We needed some good news ...

Today we learn that The Onion has acquired the defunct hate site Infowars, formerly the property of conspiracy monger Alex Jones. Jones was forced into a court ordered fire sale after Sandy Hook parents won a massive judgement for his lies about their murdered children. 

The sale and acquisition led the San Francisco Chronicle to highlight that the new owner is Jeff Lawson. He's the kind of successful entrepreneur who used to make the city an interesting place before many members of the current generation of tech-bros burned out on ketamine and rightwing fantasies, seeking to use their power to play at politics.

The Onion, and now Infowars, are primarily owned by San Francisco tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson, who is known locally for donating to efforts to fight homelessness and publicly defending the city.

While many of San Francisco’s tech leaders have fled the city in recent years or criticized its troubling street conditions, Lawson has been a notable exception.

The Twilio founder has garnered attention for philanthropic donations to fight homelessness and provide assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In April his high-flying tech career took an unexpected turn, as he led a group that bought the fabled Onion website for an undisclosed price, pledging to invest in its growth.

... In 2018, as San Francisco residents debated a business tax to fight homelessness, Lawson publicly supported the  effort, and announced that Twilio was donating $1 million to local homelessness programs. 

A year later, the Lawsons signed the “Giving Pledge,” the initiative backed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to encourage wealthy businessmen and women to donate their fortunes to charity.

That same year, he and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff donated to an effort to bring a homeless shelter to the Embarcadero. 

Two years later, he publicly defended the city as tech entrepreneurs who were fleeing to other cities heaped abuse on it.

“This is the time when we should be thinking about, 'How do we give back? How do we help take care of our communities and the people around us who may not be faring as well? '” he told the Chronicle.

As we drift into Trump's kleptocratic revival of the late 19th century Gilded Age, it's nice to learn that, now as then, some of our robber barons attempt to make themselves somewhat useful to the City.

All Saints, All Souls, Dia De Los Muertos 2024

Remembering this year, two who've gone before:

Cliff Lichter was a friend from my years as part of the Catholic Worker movement in New York City and San Francisco. 

Cliff wandered the country for decades as an itinerant pilgrim, without fixed home or property, as the Spirit took him. He turned up with little warning at Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, monasteries and various intentional communities. He always helped out with whatever menial work needed doing. He was almost ostentatiously humble, but as you got to know him, you realized his intense piety was not for show; the guy really lived within a mystical universe that somehow sustained his unlikely existence. 

His Catholic Worker friend Brian Terrell wrote of Cliff and provided an epitaph:

Our dear friend and brother Cliff Lichter died on July 11, to continue his pilgrimage on another plane. Cliff had been a soldier and a Jesuit brother and a hospital orderly before finding his vocation as a wanderer. 

... He carried with him a note of introduction from Dorothy Day, dated Sept. 1, ’71, calling Cliff a “dear friend.” “I hope that he finds Catholic Worker friends and receives hospitality wherever he goes.”

In recent years, some of those good Catholic Worker friends in Worcester, Massachusetts, saw that he was well taken care of.  ...

This was Cliff.

“By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast pocket a Bible. And that is all.” The Way of the Pilgrim, 19th century Russia

• • •

In 2000, doing his thing at some conference

Unexpectedly, Hunter Cutting died in September from pulmonary hypertension. He had trained legions of justice organizers and climate campaigners in the Bay and beyond on how to interact with media. He was my neighbor in the Mission; he was working down the block from the homeless encampment where the SFPD shot Luis Gongoro Pat in 2016. I would see him at vigils where Luis's family demanded justice from the city. Hunter leaves a shocked family; he left us all too soon.

Hearts of the city

Should you arrive at San Francisco General Hospital by bus on Potrero Avenue, you'll be greeted by this imposing, but perhaps also forbidding, maternal figure. Why is she wearing a helmet?

 

Look ahead and you'll see your way marked by cheerful hearts.

 

Gimpy patient and helpful doc seem a bit more welcoming.

 

Perhaps an orderly on break?

 

Good to see this figure getting around.

This public art displays works by sculptor Tom Offerness. He evokes SF General as "the heart of the city" and so it remains despite having been absorbed by San Francisco's best known oligarch, robber baron, and philanthropist Mark Zuckerberg.

