This just went up at the Gavel:

The Olympic Charter states that the goal of the Olympic games should be to promote ‘a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.’ The Chinese government has failed to live up to the commitments it made before being awarded the Olympic games to improve its human rights situation. In fact, there is disturbing new evidence that it is conducting a broader crackdown on human rights in China and Tibet because of the Olympics.

For the next four months, the International Olympic Committee and Chinese officials will parade the Olympic torch through dozens of countries and even through Tibet. The torch will be met by politicians and heads-of-state from all over the world along a ‘journey of harmony.’ It is the Chinese government that is making the Olympic torch relay a political event.

Freedom-loving people around the world are vigorously protesting because of the crackdown in Tibet and Beijing’s support for the regime in Sudan and the military junta in Burma. The people are making a significant statement that the Olympic ideals of peace and harmony should apply to all people, including those in Tibet and Darfur.

San Francisco is blessed by a large and vibrant Chinese American community. As San Franciscans, we embrace the diversity of our community and we value the contributions made in every corner of our great city. We also value free expression, and this week, many will exercise this right by demonstrating against the Olympic torch. I urge all those who protest to do so peacefully and respectfully. I commend those who speak out for their commitment to shining a light on the causes that challenge the conscience of the world.

Good on the Speaker.  She has been a tireless advocate for human rights and has showed real leadership on China and these games.  Glad to see this statement from her.

San Francisco authorities are justifiably nervous about providing a platform for Chinese propaganda at tomorrow’s Olympic torch relay.  The number and variety of protests are great and go beyond protesting the situation in Tibet.  The Falun Gong will call for religious freedom inside China.  Human Rights Watch seeks to call attention to China’s deplorable human rights record.  The San Francisco Bay Area Darfur Coalition will be massing to call for China’s end to its material support for genocide in the Sudan (you can hear Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s talking about this here).  There are all sorts of reasons to be concerned for China’s ascension to this position of prestige by hosting the Olympics.  And recent events along the global parade route, particularly from the pro-Tibet activists, are having a real impact.

As thousands of pro-Tibet protesters cut short the Olympic torch relay Monday in Paris, a new Zogby Interactive poll finds 70% of likely voters believe the International Olympic Committee was wrong to award this year’s summer Olympic Games to China because of its poor record on human rights. Dissatisfaction with the IOC’s choice is strong across the political spectrum, with 70% of Democrats and Republicans, and 68% of political independents who said they disagree with the decision to have China host the summer games. A Zogby Interactive poll conducted in May 2007 found 44% had a favorable opinion of the IOC’s decision to award the 2008 Summer Olympic Games to China, while 39% viewed the decision unfavorably.

So San Francisco ought to be concerned with the scope and force of protests tomorrow.  They actually should acknowledge them by canceling the parade.  What does it achieve?  Will San Francisco cover themselves in glory tomorrow?  The protesters will show that the entire city is a free speech zone, and they will show the importance and power of activism.  But the city will just be giving a platform to the Chinese to sanitize their image and whitewash the deplorable spots in their record.  There’s no reason for this and the potential for some ugly outcomes is growing.  

Authorities in San Francisco, which on Wednesday will host the only North American leg of the relay, said they had closely watched events in London on Sunday and in Paris.

“We have a lot of concerns,” said Sgt. Neville Gittens, a San Francisco police spokesman. “I don’t want to identify them, but this is not a contained route security-wise, and there are lots of opportunities for trouble. We’re watching what’s going on very closely and will make changes to our plans as we figure them out.”

Mayor Gavin Newsom met with Chinese officials in San Francisco on Monday to review security measures, which include requiring all rank-and-file police officers to report to work Wednesday. Meanwhile, at least two neighboring police departments have been asked to provide reinforcements, the California Highway Patrol will be on hand and the FBI is on standby, officials said.

I’m not sanguine about the prospects of this relay tomorrow.  London and Paris were just a prelude.

Dave Johnson, Speak Out California

You hear a lot in the news about big corporate lawsuits.  If you closely followed this week’s business news, for example, you may have read about a jury ruling that Microsoft has to pay Alcatel-Lucent $367.4 million for violating patents.  Imagine the money that must have gone into lawyers, research and experts — even the copying bill must have been enormous.  And these cases take months to hear.

There were also court rulings about the drug Prevacid, another covering dialysis machines, and many, many others.

All of them big-money corporate cases with millions, even billions of dollars at stake.  These big companies have the money to take these cases to court.

But what if you or I need to go to court?  Are we on an equal footing?

A recent issue of The Progressive States Network’s newsletter, Stateside Dispatch, says,

According to Access to Justice: Opening the Courtroom Door [PDF file] by the Brennan Center, federal funding for legal services in real dollars has declined dramatically over the last twenty-five years.  In 2004, federally-funded programs turned away at least one person seeking help for each person served, leading to approximately one million cases per year being turned away due to lack of funding.

