By Dick Meister

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just behind City Hall stand the restored quarters of the British garrison
that was stationed in the city for more than a century, one of the buildings
now housing a museum full of anti-revolutionary twaddle. Captions below
portraits of leading Loyalists praised them for "faith, courage, sacrifices"
against Yankees, who were for the most part described as violent, crude,
rude and vulgar.

Here, too, a portrait of George III hung in a place of honor. Among the
Loyalists singled out was that other fine fellow, Benedict Arnold, who lived
in New Brunswick before slinking off to Mother England in 1791. At least the
museum keepers had the decency to own up to Arnold's "reputation for
crookedness."

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

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

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

Sure. Funny, though, that they forgot to call off the mosquitoes.

Dick Meister lives in San Francisco, but has spent a lot of time among our
former enemies in Canada.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Note: In July of l972, when the Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter. I now reprint it each year on the Bruce blog, with some San Francisco updates and postscripts.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the roof of the Guardian building at 135 Mississippi, and from any Potrero Hill height, you can see the fireworks in several directions: the waterfront fireworks in the city, fireworks on the Marin side of the Golden Gate bridge, fireworks at several points in the East Bay, fireworks along the Peninsula coast line.

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

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

Next week, Congress is scheduled to vote on reauthorization of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which directs $2.2 billion annually in federal grants to small technology businesses across the country.

The problem, according to Hauge and White, is that the House bill contains a provision which changes the definition of small business to include subsidiaries of multinational corporations and companies that are majority-owned by multi-billion venture capital funds and other large financial institutions, including foreign financial institutions.

Click here to read their statement. They recommend that people call Rep. Nancy Pelosi's office and Rep. Jackie Speie's office to oppose the changes and keep the original SBIR small business eligibility criteria in place.

The UN Takes Charge

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

NEW YORK – While discussions about economic “green shoots” continue unabated in the United States, in many countries, and especially in the developing world, matters are getting worse. The downturn in the US began with a failure in the financial system, which quickly was translated into a slowdown in the real economy. But, in the developing world, it is just the opposite: a decline in exports, reduced remittances, lower foreign direct investment, and precipitous falls in capital flows have led to economic weakening. As a result, even countries with good regulatory systems are now confronting problems in their financial sectors.

On June 23, a United Nations conference focusing on the global economic crisis and its impact on developing countries reached a consensus both about the causes of the downturn and why it was affecting developing countries so badly. It outlined some of the measures that should be considered and established a working group to explore the way forward, possibly under the guidance of a newly established expert group.

One might have thought that the United States would have taken a leadership role, since the crisis was made there. Indeed, the US Treasury (including some officials who are currently members of President Barack Obama’s economic team) pushed capital- and financial-market liberalization, which resulted in the rapid contagion of America’s problems around the world.

While there was less American leadership than one would have hoped, indeed expected under the circumstances, many participants were simply relieved that America did not put up obstacles to reaching a global consensus, as would have been the case if George W. Bush were still president.

One might have hoped that America would be the first to offer large amounts of money to help the many innocent victims of the policies it had championed. But it did not, and Obama had to fight hard to extract even limited amounts for the International Monetary Fund from a reluctant Congress.

But many developing countries have just emerged from being overburdened with debt; they do not want to go through that again. The implication is that they need grants, not loans. The G-20, which turned to the IMF to provide most of the money that the developing countries need to cope with the crisis, did not take sufficient note of this; the UN conference did.

The most sensitive issue touched upon by the UN conference – too sensitive to be discussed at the G-20 – was reform of the global reserve system. The build-up of reserves contributes to global imbalances and insufficient global aggregate demand, as countries put aside hundreds of billions of dollars as a precaution against global volatility. Not surprisingly, America, which benefits by getting trillions of dollars of loans from developing countries – now at almost no interest – was not enthusiastic about the discussion.

But, whether the US likes it or not, the dollar reserve system is fraying; the question is only whether we move from the current system to an alternative in a haphazard way, or in a more careful and structured way. Those with large amounts of reserves know that holding dollars is a bad deal: no or low return and a high risk of inflation or currency depreciation, either of which would diminish their holdings’ real value.

On the last day of the conference, as America was expressing its reservations about even discussing at the UN this issue which affects all countries’ well being, China was once again reiterating that the time had come to begin working on a global reserve currency. Since a country’s currency can be a reserve currency only if others are willing to accept it as such, time may be running out for the dollar.