Aaron Peskin for Mayor of San Francisco

I've had Aaron's sign in my front window for weeks. This is the most interesting contest on my California ballot. I'd sure prefer Aaron to any of the alternatives!

London Breed has been a terrible mayor -- corrupt, partial to our tech and real estate overlords, and inept. Mark Farrell is for practical purposes a Republican who has to run as a Democrat in this Left Coast city, beholden to a bunch of billionaires who think they ought to run the world -- and who, like Elon Musk, show themselves incompetent in public life. Daniel Lurie seems a nice man, but being a Levi's heir and non-profit exec doesn't prepare a person to be mayor of San Francisco. Ahsha Safai was a good enough county supervisor from a part of the city everyone neglects -- but can't make a dent.

 

Aaron knows where the bodies, political and administrative, have been buried in this famously labyrinthine city. He's served two contentious but largely successful non-consecutive eight year stints on the Board of Supervisors.

Peskin knows that, by hook or crook, we can't solve homelessness without reform of the current morass of programs. He cares about keeping schools open, about public transit, about making rentals affordable. You know, the stuff that just goes over the heads of the billionaires who want to treat the city as their playground. 

He'd probably be a cantankerous chief executive, but a huge improvement on what we've had for quite a few years.

• • •

One of my dirty secrets is that I hate it that we elect the members of the city school board and of the community college board. I do not feel competent to make choices about who should run institutions that seem to be in chronic, slightly mysterious, trouble. And too often, the people running for these positions hope to use them as stepping stones, rather than digging in to improve them.

The one exception I'm making on this ballot is for Matt Alexander for School Board. He's a former teacher, principal and community activist who actually cares about the schools and deserves another term.

November election in San Francisco

You will be horrified to learn that City voters are offered a menu of A through O propositions to make choices on. I'm being polite when I say this seems excessive.

I can tell you what I did. My research was not exhaustive -- nor, I suspect will hardly anyone else's be.

Prop A. Money for maintenance and upgrades to aging school buildings. YES

Prop B. Money for necessary improvements to San Francisco General Hospital, Laguna Honda and community health projects and parks. YES

Prop. C. Creates an Office of The Inspector General in the Controller’s Office. Since the current mayoral administration has been notably corrupt, this is an attempt at a corrective. We need something. Two of the incumbent mayor's senior staff are already in prison, and likely there will be more. Will a new Inspector General help? Maybe. Something in addition to federal prosecutions seems necessary. YES

Prop. D. Gives the mayor additional powers over the City's maze of commissions and boards. Our governance is a mess, but centralizing these things in the mayor's office seems more likely to hide their workings than to help. NO

Prop. E. Creates a task force to study the maze of commissions and boards. Seems more likely than Prop. D to utilize community input, but I find it hard to be enthusiastic.YES (I guess.)

Prop. F. San Francisco has a cop shortage. To try to incentivize senior police officers to stay on the job past their retirement date, this would give them their retirement pay plus their continued regular salaries. Seems like a heck of a boondoggle to me. It was a boondoggle when the Secret Service tried the same thing. NO

Prop. G. Rent subsidies for very, very, very low income seniors already in "affordable housing". What are we going to do? -- put 'em out to sea on an iceberg? YES

Prop. H. Earlier retirement (age 55) with full benefits for firefighters. The politics of the firefighters unions are a plague on the City, but I can go for this one. It's a tough job, keeping us from burning up. YES

Prop. I. Include per diem nurses and 911 operators in the regular city pension and benefit system. YES

Prop. J. Gives the mayor and the superintendent of schools more power to oversee the spending of the Children’s Fund. Can't figure out what this one does and the ballot pamphlet contains no arguments. Some of the more progressive Supes have signed on. YES (I guess.)