In fact, the Brennan Center report states that “most low-income individuals cannot obtain counsel to represent them in civil matters.”  On top of that, government-funded legal aid services are now by-and-large prohibited from helping people when they are harmed by corporations.

What do you do if you are a regular person injured by a product, or denied a job because of your age, or defrauded out of money, or any of things that can happen to people?  It used to be that a law firm might take the case based on a contingency fee, where they receive a percentage of any award resulting from your case.  But more and more these fees are restricted or awards are “capped.” So attorneys cannot afford to take your case.  Even if you can find an attorney willing to take your case “pro bono” there is still the cost of research, depositions, expert witnesses, etc. to consider.

Is this fair?  Is there anything more fundamental to our American concept of democracy than equal justice?  Access to the courthouse is an example of democracy leveling the playing field and providing fairness.  But we no longer have equal access.  And this means we no longer have fairness.

So what can we do about this?  First, we need to restore our own understanding of democracy and our individual stake in its preservation.  We must all recognize that equal justice is a fundamental requirement of a democratic society.  One reason this country was founded was to level the playing field between the rich and the poor.  So we all need to demand equal treatment under the law.  

In California we must demand a rollback of the “tort reform” measures that have taken away equal access to the courts and removed a regular person’s ability to fight back when harmed by a big company.  We must either remove the award “caps” and limits on attorney fees or implement a system of government funding for attorneys who represent regular people.  

Click to continue.

It’s been a few weeks since I wrote about this, but surely you all still remember my insistence that what California faces is a structural revenue shortfall – that our budget problems are the cause of a long-term inability to raise enough money to pay for our basic services, and not with how we spend that money.

Obviously such a shortfall can only be closed through new revenues – and yes, that means new taxes. Californians need to finally understand that tax cuts are not a freebie – they come with enormous costs, and that the high price of higher education, their lack of mass transit options, their lack of affordable health care, and the looming K-12 disaster with 20,000 fired teachers are just some of those costs. 30 years of tax cuts have produced social inequality and a lack of opportunity, and only new taxes can reverse those trends.

So it’s welcome to hear that Arnold is hinting new taxes might be necessary. As reported in yesterday’s Mercury News:

Facing the worst fiscal crisis of his political career, the Republican governor in recent months has signaled in increasingly frank language that he would consider new taxes as part of a compromise to close an $8 billion deficit.

To be sure, he’s never declared: “Let’s raise taxes.” But more and more, he’s saying he is at least open to discussing it.

“I made it very clear my proposal” does not call for raising taxes, Schwarzenegger said at one of several appearances around the state last month addressing the budget. “But I’m not the only one that is running the Capitol. I’m not the only one that is running the state of California.”

Legislators, he added, are also involved in budgeting. And in the process of finding a compromise with the governor, higher taxes might enter the picture.

“I said and I made it very clear that everything is on the table,” Schwarzenegger said…

…Since then, the governor has struck a more compromising tone, suggesting that ideas such as closing tax loopholes, or applying the sales tax to services currently not subjected to it – such as, say, haircuts and legal advice – should be on the table….

Some experts say it reflects a battle between two identities – one, the anti-tax conservative and self-proclaimed disciple of free-market economist Milton Friedman; the other the political realist trying to fix the state’s daunting fiscal problem and dealing with a Democrat-controlled Legislature that resists his vision.

It’s not surprising that the Merc points to Arnold’s affinity for Milton Friedman – I’ve written before about how Arnold’s budget plans are a kind of California shock doctrine. But it is also interesting that Arnold is gingerly exploring the path of new revenues as a possible solution.

Sales tax modernization in particular has been identified by groups like the California Tax Reform Association as a valuable method of raising billions in new revenues, as the current sales tax is more appropriate to the 1960s than the 2000s in what it covers.

It might be too much to ask Arnold to revisit the Vehicle License Fee cut, which the California Budget Project estimated cost the state a whopping $6.1 billion for the current fiscal year – more than enough to wipe out the proposed education, parks, and health care cuts, all at the cost of about $150/year per person.

Of course, Arnold’s new willingness to support taxes – such as it is – runs into the stubborn opposition of the Yacht Party – Republican legislators who prefer to protect tax loopholes for the wealthy instead of doing their jobs and helping the state meet its public services obligations. These legislators are hell-bent on preventing any new taxes from being passed, and Arnold’s support for new taxes would likely just cause them to dig in even more deeply.