Emblematic of the difference between the UN and the G-20 conferences was the discussion of bank secrecy: whereas the G-20 focused on tax evasion, the UN Conference addressed corruption, too, which some experts contend gives rise to outflows from some of the poorest countries that are greater than the foreign assistance they receive.

The US and other advanced industrial countries pushed globalization. But this crisis has shown that they have not managed globalization as well as they should have. If globalization is to work for everyone, decisions about how to manage it must be made in a democratic and inclusive manner – with the participation of both the perpetrators and the victims of the mistakes.

The UN, notwithstanding all of its flaws, is the one inclusive international institution. This UN conference, like an earlier one on financing for developing countries, demonstrated the key role that the UN must play in any global discussion about reforming the global financial and economic system.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, chairs a Commission of Experts, appointed by the President of the UN General Assembly, on reforms of the international monetary and financial system. A new global reserve currency system is discussed in his 2006 book, Making Globalization Work.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org

Kamala Harris, the San Francisco district attorney, has set up a laudable program called Back on Track that offers counseling and job training for first-time drug offenders who otherwise would be clogging up the local jail.
A handful of the people who went into the program were undocumented immigrants. Some completed the program successfully and were allowed to graduate.

This is a problem?

And Harris, who is running for state attorney general, is scrambling to cover herself, announcing that undocumented immigrants will no longer be allowed to go through the program. In other words, to get rehabilitation instead of jail time in San Francisco, you now have to submit proof of citizenship.

There's a whole lot wrong with this picture. The critics attacking Harris claim that undocumented immigrants don't deserve job training since they can't work in this country legally anyway. That's just silly — tens of thousands of immigrants who lack legal documentation are working in San Francisco right now, and tens of thousands will continue to work in San Francisco. And they're generally a productive part of the economy and community. These immigrants already face barriers to attending college. The only thing that denying first-offenders job training does is increase the chance they will return to crime.

Yes, the L.A. Times was able to find one person enrolled in the program who went out and committed robbery and assault. He was the only one of seven undocumented people in the program who had legal problems while attending. The others were allowed to graduate, had their criminal records erased, and, given the overall results of the program, were far less likely than people who had served jail time to re-offend.

Unfortunately, the daily newspaper stories are just the latest attack on San Francisco's Sanctuary City policy, which is supposed to bar local law enforcement from turning people over to federal immigration authorities. Mayor Gavin Newsom has backed away from the sanctuary policy — and now Harris is backing away, too.

The district attorney says that allowing undocumented immigrants into her program was a mistake, and that it's been "fixed." That's the wrong approach. Prisons and county jails in California are jammed beyond capacity. The cost of incarcerating all those people is staggering and helping to bankrupt the state. And the threat of deportation has created a climate of terror and desperation in immigrant communities, where families are being ripped apart and lives shattered by overzealous federal agents.

And the weak responses by San Francisco city officials are just empowering the radical nativists, who want to blame all of society's problems on immigrants.

Harris did nothing wrong and has no need to apologize or change her program. Job training as an alternative to jail is good public policy — for citizens and noncitizens. She and Mayor Newsom ought to be defending the Sanctuary City laws instead of running away from them. If this is what it takes to seek statewide office, the mayor and district attorney would better serve their constituents by staying at home.

San Francisco Celebrates The 40th Anniversary of Woodstock
Announces Partial Huge Line-up For Free Concert
Golden Gate Park — October 25, 2009

Event: “West Fest” Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock
Producer: 2b1 Multimedia Inc. and the Council of Light in association with
Artie Kornfeld, the original producer of “Woodstock 1969”
When: October 25, 2009, 9am to 6pm
Where: Speedway Meadows, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA USA
Non-Profit: 501-(c) 3
Admission: FREE
Contact: Boots Hughston, 415-861-1520 www.2b1records.com/woodstock40sf or woodstock40sf@yahoo.com

