Or, more accurately, he’d be completely comfortable in it. After all, he understood how to make Chicago politics work for him, so I’m sure he’d be able to fight in the trenches in San Francisco. But as Obama tries to push our national body politic out of the gutter, some in San Francisco are working their darndest to make sure our local politics stays there.  All this is a bit ironic because many of these same people were vocal and outspoken supporters of Obama. Unfortunately, getting Democrats to work collaboratively, as opposed to combatively, even in a one-party town, can be like herding cats. But that need not lead to the abandonment of a sense of civility.

San Francisco politics, like the politics of many big cities across the country, is something of a bloodsport. Fine, but civility needn’t be tossed out as well.

During the campaign for the June 3 election, we saw some nasty stuff. We had Chris Daly putting Carole Migden on the deceptive faux-“Guardian” Slate. We had some nasty campaigning in pretty much every race, come to think of it. And, in the end, much of what defines San Francisco has been boiled down to one, or two depending on how you look at it, personalities.

But the personalities of Gavin Newsom (and Chris Daly) should not get in the way of a simple fact: Scott Wiener has done a tremendous job as DCCC chair in building the party infrastructure. He may not be the very most progressive, the furthest to the left. In fact, I don’t go out on much of a limb when I say that I am to his left on a few issues here and there.  But when the rubber hits the road, Scott Wiener has worked for progressive causes in the city and state. And he has been incredibly competent at the job for which he is seeking re-election.

Follow me over the flip…

In this city, it frequently seems that you are either pro-Newsom or you are against him. It’s not really a healthy environment. And, to be honest, both Newsom and Supervisor Chris Daly are partially to blame for the venomous atmosphere. But every step of the way, Daly has played an instrumental role in provoking the mayor and polarizing this city, so much so that Sup. Peskin had to step in as budget chair for Daly.

Supervisor Daly was an early and vocal supporter of Senator Obama (while Newsom was the same for Clinton). During the run up to Feb 5, you would frequently find him hanging outside the Obama SF office, typically trying to gather signatures for POWER’s housing initiative that became the ill-fated Prop F on the June 3 ballot. However, the difference between the rhetoric of Obama’s message of unity and hope could not be any more different from the rhetoric of Chris Daly. I won’t go into much depth on Daly’s antics, but suffice it to say that he could be far more effective without being so confrontational and brutish. If you want more information, just do some google searching, you’ll find it.

Which brings me to the hope that the message that Sen. Obama brings.  Chris Daly is a tremendous progressive, but he is a top-down progressive. While Obama can occasionaly be less than optimal (see FISA), he has built a very strong people-powered campaign.  With Daly it’s either his way, or, well, “he’ll take you out”.

Here I am referring back to the SF DCCC Chair race. Chris Daly wants to control the Chair, and the DCCC generally to elect progressives. Great, but we don’t need to destroy the party to do that. I’ll let Steve Jones detail what happens when it’s not his way:

But Daly drew the line and issued an ultimatum: “Every one of you who votes for Scott Wiener, I’m going to try to take you out. I’m going to make it my business.”

***

Finally, Daly started to berate Peskin, telling him, “Get your shit together for six months.”

Now that’s the hope Sen. Obama speaks of, huh? I am reminded of something former Democratic Congresswoman and current Green Party presidential Candidate said at a Green Party Candidate forum here in San Francisco: “I have never seen anything like I have seen in the Green Party! I have to ask my constituents, people who support me, to come and join this? I want to be proud of what I’ve asked them to join, so please, come together.”

I’m going to now say something that I never thought I would ever say: Can we just take the advice on organization and cooperation from Cynthia McKinney? Let’s get our shit together. I can’t think of a better way to do that here in SF than re-electing Scott Wiener as Chair of the DCCC. He has done a tremendous job of bringing on a full-time organizer, registering voters, and getting voters actively involved. Those are the goals of the DCCC, and those are the metrics we should be looking at. By those metrics, Scott deserves re-election.

As we’re all painfully aware, during the ’00s the US media have become ardent defenders of the status quo, generally unwilling to discuss harsh realities that might threaten that status quo unless absolutely forced to do so – Hurricane Katrina, for example, or the reaction to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Perhaps the most significant issue not being discussed in the media is peak oil – which, in its simplistic form, explains why the high fuel prices we are seeing today are going to be a permanent feature of life.

Gas prices are NEVER coming back down – rising demand is meeting a shrinking supply and the result is the end of the cheap oil that modern America was built upon.

As gas prices remain high more media outlets are discussing energy policy but only lately are they beginning to acknowledge that the era of cheap oil is over. Today’s Los Angeles Times starts examining the topic with a front-page feature, Envisioning a world of $200-a-barrel oil. It focuses on how consumers, transportation, and global trade will be affected, and even tries to examine the “upside” to this, particularly the eventual localization of American life, perhaps the closest a major American media outlet has come to embracing the ideas of Jim Kunstler.

