By Matt Gonzalez

“[N]or shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” US Constitution, 5th Amendment, Takings Clause

When James Madison wrote the “takings clause” he couldn’t have expected courts would misread it in subsequent years.  Madison plainly wrote that only a “public use” would justify taking private property by government, but courts have found that takings resulting in a “public benefit” meet those criteria.  This reading falls far from its origins. [Read more →]

By Clive Crook

Published: June 28 2009 19:09 | Last updated: June 28 2009 19:09

As he promised last year, Barack Obama has brought climate change and healthcare reform to the centre of the nation’s attention. As well as evangelising, he is pressing Congress to act. Last week the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill to curb carbon emissions, a measure that, if enacted, would touch every part of the US economy. Both House and Senate have drafted far-reaching healthcare bills, with stunning price tags.

[Read more →]

(This is an extended version of an article that appeared on the Op-Ed Page of the San Francisco Chronicle about the Transbay Authority’s callous attitude toward small businesses in its path. Attorney Gonzalez, the past president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, analyzes the history and inequities of the eminent domain process in the accompany commentary written for argonaut360.com)

By Jello Biafra, Matt Gonzalez and Warren Hinckle.

If we can learn from our ancestors, attention should be paid to Black Bart. The legendary gentleman stage coach bandit robbed only the strong boxes, not the passengers. He was always polite, apologized for any inconvenience, and even left a poem on his departure.

Some people, especially those whose property is being taken, see the eminent domain process as robbery. That is an arguable proposition, and it is not our purpose to argue it here: but what is inarguable is that the in process of taking private property using governmental authority and taxpayers funds the procedures should be polite and above all financially fair to the victims of progress.  This regretably has not been the case in the actions of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA), whose comunication with the owners whose property is taking  has not been poetry but more the bureaucratic equivalent of rude subway graffiti.

On June 21, 2005, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved the Transbay Redevelopment Plan which called for the development of “the Grand Central Station of the West”.  While the ultimate goal of the plan is laudatory, providing a central terminal for Bay Area trains and buses (with ability to connect to Los Angeles via high speed rail in the future), there is an unfortunate underside of this project. [Read more →]

San Francisco Stories

News Conference

Contact: Lee Houskeeper (415) 777-4700 Newsservice@aol.com

San Francisco’s Free Woodstock 40th Anniversary Concert Will Fight New York’s Woodstock Ventures Cease and Desist “Shakedown” Attempt

WEDNESDAY 1:00 PM PRESS CONFERENCE

Country Joe, Barry “The Fish” Melton, Former DA Terrence Hallinan, Producer  Boots Hughston and Woodstock Veterans Will Announce They Reject Demand by “GreedStock” Promoter Michael Lang Not To Use “Woodstock” or Book “His” Acts

“Lang Doesn’t Own Peace & Music . . .

That Was Born in San Francisco 42 Years Ago”. . .Boots Hughston

San Francisco - -Those Summer of Love folks who revisit their Hippie Sacred Ground in Golden Gate Park every 10 years in great numbers to celebrate San Francisco’s Human Be In that beget the Summer of Love that beget the Woodstock Generation and the Age of Aquarius will hold a Press Conference on Wednesday, May 27 at 1:00 PM (John’s Grill-63 Ellis St).

Council of Light leader and producer Boots Hughston, Former District Attorney Terrence “Kayo”Hallinan, Woodstock veteran musician and attorney Barry “The Fish” Melton and his partner Country Joe McDonald along with Lester Chambers of The Chambers Brothers and Supper Lotto Winner Dennis “Mr. Lucky” Sanfilippo will announce that despite a Cease and Desist demand from NY’s Woodstock Ventures their day long free show on Sunday, October 25th is fully permitted and financed and will take place as scheduled.   They will also complain of what they say is “an old fashioned shakedown tactics” by Woodstock producer Michael Lang.

Lang whose own 40th Anniversary of Woodstock event never materialized has been using a high-powered NY law firm to demand payment from any event in the world that plans to celebrate the “40th Anniversary of Woodstock” or use art or phases that contain “PEACE & MUSIC.”

The group of Summer of Love and Woodstock veterans will demand that Woodstock Ventures recognize that the “Peace, Love & Music they wish to cash in on was created in San Francisco.” The wish to remind Lang that no less than 18 of acts that performed at the original Woodstock flew in from San Francisco.

1878 Map Of San Francisco’s WOODSTOCK District To Be Shown

At Wednesday’s Press conference Former San Francisco District Attorney, Terrence Hallinan will unveil a map of San Francisco made by Governor HH Haight that shows a large part of San Francisco was designated Woodstock in 1878.

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

For anyone that remembers Woodstock, IT ALL MAKES SENSE TO ME NOW!

Finally, after 40 years, someone has opened the vault and revealed the answer to a question that has clawed at our brains since the 1969 Woodstock album was released:

What the heck were the lyrics to Joe Cocker’s version of ‘A Little Help From My Friends’?

He was so wigged-out and loopy on a multitude of drugs, no one has been able to understand his garbled version… ..until now!

Click link below for the lyrics …. FINALLY IT’S CRYSTAL CLEAR!

Finally!

By John Pilger

The American soap Madmen offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the “smart” people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving on a scale imagined by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as the Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged, and sold. (This omits Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, who took “credit” for starting women smoking in the 1920s and 30s.)