June 25th, 2009—Acts confirmed with more to come: Country Joe (Country Joe and the Fish), Denny Laine (Paul McCartney, Wings, Moody Blues), Lester Chambers (the Chambers Brothers), The Original Lowrider Band (with Lee Oskar), Harvey Mandel and the Snake band, Barry “The Fish” Melton, David Denny (Steve Miller), Alameda All Stars (Gregg Allman's Band), Michael McClure (Beat Poet) and Ray Manzarek (the Doors), PF Sloan, Michael Narada Waldon, Jimmy McCarty (from Detroit Wheels), Peter Kaukonen (from Jefferson Airplane), Terry Haggerty (from the Sons of Champlin), John York (from the Byrds), Leigh Stevens (from Blue Cheer), The Great Jeffersonian Tricycle (members of the Original Jefferson Airplane), Greg Douglass (from Steve Miller), El Chicano, Cathy Richardson (Starship), David and Linda La Flamme (from it's a Beautiful Day), Lydia Pense and Cold Blood, Lost Creek Gang and the Merry Pranksters, featuring, Ken Babbs, George Walker, and Mountain Girl, Scoop Nisker - KFOG, David Harris - speaker, Ben Fong -Torres (Rolling Stone), Jose Neto and Friends, Dennis Peron and Richard Eastman (Marijuana Initiative), Terrance Hallinan (Former SF DA),

Poster Artists series: Staley Mouse, Arnold Skolnick (original Woodstock 69 poster artist), Chris Shaw, Mike Dolgushkin, Wendy Wright, David Singer, Wes Wilson, Mark Henson, Carlon Ferris, Dave Huckins, Lee Conklin, Bob Masse, Andrew Annenberg, Victor Moscosco, Michael Moss, Thomas Yeats, Chrissy Costello, Gilbert Johnson, Ron Donovin - Fire House Crew.

In honor of Jimi Hendrix, who headlined the festival in 1969, 3,000
guitar players will attempt to break the World's Record for the Largest
Guitar Ensemble playing "Purple Haze" -- all at the same time!
Players are encouraged to register at:
www.steveroby.com/Jimi_Hendrix_Archives/Register.html
OVERVIEW:

Woodstock was not just an event, a happening, or a concert with 400,000 people. It was a pivotal moment of realization for an entire generation, an epiphany, a moment of realization for the entire country. The hip movement started in San Francisco a couple of years earlier in the Haight Ashbury and the “Summer of Love” had spread across the nation. There were now millions of hip people with 400,000 of them converging on Woodstock.

Woodstock was a statement to the world, “humanity had evolved”, coming together through peace, love and spirituality. An event whose original intent was to make money became the largest FREE event in history. The hip movement had come of age and was recognized by the world. The principles of love swept the country and we had become the 'Woodstock Nation”.

Hundreds of San Francisco stars and musical luminaries will perform at this October 25, 2009 event to commemorate the original principles of peace, love and spirituality. The Woodstock 40th will begin with a blessing by the American Indigenous People and several Beat Generation poets. There will be many speakers from the Peace Movement, the Free Speech Movement and the Anti-War Movement along with many of the acts who originally performed at Woodstock (to be announced). There will also be an “Eco Friendly Green Village” highlighting the products, services, and information of the emerging green movement.

Lee Houskeeper
Managing Editor
San Francisco Stories
615 Burnett Avenue, Suite 2, San Francisco, CA 94131
http://www.sanfranciscostories.com/
(415) 777-4700 Newsservice@aol.com

Thoughts on the death of Michael Jackson

Let there be no doubt about it, I'm saddened to learn that singer Michael Jackson has died.

My sadness isn't, however, because I will miss his music. Truth be told, I don't believe I could name any song he recorded since he sang "Never Can Say Goodbye" or "Ben" -- whichever one came first. I probably heard him sing, however, before most anyone I know. I was stationed outside of Detroit in 1969 and 1970 and I remember watching him and his brothers on local television there.

He was cute and amusing. And it was clear he had a lot of talent.

It was 1993, however, when he sort of stepped into my life and changed things forever. It was when a Los Angeles Police detective blessed me by tipping me to what was, up until today, the biggest single entertainment story in history. I was able to break the story that the police were investigating the famous singer as a possible child molester.

The information had come to me from a longtime contact -- a contact I trusted and still enjoy being his friend today.
I had already learned about pedophiles. In fact, I knew more about the subject than most any journalist.

Was Michael Jackson a child molester? Was he a pedophile? Nobody ever proved it in criminal court and a secret, out-of-court settlement prevented the civil trial from ever happening.

