no damage to my car, and a fair amount to hers. Just the look of my car – fifteen years old and clearly a junker – usually keeps other drivers steering clear of me on the road. Indeed, when I drive my wife’s Lexus around, folks driving vehicular equivalents of my Volvo blithely pull out or change lanes right in front of me, assuming that I don’t want my new car to tangle with their junker. They’re right on that score.

Well, my Volvo has issues. It needs a new muffler, and a complete brake job. I’m looking to get another car, and while I’m not interested in something brand new, I’m tired of owning a vehicle that’s a decade or more old. Unfortunately, Ford Motor Company purchased Volvo in 1999. Call me an American hater, but I’m not at all confident that the newer Volvos are any good. I certainly don’t think they measure up to the pre-Ford Volvos. And I’m not willing to put my life in the seat of one of those tiny plastic Japanese numbers again. So, unless I can find a make of car that’s as sturdy and durable as a pre-1999 Volvo, I may get stuck owning another ten year old car just to feel secure.

Urban wildlife (no, not wild life)

We have a family of racoons living in the extremely narrow, covered over space between our house and the neighbor’s garage. Or so our neighbor tells us. We haven’t actually seen the critters yet, though we do hear occasional scratching and scrabbling noises from that wall.

I’ve seen squirrels sauntering about our backyard as if they owned the place, and another neighbor said he found a very irritated ‘possum on his doorstep one night. Now, the SF Chronicle reports coyote sightings in the city, specifically in Golden Gate Park and Bernal Heights. (here) I lived in San Diego for way too long, and spent a few years in the suburbs, which are built on the outlying mesas. There were always stories about pet dogs and cats disappearing, the victims of marauding coyotes. Besides hunting in packs, coyotes can jump a fence and climb a tree as good as any cat.

There’s an organization in San Francisco, Nature in the City, devoted to “ecological conservation, restoration and stewardship of the Franciscan bioregion.” I guess our racoon neighbors are members, by default.

Broke-ass update

Broke-ass Stuart did manage to finish up a revised edition of his Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco. It will be out in the fall, and will be in book format, though he says it will still have a zine-ish look to it. I think Lonely Planet is publishing it. Broke-ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in New York is also part of the book deal, and part of Stuart’s plan for world domination.

Rick Steve, better watch your ass!

Deja vu all over again

After a June 2 “Progressive Convention” in San Francisco failed to chose a candidate to run against Mayor Gavin Newsom from the left, speculation has been rife about who might step up. Ross Mirkarimi has declined, leading to speculation that Chris Daly may announce today. No dice with Daly, which puts Matt Gonzalez in the spotlight once again. Even if Matt runs, this won’t exactly be a repeat of the last mayoral election as Newsom has a better than 65% approval rating, a teflon coating with respect to recent scandals, and a ton of money already donated to his campaign. To keep up on the speculation and news, check out Beyond Chron.

Broke-ass Stuart

One of the things that made San Francisco a more enjoyable place to live was Broke-ass Stuart and his Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco. No more. After a number of months traveling around South America, Stuart is off to New York for a six month stint in which he hopes to write the Guide to Living Cheaply in New York.

I bought volume 2 of Stuart’s guide when he was still hanging around the city. Whether or not it’s still available, or whether Stuart managed to pull together an updated version before he moved to New York, I don’t know. Check here for Broke-ass Stuart’s website, and here for Last Gasp’s page. Note that Last Gasp lists it as out of stock.

Broke-ass Stuart did say that the one thing in the Guide worth the cover price was the following link. Among other things, FecalFace lists various art and photography openings around San Francisco. Openings equal free wine and snacks. A person desiring to live cheaply in the city could certainly get a buzz, and perhaps a meal, out of hopping from one opening to another.

I do visit New York City on occasion, so I look forward to Stuart’s guide to living cheaply in the Big Apple.

Here we go again!

According to a story on yesterday’s SF Chronicle website, Mayor Gavin Newsom is once again intent on banning the infamous Castro Halloween party. (here) Now, personally, I’m not a big partyer. I wasn’t one when I was young, and I’m even less of one now that I’m over 50. And frankly, my claustrophobia kicks in when I think of the wall-to-wall crowd that takes over the Castro every Halloween.

Yet Newsom’s ongoing efforts to “Giulianize” San Francisco really piss me off. The Mayor’s focus on “quality of life” issues is an attempt to suburbanize the city, as the folks at San Francisco Party Party point out. He needs to be opposed. What follows is a brief list of organizations trying to make the city into a fun and livable place. Each website has further links and resources.

San Francisco Party Party (HELP!!! SF Mayor Gavin Newsom is suburbanizing our great City… he must be stopped!)

Livable City (Livable City works to create a San Francisco of great streets and complete neighborhoods, where walking, bicycling, and transit are the best choices for most trips, where public spaces are beautiful, well-designed, and well-maintained, and where housing is more plentiful and more affordable.)

Boom! (the sound of eviction)

Fun/Cheap San Francisco (cool and affordable things to do in the san francisco bay area)

Friends of the Urban Forest (creating a greener San Francisco tree by tree)

SF Gro (San Francisco garden resource organization)

I’ll have more to say on this subject in the future.