The article is a good beginning, but it avoids the key question of how we ought to respond. Videoconferencing and staycations are not substitutes for statewide initiatives to deal with the crisis. The article discusses the airline crisis but doesn’t discuss ways to provide alternative forms of transportation such as high speed rail. Nor does it discuss ways to encourage more renewable energy sources, or local food production, or urban density.

Still, just as it took Al Gore’s movie to convince Californians to take even the small step of climate change action embodied in AB 32, so too will it take the media’s willingness to tell Californians that cheap oil is over to produce action on shifting our state away from an oil-based economy.

Cheap oil was responsible for much of the prosperity of the postwar era, especially in California. It enabled people to find an affordable home to purchase, even if it was distant from their workplace. It enabled them to buy inexpensive food without needing to grow their own. It enabled the development of global trade networks that provided markets for Californian products and services.

The end of cheap oil is welcome from an ecological perspective but it will finish off working Californians if we don’t proactively work to build a post-oil infrastructure to provide for prosperity, just as we spent the 1950s and 1960s building an infrastructure around oil to provide for prosperity.

Newspapers like the LA Times could help show Californians the need for and value of such projects. It will require them to break with the status quo – but Californians are already doing so in practice, riding mass transit and even their bikes in much higher numbers than ever before. In the absence of media coverage of our changing state, we in the blogs will do what we can to keep up.

Cross Posted from big Orange, Please go rec if you can, this diary is very important to me.

It’s been at least a couple of weeks since I heard Pat Buchanan on the Thom Hartmann show and I can’t get what he said out of my mind.  Buchanan was torn up about the disappearance of Europeans on Planet earth.  Of course you know what he’s talking about.  Here is an excerpt from a review of his book…

When one remembers that if there is one cause Mr. Buchanan himself cherishes it is immigration restriction – when one recalls his words on “national suicide” and the “invasion” of America by nonwhites, and his constant inveighing against multiculturalism – when one remembers that the first pages of this very book lament that “as a share of world population, peoples of European ancestry have been shrinking for three generations,” that “we are slowly disappearing from the earth” – Mr. Buchanan’s feline criticism of Churchill stands as a piece of truly shameless hypocrisy.

NY Sun

Offensive yes.  Especially since I personally know of the true disappearance of a people, a generation lost and on it’s way out and sadly, the loss of a culture.  I hope it does not go away completely.

I’m speaking of the Mojave Indians.  My husband, Gary, is part Mojave Indian and his Grandmother was one of only a dozen or so pure Mojave Indians left.  She passed away a few years ago but Gary is grateful he was given the chance to meet her and get to know her a bit.  

Her name was Basil Fass.  She was know as an Elder among the tribe and if you mention her name to someone who knows these Elders, they know Basil well.  She helped carry on their cultural traditions up until her death and the Avi Casino in Laughlin Nevada also attempts to share some of their cultural heritage.  Yes, a Casino!

Every year the Fort Mojave Tribe holds an annual Pow Wow called “Annual Avi Kwa Ame Pow Wow” at their Casino.  

Native Americans from across the country will gather on the banks of the Colorado River in February for the 13th Annual Avi Kwa Ame Pow Wow, a festival honoring the traditional dance, costumes and cultures of the many participating tribes.

The event includes competition in various traditional Native American dances, as well as vendor booths serving up Native American food and handmade Indian arts and crafts. It is presented by the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and takes place in the new Mojave Crossing Event Center near the Avi Resort & Casino, on the reservation just a few miles south of Bullhead City.

Pow Wows are all about drums, songs and dance. The drum – a term which describes the instrument and its complement of singers, what Americans would call a band – is the center of the arena and the center of attention. The drum performs songs for all occasions, including contest songs, flag songs, memorial songs, intertribal songs and more. Drums travel many miles to attend Pow Wows Dancers from as many as two dozen tribes will participate in dance competitions, with competitors broken into groups from toddlers through senior citizens. They’ll compete in fancy dancing, grass dancing, jingle dress dancing, bird dancing and singing, and many other structured dances.

“They come from all different tribes across the country…we’ve had people from Canada, South Dakota, North Dakota, New Mexico,” said Debbie Bricker, Pow Wow coordinator for the Fort Mojave

Indian Tribe. “We’re expecting a big turnout again this year.”

http://www.laughlinnevadaguide…

Gary never met his Mother, Esperanza Fass but he did meet his grandmother Basil due to me being a persistent pain in the ass.  It was a few years ago that we met her and she was lovely and so happy to see him, it had been literally years, she had not seen Gary since his mother died when he was very young.