The veteran detective investigating Michael Jackson was convinced that he was a pedophile. If there was ever someone who fit the FBI's profile of pedophiles, it was Michael Jackson.

But that doesn't mean that anything every really happened. And after the media circus that my story triggered, I'm not sure I would believe anything that might have surfaced since then.

But I can say that Michael Jackson's death was a tragedy that followed a life that was, in its own way, tragic.
If he was a pedophile -- if his interest in children was, in reality, unhealthy or criminal, one would only have to look at the world into which he was born to understand why.

The one thing that this parent-driven child celebrity never experienced was a normal childhood. What child could experience normalcy when he was on the road with older brothers who were dealing with groupies in the hotel room every night? I'm convinced he was the victim of child abuse and that these factors took a tragic toll on him.
Imagine being so famous, so gifted, so rich and yet so lonely and lost in the world.

These are the kinds of things that lead people down paths that aren't normal -- that lead people to do things that our society doesn't (and shouldn't) allow.

When the shock of his death wears off and people take a microscope to his tragic life, we're likely to learn more about what really happened.

But whether the allegations were true or false, Michael Jackson is still a tragic figure -- even when he was alive.

By the way, that's not really Michael Jackson trying to strangle me in the photo above. It was a Michael Jackson look-alike who shared a talk-show stage with me in Chicago. Just for the fun of it, someone set up the photo and someone else pretended to be the body guard.

I'm so sorry that Michael Jackson died before he would know what life is really all about. Indeed, he'll join Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe in history and legend.

Maybe he can rest in peace.

The cost of sending your kid to a city day camp will jump 35 percent. The cost of after-school latchkey programs will go up 112 percent. It will cost a dollar more to swim in a public pool. Annual swim passes for seniors and people with economic needs will rise by $25. And that's on top of the Muni fare hike. Fines, fees and licenses will go up a staggering 41 percent.

In other words, poor people who use city services will see their taxes — that is, the cost of using city services — go up significantly. But rich people, big business, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., property owners — they won't pay anything more at all. (Of course, if you own a small tatoo parlor, your city fees will go up 1,200 percent.)
This is one of the essential lies of the Newsom budget. It's not revenue-neutral at all; it just raises taxes on the poor.
It's also not a budget that shares the economic pain fairly.

Firefighters in San Francisco get pay and benefit parity with the cops — and the cops have gotten nice raises recently, in part because it's been hard to recruit people to work for the San Francisco Police Department. On the other hand, there are 5,000 people on the waiting list to apply for a job as a San Francisco firefighter.

The Police Department's due for a budget increase, too — of more than $15 million. The budget analyst suggests that $4 million of that could be cut without damaging law enforcement.

Then there's the Mayor's Office, where a staff of five people handle public relations for Newsom, at a cost to the public of $653,571. When Art Agnos was mayor in the late 1980s, he managed to get by with just one press secretary. The population of the city hasn't changed; the number of reporters at City Hall has decreased. Why does Newsom need five times as many people in his communications office? And how much of that public money is actually being used to promote the mayor's campaign for governor?

Those are just some of the revelations from the reports of the budget analyst and the hearings so far. And they add up to a budget situation that's very different from anything the city has seen in years.

The Board of Supervisors typically tinkers with the mayor's budget, changing a million here and a million there. This time the mayor has in effect declared war on the supervisors, appearing with the firefighters at rallies and denouncing board members (at one point Newsom told reporters, "Thank god we have a mayor.") The outcome of the current budget hearings will be a test for the progressive majority on the board, and particularly for president David Chiu. The board members have to be willing to essentially tear up the mayor's budget, restructure the priorities, replace the fee increases with fair new taxes (even if it means including in the budget projections for tax measures to go on the November ballot), and eliminate the embarrassing waste.

Click here to read a recent Meister post, Jack Henning's lifelong crusade

Jack Henning was a notably outspoken and forceful leader, as this sampling from his writings and speeches should make clear:

On the Role of Labor

Although labor is no longer acknowledged as the principal agent of social change in American society, it is the one progressive force with the capacity to build a new and nobler nation. Labor teachings must be honored if the nation is to enjoy liberal priorities, if the nation is to know full employment, racial amity, academic freedom, adequate housing, decent health and the social services of a contemporary state....