All this suggests that the battle over the budget will not be won in the halls of the Capitol, but in the court of public opinion. Californians are going to have to step in and play the decisive role here, most likely by telling the Yacht Party where to stick it. In that sense Arnold’s willingness to back new taxes is a big plus, as one of the few things Arnold is good for is mobilizing popular support for policies. Polls already show that Californians support Democrats on the budget, and with Arnold on their side, Dems might just be able to isolate the Yacht Party.

How exactly that isolation occurs will be key. Republicans will either have to fold under threat of losing their seats in the November election (a successful Denham recall would be very useful here) or we may have to go to the November ballot itself with a tax package, bypassing the Republicans. Either way, mobilizing the public to oppose the Republicans and support revenue solutions is the only way we will resolve this crisis.

XPosted 4/7/2008 11:46 PM PDT on MyDesert.com by BluePalmSpringsBoyz

Overheard Saturday night at the Democrats of the Desert Awards Banquet at the Las Rancho Palmas Resort, the decision to seek to close the Cathedral City medical marijuana clinic was made by Mayor Kathy DeRosa (R), Mayor Pro Tem Charles England (R), and Councilmember Chuck Vasquez (R-Closet Case) who voted to close the clinic.

Councilmember Greg Pettis (D), Candidate for the CA 80th Assembly District, and Councilmember Paul Marchand (D), Candidate for Mayor of Cathedral City, voted to support the clinic but were overruled by the Republican majority on council.  In fact, Pettis was slated to appear at an event to support medical marijuana patients at Copy Kats last night, but the event was postponed.

More below the flip…

According to a Cathedral City source for background, Cathedral City council, under the auspices of DeRosa, has a policy to apparently vote on issues in private and to not announce the individual votes of the councilmembers.  This is really “Small Town in Mass Society” (Vidich) mentality.  Anyway, the Desert Sun never printed who voted what way as the specific vote was never announced as per usual.

Seems that DeRosa, England, and Vasquez are out of step with Californians overall and Cathedral City residents who favor keeping the clinic open to service patients diagnosed with cancer, chronic pain, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, etc.  Isn’t this the same party that opposes stem cell research?  What kind of family values does the Republican party really have?

(Chris Daly is the George Costanza of SF politics, but his wife kicks ass and I think of him as a friend. I’ll be posting pics of the protest on Calitics as fast ss I can. – promoted by Bob Brigham)

Join me for an historic rally and march on Beijing’s Olympic Torch in solidarity with the people of Tibet.

Wednesday, April 9th, 12 Noon, Embarcadero near Market

Nearly two months ago, representatives from the Tibetan community began working with my office on a resolution for the Board of Supervisors. Tibetans were rightfully concerned that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was using the Olympic Games in Beijing to gloss over their program of cultural genocide in Tibet. San Francisco would be the only stop in the US for the Torch Relay scheduled to make its way to Tibet this summer. On March 10th, Tibetan Uprising Day, I was set to introduce the resolution.

On the same day 300 brave monks set out from Drepung monastery outside of Lhasa on a protest march to Potala Palace in the heart of the city. The arrest of dozens of these monks led to further protests and uprising on the streets of Lhasa and other cities across Tibet. The Chinese government met these protests with a brutal crackdown, killing over 100 Tibetans and arresting hundreds of others in door-to-door raids.

This wicked turn of events in Tibet catapulted what would otherwise be a highly symbolic resolution into the national and international spotlight — drawing significant attention to San Francisco as we called out China’s abysmal human rights record – a laundry list of dirty abuses that extend from cultural genocide in Tibet to persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, from suppressing labor and environmental activists to stifling freedom of speech and press, and from militarily aiding genocide in Darfur to propping up a brutal dictatorship in Burma.

For months, Gavin Newsom had been working closely with top Chinese government officials on preparations for the torch event in San Francisco. For the PRC, the San Francisco leg of the relay had a unique importance due to our economic role in the Pacific Rim and for our significant Chinese population. For Gavin Newsom, the torch relay was a ready-made opportunity to elevate his national and international political stature.

But the veil of secrecy under which this planning took place became increasingly apparent as the Board’s resolution worked its way through the legislative process. Community groups and reporters alike were asking questions about the route and how protests would be handled. The answers were either not forthcoming (the route was not set) or the wrong ones (protests would be limited to “free speech zones”). Gavin Newsom also started to be asked about his position on human rights in China.

After the brutal crackdown in Tibet, it became increasingly difficult for Newsom to dodge these questions. One of Gavin’s political mentors, Nancy Pelosi, took a strong stance on the PRC’s crackdown, traveling to meet with the Dalai Lama in India.  She said, “If freedom loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world.” Pelosi’s actions challenged Newsom to act with conscience, but instead he opted for the same line used by George Bush — politics, including China’s crackdown in Tibet, should be kept separate from the Beijing Olympics.