It’s tragic and sad and his paternal Grandparents helped his father raise him away from the tribe and their land.  Gary came back but it’s been hard, we haven’t been in years.  To think that you came from somewhere but you have no connection, at least it must feel like that to him.  It was overwhelming to all of a sudden have not just another whole family but a whole tribe.

We hope to return again very soon and bring Charlotte to meet her great Aunts.  Most of the elders are gone now but the Mojave people are keeping their language and traditions alive and they should be honored and admired for doing so.  This is a struggle to keep meaning and a whole people living Pat, this is what it means to see something disappear.  

The Mojave Indians suffered many injustices under the new rule of America just as many other Native peoples were.  

The late 1800s were years of change for the Mojave. In 1861, constraints of the American Civil War forced the military to abandon Ft. Mojave. Tribal leadership was in upheaval as the Great Chief Homoseh awahot relinquished his post to Yara tav, who favored peace with the Americans. He had seen their power, having traveled to Los Angeles, San Francisco and to Washington, DC to visit President Lincoln.

In March 1865 the US Government created the Colorado Indian Reservation near Parker, the southern range of the Mojave. Yara tav, though disapproving of the poor farmland, led 500 to 800 Mojaves to the new reservation at Parker Valley. Homoseh awahot resumed his post as great chief to lead those who refused to leave the Mojave Valley. The people were split into two tribes.

…

Those living around the fort were called Ft. Mojaves when the building and 14,000 acres were transferred from the War Department to the Interior Department in 1890. The fort became an industrial boarding school for the Ft. Mojave and other non-reservation Indians.

The plan was to eradicate native language and culture. A compulsory education law was passed, and truant children forcibly returned to school were often whipped and locked in an attic for days, and given water and a slice of bread for meals.

History of the Mojave

The Mojave have fought hard to retain and keep their traditions alive even against such odds as the attempted assimilation by American Settlers.    The Mojave have continued to fight for what is theirs from their water rights to keeping a radio active waste site out of Ward Valley (which could have impacted not just the environment but the water that the tribe has access to).

After a couple of years in the background of the dispute over a nuclear waste dump proposed for Ward Valley, five desert Indian tribes stepped in 10 days ago and brought the plan to a sudden halt.

Federal officials said they will not proceed with the plan as long as the Indian elders are on the land the tribes have declared sacred.

About 40 Indians from the five tribes of the lower Colorado River remain at the site this weekend along with an equal number of anti-nuclear activists but their role in the dispute began much less visibly.

More than two years ago the Fort Mojave Tribe obtained a permit to set up a camp at the dump site and allowed non-Indian protesters to stay there. While the white activists were more vocal in opposition, the Indians continued to fight the permit process through government channels.

“This action where tribes take the lead over an environmental issue is unique,” said Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network of Benidji, Minn.

Source

I’ve hunted via the internet for anything about Gary’s Grandmother Basil and found this one quote that ends a lovely story about tortoises joining the Ward Valley Occupation.  

This visit by our first tortoise to come into the village came on the

day negotiations between the Colorado River Native Nations Alliance – Ft.

Mojave, Chemehuevi, Cocopah, Quechan, and Colorado River Indian Tribes –

seemed to have broken off.  We, at the camp, felt honored by his visit and took it as a sign that the valley and its natural inhabitants welcome us. We have since had other visits.  The tortoises seem content with our

presence; they appear to enjoy our greetings.

Basil Fass, Ft. Mojave Elder, said, “See, they show us they are here.

They bless us when they come.  They know we will win this fight for our

sacred land. ”

Source

Basil wouldn’t let go of our hands when we met her the first time.  We her met at a pow wow in Indio and she held both our hands for a long time, taking us to different people to introduce us but she was so happy to see her Grandson and she had eventually urged him to become involved in the tribe’s political future.  I think she would be proud that he is running for California State Senate and Gary is seeking the support of his tribe.  It would mean so much to be able to speak out for the Native people in California, Nevada and Arizona.  

Please help us if you feel compelled.  I know there are great things that Gary can do if elected to our State Senate.  There are so many people who are forgotten and unseen.  I am going to attempt to make it back to Fort Mojave and I will chronicle that journey here as well.  We have so much to learn.

Act Blue

I started this when I wrote another diary about giving to candidates down ticket.  They money I’ve raised here has been seed money for our campaign and has been a tremendous boost.  When you give here it does matter, it really does and our campaign is grateful.

Gary and Charlotte Pritchard

Gary Pritchard for State Senate

Building on Bob’s report about the San Francisco Clean Energy Act, the California Air Resources Board has released its draft blueprint designed to fall in line with the mandate of AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, by cutting emissions 30% by 2020.  