The labor movement must remain liberal if it is to survive. We can argue about the definition of liberalism, but we know it as a commitment to wages and hours and conditions of work that are worthy of the human person and as a commitment to the service of all humanity....

Tip: pin down Newsom and pin down the supervisors and everybody who is running for mayor on these critical PG&E moves. After all, in this budget crisis, public power is the largest potential source of new revenue for San Francisco (upwards of $300 million a year) and public power would stop the enormous financial drain of PG&E's expensive private power (PG&E yanks upwards of $650 million a year out of the local economy in high rates.)

PG&E's new attacks on public power

The ability of cities to switch to public power could be eliminated if a proposed state ballot initiative moves forward

By Rebecca Bowe
rebeccab@sfbg.com

A ballot initiative backed by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. could amount to a death sentence for community choice aggregation (CCA) and expanded public power in California.

Dubbed the Taxpayers Right to Vote Act, the proposed initiative would require a two-thirds majority vote at the ballot before any local government could establish a CCA program, use public funding to implement a plan to become a CCA provider, or expand electric service to new territory or new customers.

Click here to continue reading.

As Rebecca Bowe reports, a proposed initiative that would require two-thirds of the voters to approve any sort of public electricity measure, including community choice aggregation (CCA), has been submitted to the state attorney general's office. And Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s fingerprints are all over it.

There's no doubt whatsoever that this measure is designed to derail successful CCA efforts in places like Marin County and San Francisco, where the supervisors are moving forward to set up the equivalent of a buyer's co-op for electricity. A San Francisco CCA would offer lower costs and much greener power — and would give the city far more control over its energy future.

The state Legislature approved a bill back in 2002 allowing California cities to replace private utility service with CCAs — and the bill included language barring PG&E and the other giant electricity companies in the state from spending money to undermine CCA efforts. In other words, it's illegal for PG&E to use its immense resources and lobbying clout to try to block San Francisco's efforts.

And PG&E has spent tens of millions of dollars in San Francisco, Davis, and elsewhere trying to block public-power programs.

So now the utility is going to the state ballot, where a campaign with enough money on an issue that's sufficiently complicated can often pass. The law firm that filed the initiative papers, Neilsen Merksama (a political powerhouse that represents, among others, PG&E) won't divulge much about the funding sources — except to say that the filing fee came from ... PG&E. So there's little doubt the measure will have the funds it needs to gather more than 600,000 signatures and mount a campaign of lies and disinformation.

That's why supporters of CCAs and public power need to rally, now, to start planning to defeat this thing.

Mustering a two-thirds majority at the ballot for almost anything is difficult. Even in liberal San Francisco, bond measures requiring a two-thirds vote often pass only narrowly — and that's if there's no opposition. Even the most popular sorts of measures — say, for funding schools or libraries — can go down to defeat if anyone mounts serious opposition.

And PG&E, with its unlimited resources, would have the ability to kill the current CCA plans — or anything in the future that threatens the company's illegal monopoly.

The two-thirds majority requirement is undemocratic and has paralyzed state government. Two-thirds mandates for new tax measures have made it almost impossible for cities and counties in this state to raise new revenue, even in desperate times like these.

The San Francisco supervisors need to immediately pass a resolution opposing the measure. Assembly Member Tom Ammiano and state Sen. Mark Leno have told us they oppose it, and they should see if there's any way the Legislature can add language to the CCA bill to bar regulated utilities from spending money to undermine public power statewide. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission should be talking to public power agencies all over the state and helping organize the opposition. If the measure makes it onto the ballot, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and every other municipal utility agency in the state will need to raise money — millions — and marshal forces against it.

This is a very serious threat, and the time to start defusing it is now.

P.S.: Mayor Newsom has nominated Anson Moran, the former general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, for a seat on the commission. This is a terrible idea. Moran had a notoriously anti-public power record when he was running the agency. In fact, in 1994, he tried to stop the city from bidding on the lucrative contract to supply electricity to the Presidio, saying that going up against PG&E would be "too political." And although he later said he would be willing to bid on the contract, he privately urged then-Mayor Frank Jordan to veto then-Sup. Angela Alioto's measure pushing for public power at the Presidio. With all the battles over CCA and public power, the last thing the city needs is a PG&E call-up vote on the PUC. The Rules Committee hears the nomination June 18, and should vote to reject him.