Prop. K. Close the Great Highway, making it functionally a park. I realize this is going to piss off the people who live adjacent, but many of us from the rest of the city already use it for open space to walk on and reach the beach. Besides, it is going to be overrun by flooding and sand as the climate warms and the ocean rises. Might as well get some pleasure out of it in the meantime. YES

Prop. L. Tax on Uber, Lyft, and Waymo to fund the Muni public transit system. Makes sense. YES

Prop. M. Rejigger business taxes so big companies (yes, PG&E) pay more and small businesses less. YES

Prop. N. Create a fund, from private donations, to help cops, sheriffs, nurses, paramedics, and 911 dispatchers pay their student loans. The City has trouble hiring ... YES

Prop. O. Makes San Francisco a sanctuary city for reproductive freedom, including barring cops for sharing any information about reproductive health choices made by anyone in this jurisdiction. Of course. YES

• • •

I shared my reactions to the California State ballot measures here.

Walz rocks

Yesterday I wore this t-shirt (a product of the Lincoln Project, a para-campaign by disaffected Republicans supporting Harris-Walz) while walking laps around a small San Francisco lake. It was a lovely, warmish day and there were lots of other exercisers and strollers doing the same. 

The t-shirt reproduces a moment in Tim Walz' VP speech at the Democratic Convention: 

When it comes to reproductive rights, Walz says Minnessotans have a golden rule: “Mind your own damn business.”

Reactions to the shirt were interesting. Folks coming the other way don't always appear to read what you've got on your chest -- but some do. (I do read them, routinely.) 

The first woman who appeared to read it grimaced scornfully. That's interesting I thought -- and continued to tune in. 

One of the features of walking around a lake is that you start seeing the same people repeatedly going the other way if you are moving a smidgen faster than they are. As people came by on second and later passes, I began to receive smiles. It was clear that some groups had chatted about what this slightly dire message might mean. I was a little surprised that quite a few recognized the quote.

Tim Walz is a fine communicator and he's demonstrated a way for an older white man to speak out on reproductive freedom. Go Tim!

Economy insight

Okay -- maybe I begin to get it. For the last couple of years, economic surveys have reported that a majority of Americans feel positive about their own financial position, but think "the economy" is going to hell. (That link is a couple of years old, but current opinion research largely agrees.)

Yes -- there has been inflation, but, in general, wage growth has been exceeding price increases to consumers for months so we ought to feel better. And housing has become insanely expensive. But most of us, most of the time, aren't really in the market for housing. So what's the beef?

Today the shrunken San Francisco Chronicle passed along some local data that might be a contributing cause of our discontent. In much of the city, too many neighborhood businesses have not come back from the pandemic. 

Businesses in most S.F. neighborhoods are still struggling to bring back customers. ...

Four years after the beginning of the pandemic, consumer spending in most San Francisco neighborhoods still hasn’t recovered to anywhere near pre-pandemic levels, according to city data.

Citywide, sales tax revenue from April to June this year was down 34% compared to the same period in 2019, adjusting for inflation. In over half of neighborhoods, revenues are down more than 25% compared to before the pandemic, according to a Chronicle analysis of city data.

Actually my home turf, the Mission, is doing a little better than the city at large, down only 25 percent. But it is dotted with empty storefronts like the one pictured above, steps from my house. It sure doesn't feel as if small businesses are thriving.

So, even if we're personally doing okay, we are constantly visually reminded that something is amiss.

We get junk mail

No, not the masses of candidate flyers and fund appeals of years past. Obviously San Francisco is not a presidential battleground, but the local candidates have often flooded our mail boxes.  Maybe data on voters has become so accurate that campaigns already know who we will vote for in this hyperacive electoral season and don't waste their money on us?

 

However, I can't say that for national nonprofits. These two envelopes soliciting funds arrived the same day. I hope they didn't pay much for whatever list of targets they are working off of.

I suspect random direct mail is pretty much dead.

From the streets of San Francisco

Reporter Heather Knight, along with photographer Loren Elliot, offers a largely sympathetic account [gift article] of some of what the city of San Francisco is doing to care for asylum seeking families who turn up in our midst. 

They huddled in the cold on a graffiti-covered bench last November, the twin girls dozing in their parents’ laps while the older children buried their heads in their phones.

Most nights, the family of six waited like this outside a San Francisco school gymnasium until it could be converted into a homeless shelter. Once inside, they slept each night on a small patch of the floor, then rose early each morning to secure a spot in one of the three showers shared by 69 people. They had to leave by sunrise so the school gym could be returned to its intended purpose.