San Francisco Tourist Advisory

If you’re planning to visit our fair city anytime soon, please, don’t ask this police officer for directions.

This is a public service announcement.

Officer Jesse Serna reported using force 57 times and injuring 31 citizens during the 1996-2004 time period. Chronicle photo, 2004, by Paul Chinn.

Izzy’s update

Israel Rind informs me that they’ve opened a second Izzy’s at 783 E. El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. (408-523-1333). Why does South Bay have all the luck!?!

Uncle Luigi’s Kosher Pizza. PIZZA and KOSHER used to inhabit two different worlds. Izzy brought them together.

Hippie to yuppie

I subscribe to the Guardian Weekly. Occasionally, I get the latest issue on Friday, but more often it arrives on Saturday. That’s “on time” as far as I’m concerned, and I can still enjoy reading it over the weekend. Once in a while it doesn’t get to me until Monday, which meant Tuesday this week since Monday was Memorial Day.

Ah well.

John Harris quotes British rock writer Charles Shaar Murray in his opinion piece “Tune in, turn on, drop out, cash up” in the 25.05.07 issue. I thought I’d pass it along:

“The line from hippy to yuppie is not nearly as convoluted as some people like to believe,” Murry said. “A lot of old hippy rhetoric could well be co-opted now by the pseudo-libertarian right, which has in fact happened. Get the government off our backs, let individuals do what they want — that translates very smoothly into laissez-faire yuppie-ism, and that’s the legacy of the era.”

Izzy’s is gone!

I walked around my old South of Market neighborhood yesterday. A lot has changed since I moved away 9 months ago, most of it not for the better. The residential building boom of apartments, condos and “live/work” lofts continues at an alarming rate, altering the light industrial character of the area with relentless gentrification. Upscale businesses are proliferating, yet there’s no commensurate expansion of public parking for the customers those businesses hope to draw. The Academy of Art University has spread like a cancer, occupying more and more real estate. Perhaps most disheartening of all, Izzy’s Brooklyn Bagels at 151 Townsend is no more.

I regularly walked down to the waterfront for exercise when I lived in the neighborhood, passing Izzy’s on the way. I always bought a bagel to nosh on for the remainder of my walk, and occasionally picked up a few more for home. I ate them plain, savoring the smell and taste of Izzy’s authentic, kosher bagels. Their bialys were to die for. Izzy’s bagels never failed to transport me in my memories to the times I spent in Brooklyn and Manhattan visiting friends.

Izzy sold the San Francisco store, and it’s now the non-kosher Bagel Bakery. There’s another Izzy’s down the peninsula in Palo Alto (477 S. California Ave.), but that’s a long way to go for genuine Brooklyn bagels. I’m saddened more by Izzy’s departure then I am about SOMA’s inexorable transformation into yuppieland. (Izzy’s website)

Blackwater in the news (privatization of war, part 1)

On Friday, May 25, 2007, Reuters reported (here) that a US judge moved a wrongful death and fraud suit, brought by the families of four civilian contractors against Blackwater, out of the courts and into private arbitration. A victory for Blackwater, the decision confirms that Blackwater’s contract with the contractors “is iron-clad and that its terms absolve the company of liability” according to legal expert Jeffrey Addicott.

And today, The Washington Post reported that Blackwater contractors opened fire in Baghdad in two separate incidents this week (here). Blackwater will neither confirm nor deny that there were casualties.

There is plenty of information out there about the insidious nature of Blackwater in particular, and about the dangers of military privatization in general, beginning with Jeremy Scahill’s excellent book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. No need for me to belabor the point.

In the fast-paced BBC TV drama “The State Within,” one of the characters in the last episode comments that military and security privatization is the Klondike (or was it the Yukon) of the current century. The reference is to the 19th century Alaskan gold rush. “The State Within” is about a conspiracy between US State Department officials, a Halliburton-style development corporation and a private security firm, modeled after Blackwater, to overthrow the government of a former Soviet republic in central Asia using a fabricated terrorist incident, the blowing up of a British airplane in America, to create an international crisis. Chilling, and well worth renting at your local video store.

With no apologies…

…to Joseph Goebbels.

Whenever I hear the words “U2″ or “Bono,” I reach for my gun.

U2 jetted into Cannes and staged a short concert on the red carpet. They also premiered U2 3D, which captures the band on their 2006 Vertigo world tour.

–BBC News, 5-25-07

Hey, Ho, Let’s Go!

I spent the last three days creating and perfecting the website, “What’s Left?,” for the mostly monthly political columns I write for Maximum Rocknroll under the name “Lefty” Hooligan. (check here) I learned quite a bit in the process, so constructing “Playing for Keeps” for my personal blogsite was a snap. I’m still not completely happy with this theme, but it will do.

“What’s Left?” piggybacks on the blog format, allowing me to post my columns on the web as I write them. It will also be a place for limited archiving of my past columns. The idea here is to get some web exposure for the columns in a way that allows comments and feedback. I’ve written “What’s Left?” for MRR now for 15 years. It’s pretty much taken for granted, and raises little commentary or controversy.

“Playing for Keeps” is intended as a true blog. It’s also intended to inspire me to write more frequently, on a wider range of subjects. I’m new to blogging, so we’ll see how it goes.