State law requires PG&E to pay claims for economic damage caused by system failures.
EDITORIAL The electricity that San Franciscans buy from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. isn't just expensive — it's unreliable. That's what figures from the California Public Utilities Commission show (see "The blackout factor, page 8). In fact, PG&E has more blackouts than any of the public power agencies in the Bay Area.
That has a significant impact on local businesses — but neither City Hall nor the small business community is paying much attention to a multimillion dollar problem.
During the worst days of the California energy crisis, rolling blackouts were a regular event, and the press and public talked constantly about the impact of power outages on businesses and the economy. Now that the worst of that crisis is over, many blackouts get no news media attention at all. But the problem is still serious: reliable power is critical to most business in the Bay Area, and even short-term outages can hit the bottom line.
What do Green Acres, the Roseann Barr show, and the governor's mansion have in common?
A pig named Arnold.
(From the weekend answering machine of Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, back in action after helping deliver one of the worst budgets in California history.) B3
Here is our monthly installment of Joseph E. Stiglitz's Unconventional Economic Wisdom column from the Project Syndicate news series. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.
Stimulate or Die
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
NEW YORK – As the green shoots of economic recovery that many people spied this spring have turned brown, questions are being raised as to whether the policy of jump-starting the economy through a massive fiscal stimulus has failed. Has Keynesian economics been proven wrong now that it has been put to the test?
That question, however, would make sense only if Keynesian economics had really been tried. Indeed, what is needed now is another dose of fiscal stimulus. If that does not happen, we can look forward to an even longer period in which the economy operates below capacity, with high unemployment.
The gentleman's agreement between Fox and MSNBC illustrates the corrosive effect on media of corporate ownership
(FAIR is a media reform group called Fairness & Accuracy in Media)
In the wake of an August 1 expose in the New York Times, an agreement reportedly reached by executives at the parent companies of Fox News Channel and MSNBC to rein in the networks' two stars' criticism of each other seems to have fallen apart. The behind-the-scenes deal-making, though, still illustrates the corrosive effect on media of corporate ownership.
The alleged deal concerned MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly. Olbermann seemed to deny any arrangement limiting his speech, and criticized Fox and O'Reilly right after the Times story was published (8/3/09). O'Reilly, in turn, resumed his criticism of GE on his August 5 show. But many questions remain about the nature of the deal.
California incarcerates 170,000 people in facilities designed for less than half that number.
EDITORIAL A panel of federal judges has ordered the release of 44,000 California prisoners, sending politicians of both parties scrambling for cover and throwing a crucial issue into the heart of the Democratic campaign for governor.
And so far, both major candidates are ducking, badly.
The state prison system is a mess; any sane person knows that. California incarcerates 170,000 people in facilities designed for less than half that number. Sick inmates don't get to see doctors; mentally ill or drug-addicted inmates often get no treatment at all. It's so bad that a federal monitor appointed by the courts has demanded that the state spend $8 billion building new medical facilities for prisoners.
B3: Thom Hartman, on his Air America radio talk show, summed up his health care proposal in one line: From birth to death, everyone in the U.S. should be covered by Medicare. It's the best one line proposal I've heard to date.
Below is his longer version about Medicare in the form of an open letter to President Obama.
I understand you’re thinking of dumping your “public option” because of all the demagoguery by Sarah Palin and Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich and their crowd on right-wing radio and Fox. Fine. Good idea, in fact.
Instead, let’s make it simple. Please let us buy into Medicare.
It would be so easy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with this so-called “public option” that’s a whole new program from the ground up. Medicare already exists. It works. Some people will like it, others won’t – just like the Post Office versus FedEx analogy you’re so comfortable with.
Just pass a simple bill – it could probably be just a few lines, like when Medicare was expanded to include disabled people – that says that any American citizen can buy into the program at a rate to be set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which reflects the actual cost for us to buy into it.
Garamendi has an unmatched history of intensive work on the most pernicious problems that Congress is now wrestling with. And he is a strong advocate for single payer health care.
Garamendi for Congress
EDITORIAL The Sept. 1 special election to replace Ellen Tauscher (who has taken a post with the Obama administration) in the East Bay's Congressional District 10 includes a large field with several great candidates. In fact, any of the top half-dozen or so Democratic Party candidates would be an improvement on Tauscher, a member of the Blue Dog Coalition who supported the Iraq War.
All these top candidates are good on the issues, including requiring a strong public option in health care reform (most go even further and support single-payer), ending the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, withdrawing troops from Iraq and developing an exit strategy for Afghanistan, achieving marriage equality, limiting federal drug and immigration raids, reforming Wall Street, and developing a sustainable energy policy that addresses climate change.
A Q and A audio interview with co-producers Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on their remarkable new documentary, “American Casino,” opening Friday (Aug. 21) at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco for a two week run.
Leslie Cockburn, the widely respected investigative reporter and filmmaker, began work on “American Casino” in January 2008 when she and her husband Andrew recognized the signs of an emerging financial collapse from the subprime meltdown.
They spent the next 12 months filming the terrible effect of the accelerating disaster and have produced in my view one of the very best accounts of how and why $12 million trillion dollars vanished in the American Casino.
The reason the film is so good is because the Cockburn team were working with great freedom as independent filmmakers and they are both superb reporters who know how to put an investigative story together clearly and with impact and authority. You really don’t feel you understand the collapse until you’ve seen this documentary.