Margarita Solito, 36, sometimes wondered if the 3,200-mile journey to San Francisco from El Salvador had been worth it. The family left as international migrants, and now they were migrants of a different sort, moving around their new city all day with nowhere to call home.

A year after arriving in the city, Ms. Solito’s fight for housing would pay off, and her family would be able to put down roots. But their journey shed light on the larger crisis of family homelessness in San Francisco and revealed the daily uncertainty that hundreds of schoolchildren face there. ...

Knight reports that 2403 children in the San Francisco Unified School District, 5 percent of total enrollment, are unhoused!

No wonder teachers and school staff wanted to use what space they could find in their building to shelter the children they serve. Neighborhood meetings averted most fears about using the Buena Vista/Horace Mann campus for this purpose. I live nearby; the nightly shelter residents have not discernibly upset the area.

San Francisco is relatively friendly to this work thanks to the tireless agitation of community and migrant groups. 

Today Bay Area Faith in Action rallied outside of the public San Francisco General Hospital in support of another resident of this shelter, Carmen Marquez, who contracted meningitis, spent 6 days in a coma, and then had to have 9 fingers and her lower leg amputated due to the disease. 

The City Department of Homelessness wants to send her and her teenage daughter back to a shelter. They say that despite her medical condition, she does not have enough points in the computer system to qualify for more permanent housing.

If wealthy San Francisco remains at all friendly to our poor neighbors, it's because of tireless agitation from organized people in community groups.

Making a true labor day of it

For San Francisco hospitality workers who are members of the union UniteHERE, it's not a vacation day, it's a day to picket their hotel workplaces. Per the Chronicle:

Housekeepers, hosts, bellmen, servers, cooks, dishwashers and market assistants are striking at the 1,921-room Hilton Union Square, the city’s biggest hotel, as well as the Grand Hyatt San Francisco, Grand Hyatt at SFO, Palace Hotel and Westin St. Francis.

 

There was plenty of spirit. 

And lots of energy.

Workers don't respect hotel owners pleas of poverty ... and there sure seem to be plenty of tourists gawking in Union Square.

Lots of local politicians showed up, as the smart ones do. I particularly liked the obvious delight on the face of Supervisor Connie Chan, up for re-election in the Richmond District.

Street critters

The alleyways have their residents.

 

Might those guys chase this one if they met?

This big boy just watches the world trudge by.

Thank you Joe Biden; bring on Kamala Harris. And Nancy delivers again.

So our Democratic leaders have, at length, led. We can now get on with the business of trouncing MAGA. The dis-eased and depleted state of the nation may defeat us, but the majority of us still have a chance to live to struggle another day for hope, justice, civil compassion and government of the people.

Many of us have watched in horror for the past three weeks as the Democratic Party, through whose big tent we are forced to work, has seemed mired in indecision and in desperate need of a generational transition. Well, we've begun one.

In this moment I want to bring forward a bit of almost forgotten San Francisco history. My Congresscritter, the former Speaker and still Party wisewoman Nancy Pelosi, first came into office through a managed generational transition not so different than the one we are seeing now.  She knows how this goes.

In the 1960s and '70s, San Francisco was represented in Congress by Phil Burton, a liberal giant whose legislative efforts included civil rights, environmental protection, disability rights, and the struggle for health care for all. And then, at in 1983 at age 56, a ruptured aortic embolism killed this man on the move. His wife Sala Burton slid into the safe Democratic seat and served two terms, before succumbing to colon cancer in 1987. The shocking Burton transitions left many progressive Californians unmoored.

Nancy Pelosi was a prominent California Democratic leader, a powerhouse fundraiser. But she had not ever held elective office herself. As Sala Burton was dying, Pelosi came away with her death bed endorsement for the San Francisco Congressional seat. Oh, now this Pacific Heights lady wants to be in Congress?

Not all San Franciscans were ready to jump on what seemed an anti-Democratic dynastic transition. The city was then full of left activists, supporters of revolutions in Central America, of affordable housing for all, and particularly of gay and lesbian AIDS campaigners, desperately trying to force the murderous epidemic onto the national agenda. In the special election held to replace Sala Burton, these forces combined behind gay Supervisor Harry Britt. Nancy consolidated the money, the party regulars, and the politically active unions; Nancy wiped the floor with Harry. (I know. I did some door knocking for poor Harry.)

