San Francisco Bay Guardian

Bruce Blog

The mayor's horrible deal

07.27.10 - 12:09 pm | Guardian Editorial |

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The Supervisors should pass legislation outlawing vote trading for all local elected officials, including Newsom

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom put the supervisors in a terrible position — and showed the worst kind of political arrogance — when he held $43 million worth of critical services hostage to his desire to continue packing commissions with political hacks. The deal he presented to the board was shameful, and the supervisors should have rejected it. And now they should pass legislation to make this sort of logrolling illegal.Read more »

Safety first!

07.23.10 - 3:10 pm | Dick Meister |

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Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

The number of serious on-the-job accidents this year have yet again made very clear the urgent need for expanded and tightened government safety regulation. The toll on workers has been high, as President Cecil Roberts of the United Mine Workers union told the House Education and Labor Committee in mid-July.

Roberts noted the explosion at a mine in West Virginia that killed 29 coal miners, a blast at a refinery in Washington State that killed seven workers, the BP oil rig blast in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11, an explosion that killed six workers at an Energy Systems facility in Connecticut. Read more »

Small biz should support Chiu tax plan

07.20.10 - 11:07 am | Guardian Editorial |

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A new proposal to make the flat payroll tax more progressive and exempt more small businesses

EDITORIAL It's rare to see a fairly conservative city agency, created in part to make it harder for progressives to push measures that might affect business, come down in favor of a new business tax. But the San Francisco Office of Economic Analysis has concluded that the proposal by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu to change the local payroll tax and impose a new tax on commercial rents would actually help local businesses, particularly small businesses. The proposal presents a crucial opportunity for progressives to make the case that the Chamber of Commerce and big downtown corporations are not advancing the interests of small businesses — and local merchant groups need to pay attention.

Chiu has taken on a problem that has lingered in San Francisco for decades. The city's business tax is terribly regressive: Only 10 percent of the companies in town even pay the payroll tax, in part because banks, insurance companies, and financial services firms are exempt under state law. That means the burden falls the heaviest on small and medium-sized companies — the ones that provide most of the net job growth in the city.

The new proposal would make the flat payroll tax more progressive and would exempt more small businesses. It would also raise $28 million more a year for the cash-strapped municipal coffers by taxing commercial rents of more than $60,000 a year. Read more »

Congress is acting stupidly

07.19.10 - 1:03 pm | Dick Meister |

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AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka has it right. It's not the heat in Washington, D.C., that's bothering him and many other advocates of working people. It's the stupidity - the economic stupidity of Congress refusing to give financial aid to states that badly need help in order t o save the jobs of some 300,000 teachers, nurses, firefighters, police and other public service workers who are facing layoffs because of budget deficits.

The possible remedy is at hand – a pending $100 billion jobs bill. Most of the money would go to states for quickly creating or saving up to one million jobs in public and private employment, restoring government services that have been cut, and averting other planned cuts, mostly in education, public safety and job training. Read more »

The martyrdom of Mooney and Billings

07.16.10 - 1:44 pm | Dick Meister |

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Dick Meister , former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

It was an unusually hot July day in San Francisco. There was a parade on that day in 1916 – a “Preparedness Day” parade organized by local Republican businessmen. It was intended to drum up support for U.S. entry into World War I and embarrass Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, who was running for re-election on a platform that stressed, “He kept us out of war!”

A lot of people supported neither the war nor the parade, however. The opponents particularly included the union organizers who were the radicals of that period – “reds” who were trying to establish the right of unionization in the face of often violent opposition from the business interests who controlled the city and who most assuredly supported the war. Read more »

Fix the BART police force - or disband it

07.13.10 - 1:24 pm | Guardian Editorial |

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18 months after a BART cop shot Oscar Grant, the transit agency still doesn't have effective police oversight

EDITORIAL Who murdered Oscar Grant? Part of the equation is the years of neglect of the BART Police. — Assembly Member Tom Ammiano

We're angry, too.

Angry that a police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man could wind up with little or no prison time. Angry that the news media whipped up such a fervor over the potential for a riot in Oakland that it almost guaranteed someone would show up and break a few windows. Angry that the jury who decided this case was 400 miles away and included no African Americans.

But mostly we're angry that 18 months after a BART cop shot Oscar Grant, the transit agency still doesn't have effective police oversight. And until the BART board recognizes that it still has 200 poorly trained, poorly supervised,* armed officers on the streets — and that this shooting wasn't an anomaly, it was simply the latest in a series of criminal acts by BART police officers that led to the deaths of innocent people — and until the BART Board starts treating this like the emergency that it is, the problems are going to continue.

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Taming finance in an age of austerity

07.08.10 - 3:48 pm | sfbg |

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By Joseph E. Stiglitz

NEW YORK – It was not long ago that we could say, “We are all Keynesians now.” The financial sector and its free-market ideology had brought the world to the brink of ruin. Markets clearly were not self-correcting. Deregulation had proven to be a dismal failure.

The “innovations” unleashed by modern finance did not lead to higher long-term efficiency, faster growth, or more prosperity for all. Instead, they were designed to circumvent accounting standards and to evade and avoid taxes that are required to finance the public investments in infrastructure and technology – like the Internet – that underlie real growth, not the phantom growth promoted by the financial sector.

The financial sector pontificated not only about how to create a dynamic economy, but also about what to do in the event of a recession (which, according to their ideology, could be caused only by a failure of government, not of markets). Whenever an economy enters recession, revenues fall, and expenditures – say, for unemployment benefits – increase. So deficits grow. Read more »

Newsom and the board's challenge

07.06.10 - 1:29 pm | Guardian Editorial |

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Newsom needs to decide whether he's serious when he says he wants to work with the supervisors on a budget

EDITORIAL The San Francisco supervisors took a huge step with the city budget this year: they essentially told the mayor that his approach was unacceptable, and that they were going to do it themselves.

The result — the document that the board's Budget Committee approved and sent back to Mayor Gavin Newsom — isn't perfect. But the members of that panel saved $40 million worth of programs from the mayor's budget ax and got rid of two particularly bad plans: privatizing health care at the county jails and allowing more condominium conversions.

The board members are also looking seriously at putting as much as $100 million in new taxes — progressive taxes — on the November ballot. Current plans include a modest increase in the hotel tax, an increase in the real-estate transfer tax on high-end properties, and a tax on commercial rents of more than $200,000 a year, which would be paired with a reduction in the payroll tax for small businesses.

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Closing the wealth gap

07.06.10 - 11:30 am | Dick Meister |

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Although the wage gap between white and African-American workers remains wide, it has been shrinking. But that's not so for the more significant black and white wealth gap.

A new study by researchers at Brandeis University shows that the wealth gap has been growing steadily, leaving African-American families with increasingly fewer resources than white families to cope with serious economic problems such as many families face today.

The Brandeis study found that in the quarter-century from 1984 to 2007, the African-American and white wealth gap more than quadrupled, from $20,000 to $95,000. Read more »

The good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa, the Fourth of July, 1940-1953

07.02.10 - 3:22 pm | Bruce Brugmann |

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(Note: In July of 1972, 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.

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