Leslie, who was born and raised in San Francisco, was among the first women to graduate from Yale. She went on to produce many award-winning stories for PBS, CBS and ABC news, including “From the Killing Fields” for the ABC News documentary show Peter Jennings Reports. She conceived and co-produced “The Peacemaker,” a thriller starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman about a planned terrorist attack on New York City.
Andrew is a member of the famous Cockburn journalism family that count father Claud, two brothers Patrick and Alex, two nieces and Leslie. He has produced journalism in many forms including books, newspaper and magazine articles and “The Red Army,” a 198l film on the Russian military that debunked the widely held opinion at that time that the Russian military machine was equal to the U.S. military. In l998, he and brother Patrick published the book, “Out of the Ashes, the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.” When Hussein found out about the book, he decreed that anyone caught selling it would be hanged. In l987, Andrew and Leslie began their collaboration by producing documentaries for PBS Frontline.
Andrew claims he is not shocked by the financial disasters he researched in “American Casino.” His father covered the l929 Crash as a correspondent for the London Times and Andrew grew up listening to the stories.
“American Casino” opens Friday night with a showing at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th st., followed by Q and A sessions by Leslie and Claud. The show plays Saturday night at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. with Q and A sessions. The move runs for the next two weeks. The Q and A sessions will be a special treat, as the audio interview above demonstrates.
The mayor's leaked memo puts the city treasury at risk, possibly violates the law, and promotes his gubernatorial ambitions at the expense of sound city policy
Click here to read Sarah Phelan's story in this week's Guardian titled, Restoring the sanctuary.
EDITORIAL At the heart of the conflict over Sup. David Campos' recent sanctuary legislation is a basic issue of civil rights: Should a young San Francisco immigrant arrested by the local police be treated as innocent until proven guilty — or should that person face deportation, even if the arrest is bogus and no formal charges are ever filed?
All Campos wants to do is establish that an arrest is not a conviction — and, as anyone who works with youth or immigrants in the city knows, thousands of innocent people are picked up by the police every year, sometimes because of simple mistakes, more often because the local cops have a propensity to arrest young people of color in disproportionate numbers.
Why bar women from playing baseball? Baeball officials have never even bothered to explain.
By Dick Meister
Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based freelance columnist, has covered labor and political issues for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator.
Another season of professional baseball is upon us, another season of a sport that's billed as the "National Pastime," yet bars half the population
- the female half - from the playing field.
Major and minor league teams, as well as most amateur and semi-professional clubs, have kept the game largely what it has been since its beginnings: a chewing, spitting, macho game reserved for men. Women are allowed to watch, but only rarely have they been allowed to come out of the stands and play.
Major League Baseball made it official in 1952, when teams were banned from signing major or minor league contracts with women.
Where Is the Afghanistan Debate?
When public support slips, TV packs in war boosters
With new polls showing the American public becoming increasingly critical of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, the Sunday morning network talkshows turned primarily to Pentagon officials and war boosters to discuss the issue, continuing the media marginalization of critics of the escalation of the war (Extra!, 4/09).
The most recent ABC/Washington Post poll (8/13-17/09) found that 51 percent of respondents believe the war is not worth fighting--the first time that position has received majority support. Just 24 percent supported sending more troops to Afghanistan, while 45 percent think the level of troops should be decreased.
I liked Ted Kennedy for lots of reasons. But I think I liked him the most because, in carrying the Kennedy family torch for all these decades, he was the most liberal of the Kennedys and he never backed down from calling himself a liberal, even when the word went out of fashion and lots of "liberals" were ducking for cover. To me, a liberal is someone who tries to make things better.
Kennedy spent his Senate career working tirelessly and effectively to make things better, for all of us, and applying his liberal voice to a breathtaking range of issues from health care reform, to civil rights, to opposing the Gulf and Iraq wars, to backing Obama at the right moment.
If Kennedy had not been stricken in the middle of his greatest battlle and his greatest cause ("health care for all is the cause of my life"), I'm certain that single payer health care would not have been taken off the table so cravenly and there would at minimum be a real public option with real public support and without a lot of cowering Democrats and Republicans. And there would be real health care reform, perhaps a version of Medicare for all, with a liberal Ted Kennedy imprimatur. He was the one politician in all these years and all these battles who could have made it happen. Alas. Alas.
The Boston Phoenix, the liberal alternative newsweekly of Boston and New England, has covered the Kennedys and liberal Ted since Steve Mindich founded the paper in l966.
Click here to view its splendid coverage, updated regularly.
Cheney's 'Fodder'
Cheney's torture claims debunked; will the media say so?
The release of a 2004 CIA inspector general's report on the agency's "enhanced interrogation" techniques, along with two other previously classified memos, has thrown a harsh spotlight on former Vice President Dick Cheney's oft-repeated pro-torture arguments. But corporate media seem intent on deflecting much of that glare.
Earlier this year, Cheney spent weeks on the airwaves, explaining that these CIA memos would back up his argument that torture provided valuable intelligence that helped thwart attacks against the United States (FAIR Media Advisory, 5/29/09). But the heavily redacted documents don't appear to do that. Of the two that Cheney asserted would help his case, reporter Spencer Ackerman noted (Washington Independent, 8/24/09) they "actually suggest the opposite of Cheney's contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations."
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