In the end, Pelosi has been a magnificent Democratic Party leader. From her safe seat in San Francisco, she has served her true constituency, her fractious party. Those of us who cast ballots for her are just extras in her Party drama -- but mostly she's been good for the broad progressive project. 

I feel confident that she has had a strong role in the Biden to Harris transition. This sort of thing is her political meat and potatoes and her political genius. Thanks again, Nancy -- I feel sure you have been in the middle of getting us here.

Spring in the Mission

I know, it is not even the end of standard time. Spring is officially two weeks away. Yet the coming season is in the air. 

 

The view out my window is wildly lush.

The people gather as well. 

 

San Franciscans demand to be heard.

And on light polls and walls around the Mission, these flyers turn up.

click to enlarge if you want to read.

Odd one this. I'm as little a fan of Mayor London Breed as anyone. 

But these flyers call to mind a long time useful axiom I've developed for understanding San Francisco leftist politics: if somebody seems to be trying to co-opt the legitimate moral energy of your justice movement, run -- don't walk -- away from them. These aren't your friends. They are either bloodsuckers or opportunists. They may be actual enemies of justice or they may be deluded, but they aren't your friends. They are trying to seize the legitimate space you are fighting to open.

Polls - national and local

Ever wondered why national polls are so inadequate for understanding the opinions and leanings of people who aren't white/don't consider themselves "white"? 

Here's the answer in one simple chart:

Source

 

Even though there are plenty of Asian-origin, Black, and Latino (and other!) Americans, unless pollsters really work on enlarging their samples ("over sampling"), they just aren't talking to enough people to avoid distortions caused by small sample size. This is hard and expensive and often doesn't happen.

Thinking about this made me wonder about the intricacies of accurate polling in San Francisco, especially about the upcoming mayoral race. Here's a picture:

Wikipedia - click to enlarge

The sheer complexity of the project is very costly to do well -- and the cost will contribute to why we are in danger of only having well-heeled choices come November. That's too bad for the city. Most of us don't live in the tech-bro bubble and have different needs and hopes for this place.

March primary election (part 2): San Francisco ballot

There are only two measures I can bring myself to care about:

San Francisco Measure E is Mayor London Breed's effort to take advantage of the sour mood of city voters to unleash the police department from numerous constraints and reforms won in the last few years. Want the city cops hiding evidence of when they have used force? Want the cops freed to use any hot new surveillance techniques without supervision? Want our highly political mayor to take oversight of the SFPD from the police commission? That's what's going on in this one. Vote NO. 

San Francisco Measure F is also a foul item and also plays to the city's discontents. It claims to force welfare recipients into mandated drug treatment. But, as is usual in these things, it provides for cutting off benefits without providing genuine services. It's stupid; it's mean; and it won't work. But voters sick of seeing homeless people will probably vote for it; every once in awhile, this city has to kick homeless people. Vote NO.

Then there's the chance for San Francisco Democrats to elect members of the Democratic Party County Committee. WTF?? I usually think of this as the "student council" part of the ballot, the place for locally prominent Democrats to scuffle for attention. But the County Committee does get to pin the Democratic label on candidates and its recommendations might make a difference in the high turnout/low information election that will be the presidential in November.

And so the big money boys -- real estate and tech bros -- are going all out try to put in their guys and gals now. They've got outfits with names like NeighborsSF, TogetherSF and GrowSF and a full slate of "moderates" (that means representing the rich, not the neighborhood people) that they want to implant.

According to an exposé in the Guardian (based on work by Mission Local) they want

a tougher approach to homelessness and drug problems, a more punitive approach to crime, and a climate more friendly to business and housing construction. Some have called for centralizing more power in the office of the mayor.

Yeah -- no kidding they want more corruption and incompetence from a useless mayor they own ... she'll be running again in November. She works fine for these guys, just not for the rest of us.

There's a progressive slate running for County Central Committee. If you live on the east side in Assembly District 17, here are the recommendations of the Bernal Dems.