Click here to read Rebecca Bowe’s article, Which kind of poison?: The push to shut down Mirant's aging power plant cculd get rid of a polluting power source and shift the polluting problem to the poor communiy of Pittsburg 40 miles away. And PG@E and Mirant would impose a further lock on their private power monopoly on San Francisco and further violate the federal Raker Act that mandates public power for San Francisco.

The mayor's cheery line may sound good when he's out of town running for governor, but it's not going to play so well on the streets of San Francisco.

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom was upbeat when he delivered his budget proposal last week. It won't be that bad, he told everyone — "At the end of the day, it's a math problem."

Well, actually, it's not. At the end of the day, it's job losses, major cuts to city services, and hidden taxes — most of them, despite the mayor's rhetoric, falling on the backs of the poor.

You can't cut $70 million from the Department of Public Health — which is already operating at bare-bones levels after years of previous cuts — without significant impacts on health care for San Franciscans. You can't cut $19 million out of the Human Services Agency without badly hurting homeless and needy people. You can't raise Muni fares to $2 without taking cash out of the pockets of working-class people. The mayor's cheery line may sound good when he's out of town running for governor, but it's not going to play so well on the streets of San Francisco.

Just for the record, here are a few of the proposed cuts:

A 21-bed acute psychiatric unit would be shut and replaced with an 18-bed unit for milder cases. Where would the seriously mentally ill go?

The number of home-healthcare workers, the folks who take care of the very sick who need skilled clinical services in the home, would be cut by 30 percent. Those clients would either suffer, go to (expensive) hospitals, or die.

Ongoing outpatient mental health services would be limited to the most severe cases. People who are, for now, only moderately mentally ill would lose access to care (until, without care, they become severely mentally ill).

The emergency food-bag program for seniors will lose $50,000, so hungry senior citizens won't get to eat.

Almost $3 million will be cut from community-based organizations that provide direct, frontline services to the homeless.

Almost half of the city's recreation directors — people who provide direct services and mentoring to at-risk youth — will be laid off.

The Tenderloin Housing Clinic Eviction Defense Center, the only place that offers free legal defense for Ellis Act evictions, will lose funding, leaving hundreds of tenants at risk of losing their homes.

Drop-in centers will close. Programs for homeless youth will shut down. More homeless people with increasingly more serious mental illness will be wandering the streets with nowhere to go for help.

Mayor Newsom brags in his campaign ads about creating private-sector jobs — but the budget will mean layoffs not just for city employees but for perhaps 1,000 nonprofit workers. That dwarfs the job creation he's claiming — and defies the Obama administration's call for government and private business to try to preserve and create jobs.

This isn't a math problem. It's a political problem, and the supervisors need to make it very clear that the mayor's budget isn't going to fly.

The supervisors need to take the budget apart, piece by piece, and reset its priorities. Newsom increases funding for police investigators by $7 million, while cutting the Public Defender's Office by $2 million. He's preserving his own bloated political operation (a big press office, highly paid special assistants and programs like 311 that are part of his gubernatorial campaign) while eliminating big parts of the social safety net. He's raising bus fares, but not taxes on downtown.

"The mayor has presented his vision," Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the Budget Committee, explained. "Now our priorities have to be presented."

This can't be a modest, typical budget negotiation with the supervisors tweaking a few items here and there. This is a battle for San Francisco, for its future and its soul, and the supervisors need to start talking, today, about how they're going to fight back. *

America’s Socialism for the Rich

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

With all the talk of “green shoots” of economic recovery, America’s banks are pushing back on efforts to regulate them. While politicians talk about their commitment to regulatory reform to prevent a recurrence of the crisis, this is one area where the devil really is in the details – and the banks will muster what muscle they have left to ensure that they have ample room to continue as they have in the past.

The old system worked well for the banks (if not for their shareholders), so why should they embrace change? Indeed, the efforts to rescue them devoted so little thought to the kind of post-crisis financial system we want that we will end up with a banking system that is less competitive, with the large banks that were too big too fail even larger.

This is not just theory; it is a lesson we learned, at great expense, during the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980’s. When the ATM machine says, “insufficient funds,” the government doesn’t want this to mean that the bank, rather than your account, is out of money, so it intervenes before the till is empty. In a financial restructuring, shareholders typically get wiped out, and bondholders become the new shareholders. Sometimes, the government must provide additional funds, or a new investor must be willing to take over the failed bank.