But the notion that we can somehow separate politics from an international event on the scale of the Olympics is an impossible one, even if the Olympic Charter wasn’t dedicated to “promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” The Olympic Games have been necessarily intertwined with our politics and history. This was especially the case with ’36 Berlin Games, ’68 Mexico City Games, and the boycott games of ’80 and ’84. While the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta had little international controversy, the local politics in Atlanta were very loaded. To make way for the Olympic Village, the oldest public housing development in the country was demolished. Thousands of people lost their homes while new laws were enacted to target homeless people. Meanwhile, the

Fortunately, Newsom ultimately backed down from China’s requests of limiting protest, although you’d think the Mayor of San Francisco would know better. The entire City of San Francisco is and will always be a “free speech zone.” San Francisco is known across the globe for protest, one of free speech’s most critical elements; from the General Strike in 1934 to the hundreds of thousands that flooded San Francisco streets to protest the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So when the Board of Supervisors resolved that the Olympic Torch should be received with alarm and protest, we did so fully cognizant of the role of protest in our great City.

As the Olympic Torch approaches, it is critical that we acknowledge the situation in Tibet has reached a crisis point and appreciate the gravity of our opportunity to highlight the issue on behalf of those inside Tibet who are being brutally persecuted by the Chinese government for expressing their desire for freedom. We must build on the message that’s been delivered by people of conscience in Athens, London, and now Paris.

Our March on the Torch will continue the peoples’ story of justice — that this torch should not be allowed to go through Tibet. We will apply even more pressure on the International Olympic Committee to end their complicity in China’s brutal crackdown and send a clear signal to the PRC that they need to clean up their human rights record and end their brutality in Tibet at once.

The cause of international human rights is coming to San Francisco on Wednesday. Please march with us to accept this enormous responsibility.

For up to the minute updates please text SFTORCH to 41411.

Lite Gov. Garamendi along with some Senators (Garamendi, Steinberg, & Kehoe) are distributing a letter (PDF) to US Commerce Secretary Guttierez regarding the proposed 241 Toll Road over San Onofre state beach. The toll road was rejected 8-2 by the Coastal Commission after a marathon public comment session.

John and the Gang want the Secretary to reject the Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Authority’s appeal of the Coastal Commission’s decision. They had some backup plans in case the Bush administration is all predictable and takes the appeal: they want another lengty public comment session in SoCal.  From the letter:

We believe that you should out of hand reject the TCA’s appeal.  However, should you take it up, we urge you to hold a public hearing in Southern California and to extend the public comment period accordingly to ensure full opportunity for public participation.  We are certain that at such a public hearing you would quickly learn that Californians consider this coastal public park a treasure and that there is broad public opposition to the Toll Road.

But, this is the Bush administration, and they are way, super into building roads that can make a profit for companies instead of the public. This might be another situation where any and all delays are a good thing in the decision-making process. We desperately need a better administration in Washington that doesn’t just impulsively privatize everything.

(Another longtime Calitician announces. Hogarth is competing against Calitics publisher Brian Leubitz in Pelosi’s CD (they’re friends). A Blogger v Blogger election…clutch your pearls now while I flip a coin – promoted by Bob Brigham)

With 71 people running for 3 Obama delegate slots in San Francisco, I have teamed up with two other candidates to form the Unity Slate.  We are 3 Democratic individuals who represent the diversity of CD-08, the diversity of Barack Obama’s appeal, and are excited to bring San Francisco values to the Democratic National Convention.  We are Paul Hogarth, Clem Clarke and Myrna Melgar!

Clemetine Clarke was born in Mississippi, and has been a committed Democratic party activist for 29 years. She has been active in mentoring youth in the community and is especially passionate about getting young African Americans active in politics. Clem runs her own company, has a four year old son and lives in the Western Addition.

Many of you know me, Paul Hogarth, as the managing editor of Beyond Chron.  But I’m also a 30 year old tenant rights activist who grew up in Chicago — three doors down from Obama. I’ve been involved in SF politics for 10 years, and worked for LGBT causes, such as marriage equality and tenants rights. I currently work as an attorney at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, and live in the Tenderloin.

Myrna Melgar is a Latina mother of two girls. She immigrated to the Mission District from El Salvador as a teenager, and has been a community and union organizer through most of her career, working on issues of affordable housing, workers’ rights and social and environmental justice. She currently works for the City administering programs for low income first time homebuyers. Myrna lives at the edge of the Castro/Mission.

Please come out on Sunday, April 13th at SEIU Local 1021 (350 Rhode Island) to support the Unity Slate.  Doors open at 2:00 p.m., and we hope you can be there to help us bring San Francisco values to the Convention!!