If you live on the west side of town in Assembly District 19, check out the recommendations from the Harvey Milk Club and Working Families.

I am not edified, but we have to do these things if we want a democratic (small "d") majority to continue to influence this city. Just say NO to our local plutocrats.

Mission District street flotsam

 

It's no mystery what people around here think of the presumptive Republican nominee. 

My neighborhood and my city have been going through a bad patch, but hearts remain in the right place and heads are screwed on right.

Seasonal pleasures

Having spent the height of autumn in New England, it seems improbable to highlight the astonishing color changes in a few California trees observed in the last week. But they are all around.

I've long joked, since becoming a California immigrant over 50 years ago, that instead of turning colors, the trees around here just get tired and finally drop their leaves.

 

But that dismissive attitude is unfair to trees doing their deciduous thing.

 

Pretty magnificent, actually.

Naturally we Californians can't resist adding our own embellishments.

Dueling demonstrations

I knew this would be a good week to be out of San Francisco. APEC (the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation forum) seems to have brought out the expected raft of protest contingents. One might have expected that the Gaza war, Ukraine, and climate to be main themes, but that wasn't all.

Mission Local covers what seems to me the most interesting aspect of the San Francisco response to the arrival of Chinese President Xi and his meeting with US Prez Joe Biden: dueling Chinese demonstrators.

Flying in from New York and Philadelphia, supporters of Chinese President Xi Jinping waved red Chinese flags and greeted the president’s motorcade on Tuesday, part of a hundreds-strong rally outside the St. Regis Hotel in downtown San Francisco, where Xi is reportedly staying.

“I just want to see him, even if it’s probably just seeing his car going by with a tiny Chinese flag on it,” said Lily Tan, a Chinese national who lives in San Francisco to attend language school.

But Xi's admirers had competitors.

On Wednesday morning, hundreds of demonstrators marched from the Chinese consulate to the security gates near APEC downtown, lambasting what they called human rights abuses by the Chinese government. 

“Shame!” bellowed Jigme Ugen from the Tibetan National Congress outside the consulate, eliciting boos from an internationally-diverse crowd.

... Speakers — from China, Tibet, Hong Kong, and more — advocated against a host of issues: China’s forced education schools and lack of media in Tibet, its political prisoners, its influence in Taiwan, violence against Uyghurs, and its crackdown against Hong Kong.

Alex Chow, who was imprisoned in 2017 for organizing the Umbrella Protest as a student in 2014 and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, described the experience as torturous, especially of seeing his mom behind the glass. One of his co-organizers still is not free, he said, and another is in exile. ...

San Francisco has long been a place where intra-Chinese conflicts manifest visibly. Walking down Chinatown's Grant Avenue, if you look, you can see flags of both the People's Republic and of Taiwan on different buildings and shops. Mostly tourists are oblivious, but China is close by for many San Franciscans.

It's National Coming Out Day

I guess we have to do this a little longer. The enemies of sex and gender diversity are on the march again, so let's remind them "we're here; we're queer; get used to it!"

A few images captured around San Francisco from the days I was walking every street:

San Francisco for people as well as cars

I'm not walking as many San Francisco streets as I did for a long while, but I still get out and about. And I still encounter these sad markers of pedestrian carnage.

My sense is that we've come out of the pandemic driving even more erratically than we did before. The self-driving cab fleet generally smooths the flow; without imagination, the little zombies don't attempt to weave in and out of traffic. But some humans ... !

As of September 22, there had been 14 pedestrian deaths in the San Francisco this year. Two of those killed were older persons using crosswalks in the Mission-Valencia corridor.  

A new bicycle lane down the center of Valencia may or may not be helping. Both drivers and cyclists sometimes seem confused by it.

Advocates and local politicians are focusing on banning some right turns on red lights.

According to the city’s transit agency, turn-on-red crashes account for 20% of all pedestrian or bicycle-related injuries. In an experiment in the Tenderloin, the agency found that banning right turns on red has led to a decline in car collisions with pedestrians and a 70% reduction in cars blocking crosswalks.

Pedestrian advocates will be taking our concerns to the Municipal Transit Board this Tuesday.