The 75+ page plan includes a range of policy recommendations.  Chief among them is increasing the state’s renewable electricity standard.  The plan also contains provisions for a regional cap-and-trade program that could work in harmony with other more specific policies to reduce pollution economywide.  The plan also says CARB will consider a vehicle “feebate” program that would provide incentives to consumers to buy cleaner cars.

In addition, the proposal includes plans to reduce emissions from heavy-duty trucks with hybrid engine technology and better fuel economy.  Like many of CARB’s proposals, the heavy-duty truck provisions would improve public health by also reducing smog-forming pollution.  The plan also advocates for a high-speed train system in California.

Jim Downing at the SacBee has more here.  Analysis on the flip:

There’s no question that California needs to do what is within its control to act immediately.  Climate change is already imperiling two-thirds of the state’s unique plants, and Los Angeles is trying dubious ideas like seeding the clouds with silver iodide particles to force it to rain.  The only sustainable solution is to demand mandatory emissions caps to fight a runaway climate.

Some of their ideas are top-notch.  Robert in Monterey, as his High Speed Rail blog, notes that CARB endorsed HSR to reach their targets:

Transportation is one of the capped sectors of the economy – meaning we can no longer just fly around or drive around endlessly; there will be increasing limits and at the same time rising costs as the cost of the credit purchase is passed on to consumers. To achieve the required lower emissions, and to provide sustainable and cleaner forms of transportation CARB endorsed high speed rail as one of its recommendations.

Their explanation was not particularly detailed – basically an endorsement of the concept of HSR and a projection that it would save around 1 million metric tons of CO2 in 2020. That’s around 22 billion pounds per year, close to the figure of 17.6 billion pounds that Quentin Kopp has been quoting.

I also really like the feebate idea that is part of the plan:

CARB also identified a feebate program as one avenue for reducing vehicle pollution. Such a program would establish one-time rebates and surcharges on new passenger cars and light trucks based on the amount of global warming pollution they emit.  This program would deliver benefits on its own, but also would complement California’s tailpipe standards if both were implemented.  According to a University of Michigan study, implementing a clean car discount program would deliver an additional 21 percent reduction in global warming pollution beyond the tailpipe standards.

The worry, of course, is that by the time the lobbyists and special interests get through with these targets, they’ll blow loopholes in them so wide that their impact will be meaningless.  But since the hard target of a 30 percent reduction is state law, I think there will be more backbone to actually reach those targets.  Builders and design specialists have already seen this coming and are producing innovative solutions to reduce emissions and save money.  At its best, carbon reduction is both efficient and cleaner, so really nobody loses except giant polluters.  They’re going to use the state’s budget problems to raise all kinds of fears about cost, but they’re really separate issues.  Plus, as the Bee article notes:

The air board’s mission may already have been made easier by changes in the economy. Today’s high energy prices are driving many of the sorts of emissions-cutting changes called for under the plan.

Sales of fuel-efficient cars are up, transit ridership is breaking records and businesses are investing in ways to save fuel and electricity.

Many have raised concerns about the cap and trade system, but CARB chair Mary Nichols is clearly invested in it, having presided over the most successful cap and trade system in history while in the Clinton Administration, the one that virtually eliminated acid rain.  It may be insufficient to have a few states in the West implement a trading system, but some industries, like energy production, aren’t likely to up and leave California – the market of 38 million people is too lucrative.  Anyway this gives momentum and support for a national system.

What I would like to see is a progressive cap and trade setup, which recognizes that higher energy costs disproportionately impact the poor, and seeks to balance that.  This is easier said than done:

Two things are worth noting. First, utility costs are a bigger problem than gasoline. On a percentage basis, the poor pay 7x as much for utilities as the well off, while they pay only 4x as much for gasoline. What’s more, unlike gasoline, there are seldom any reasonable alternatives for utility expenditures.

Second, there are always tradeoffs. Using the money from permit auctions (or carbon taxes) to rebate other taxes is indeed progressive if the rebate is fairly flat, but only if you pay taxes in the first place – which many of the poor don’t. For the very poorest, then, a tax rebate scheme would still be regressive: you’d essentially be hitting them with a big new energy tax without any offset at all. Conversely, a more targeted approach, like expanding funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, helps the poor more directly but removes the incentive to use less energy.

The answer, then, is almost certainly a bit of this and a bit of that. No single solution targets assistance to the poor ideally, but a basket of solutions (payroll tax rebates, energy assistance, more funding for mass transit, etc.) can do a pretty good job. It won’t be perfect, but a well-designed program can make a cap-and-trade program pretty progressive.

Hopefully this will guide the CARB as they seek to work through the policy grinder and implement their reductions.  Right now the board is considering auctioning off few permits and giving away the rest, gradually eliminating the giveaway over time.  This kind of hair-splitting is wrong, and I hope they come to understand that.