The Obama administration has, however, introduced a new concept: too big to be financially restructured. The administration argues that all hell would break loose if we tried to play by the usual rules with these big banks. Markets would panic. So, not only can’t we touch the bondholders, we can’t even touch the shareholders – even if most of the shares’ existing value merely reflects a bet on a government bailout.

I think this judgment is wrong. I think the Obama administration has succumbed to political pressure and scare-mongering by the big banks. As a result, the administration has confused bailing out the bankers and their shareholders with bailing out the banks.

Restructuring gives banks a chance for a new start: new potential investors (whether holders of equity or debt instruments) will have more confidence, other banks will be more willing to lend to them, and they will be more willing to lend to others. The bondholders will gain from an orderly restructuring, and if the value of the assets is truly greater than the market (and outside analysts) believe, they will eventually reap the gains.

But what is clear is that the Obama strategy’s current and future costs are very high – and so far, it has not achieved its limited objective of restarting lending. The taxpayer has had to pony up billions, and has provided billions more in guarantees – bills that are likely to come due in the future.

Rewriting the rules of the market economy – in a way that has benefited those that have caused so much pain to the entire global economy – is worse than financially costly. Most Americans view it as grossly unjust, especially after they saw the banks divert the billions intended to enable them to revive lending to payments of outsized bonuses and dividends. Tearing up the social contract is something that should not be done lightly.

But this new form of ersatz capitalism, in which losses are socialized and profits privatized, is doomed to failure. Incentives are distorted. There is no market discipline. The too-big-to-be-restructured banks know that they can gamble with impunity – and, with the Federal Reserve making funds available at near-zero interest rates, there are ample funds to do so.

Some have called this new economic regime “socialism with American characteristics.” But socialism is concerned about ordinary individuals. By contrast, the United States has provided little help for the millions of Americans who are losing their homes. Workers who lose their jobs receive only 39 weeks of limited unemployment benefits, and are then left on their own. And, when they lose their jobs, most lose their health insurance, too.

America has expanded its corporate safety net in unprecedented ways, from commercial banks to investment banks, then to insurance, and now to automobiles, with no end in sight. In truth, this is not socialism, but an extension of long standing corporate welfarism. The rich and powerful turn to the government to help them whenever they can, while needy individuals get little social protection.

We need to break up the too-big-to-fail banks; there is no evidence that these behemoths deliver societal benefits that are commensurate with the costs they have imposed on others. And, if we don’t break them up, then we have to severely limit what they do. They can’t be allowed to do what they did in the past – gamble at others’ expenses.

This raises another problem with America’s too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-be-restructured banks: they are too politically powerful. Their lobbying efforts worked well, first to deregulate, and then to have taxpayers pay for the cleanup. Their hope is that it will work once again to keep them free to do as they please, regardless of the risks for taxpayers and the economy. We cannot afford to let that happen.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, chairs a Commission of Experts, appointed by the President of the UN General Assembly, on reforms of the international monetary and financial system. A new global reserve currency system is discussed in his 2006 book, Making Globalization Work.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister has covered labor and political issues in California for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. To read a sampling from Jack Henning's writings and speeches, click here)

California lost a remarkable public figure with the death of John F. Henning
on June 4 at age 93. Labor leader, government official, ambassador. Jack
Henning had been all of those - and more - during a career that spanned many
decades.

Eloquent, visionary, forceful, successful. He had been all of that, too, in
what was a lifelong crusade in behalf of those who do the work of the world
and against the wealthy and privileged who exploit them.

Few leaders of any kind have been as liberal and outspoken as Jack Henning,
a gifted orator who had the rare ability to sway people with words as well
as deeds, and few leaders have ever done more for ordinary people.

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has covered labor and political issues for a half-century as a print, broadcast and online reporter, editor and commentator.)

It's been three-quarters of a century since enactment of the National Labor Relations Act that grants U.S. workers the basic legal right of unionization
- the right to bargain with employers on setting their wages, hours and working conditions.

But for all that time, two groups of our most highly exploited workers have been denied the law's protections - farm workers, and housekeepers, nannies, and other domestic workers.