It has been more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has since been named Advertising Age’s “marketer of the year for 2008,” easily beating Apple. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign “an institutionalized, mass-level, automated technological community organizing that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force.” Deploying the Internet and a slogan plagiarized from the Latino union organizer Caesar Chavez – Si se puede! – “yes, we can,” the “mass-level, automated technological community” marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W. Bush. No one knew what the new brand actually stood for.

So accomplished was the advertising – a record $75 million was spent on TV commercials alone – that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “change you can believe in,” it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful!” he declared. Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers in a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticized him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as “adroit literary creations, rich, like those doric columns, with allusion” (Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian). San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that “many spiritually advanced people I know … identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who … can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.

In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus, and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On April 24, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo prisoners were not “persons” and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Adm. Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, America experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of “defense,” Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, have been retained by Obama.

All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ’smart bombs’ and other high-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by American missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office. In Afghanistan, the U.S. “strategy” of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the “Taliban”) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the U.S. military will remain indefinitely.

Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, lying that they are a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing “a real threat” to Europe and the U.S. On April 5, in Prague, he made a speech reported as “anti-nuclear.” It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, the U.S. is building new “tactical” nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Perhaps the biggest lie – the equivalent of smoking is good for you – is Obama’s announcement that the U.S. is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed U.S. Army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain “for the next 15 to 20 years.”

On April 25, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered – especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3 trillion at the same banks that paid him more than $8 million last year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in.

Much of the American establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing, and threatening, the onward march of America’s “grand design,” as Henry Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it. In advertising terms, Bush was a “brand collapse,” whereas Obama, with his toothpaste-advertisement smile and righteous clichés, is a godsend. At a stroke, he has seen off serious domestic dissent to war, and he brings tears to the eyes, from Washington to Whitehall. He is the BBC’s man, and CNN’s man, and Murdoch’s man, and Wall Street’s man, and the CIA’s man. The madmen did well.

(John Pilger writes for www.antiwar.com)

Whats she hanging on to?

 His stimulus package?

Log in here and sign a petition to nominate Peter Seeger for the Nobel Peace Prize.

When Dianne Feinstein was mayor, she tried cleaning up the strip joints, particularly the Mitchell Brothers’ Theater which is located only three blocks from City Hall. In February 1985, the cops raided the theater and arrested porn movie star, Marilyn Chambers, in the middle of her nude act. Prior to becoming a porn movie star, Ms. Chambers had a brief career as a model and was featured as the wholesome looking mother on the boxes of Ivory Snow detergent.

Hinckle, a buddy of the Mitchell Brothers and an frequent critic of the mayor, wrote several columns of scathing ridicule about the arrest and the politician behind it. A few days later, Hinckle was arrested on a warrant for walking his basset hound, Bentley, without a leash.

By Warren Hinckle

(Marilyn Chambers, who died last week at 56, is an icon to generations of San Franciscans. The former Ivory Snow (“99 & 44/100 % Pure”) soap box cover girl starred in San Francisco’s the Mitchell Brothers mega-porn hit movie “Beyond The Green Door.” The following is excerpted from Warren Hinckle’s forthcoming book, “Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson” to be published in May by Last Gasp of San Francisco.)

“The Ivory Snow Girl arrested for prostitution in San Francisco in San Francisco. It’s awesome.”  — Jim Mitchell, after Marilyn Chambers 1985 arrest at his O’Farrell Street Theater.

When the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Street Theater began presenting live acts on multiple stages — one set was built as a giant shower room — the Savonarola inside Mayor Diane Feinstein was awakened.  Now the senior U.S. Senator from California, as Mayor the convent-bred Feinstein was about as hang loose as an Easter Island statue. Her mayoralty was firm on primness – women working in the mayor’s office were expected to wear dresses, no pants; formerly as a city Supervisor she had tinkered with ordinances attempting to regulate the commerce of sex in the famous sea port city, even unto suggesting that all the city’s sex emporiums be relocated into a single Red Light combat zone in the largely black Bayview District;  she was actually taken aback when the residents didn’t cozy up to her idea. If Dianne hadn’t fallen into a career in politics — when her predecessor as Mayor, George Moscone was assassinated with Harvey Milk at City Hall, she became Mayor  –  she would have had an excellent future as a disinfector of public telephones.

Feinstein empowered the vice squad of the SFPD as a sort of screwball comedy Papal Swiss Guard with the sworn duty of putting the Mitchell Brothers out of business. The O’Farrell was raided the way the Allies bombed Dresden and The Brothers legal beagles were led by prominent New York attorney Michael Kennedy, who cut his legal\ teeth in San Francisco defending the Brothers. The lawyers acquired stiff necks from fighting off copyright VCR infringements from the mafia and daily vice squad intrusions on the premises. Every one of the Mitchell Brothers prostitution busts – there were hundreds in the 70s and 80s – was thrown out of court, a reality but that did not deter Feinstein’s finest from continuing to hit on the O’Farrell with metronic regularity. Led by vice lieutenant Dennis Martel who paid proud to the flashlight prowess of the SFPD — he crawled about the O’Farrell’s back stairwells carrying a long black flashlight and once sent 12 officers with flashlights in search of Marilyn Chambers W-2 form. Flashlight-carrying cops invaded the darkened Kopenhagen Lounge, which already had a surfeit of flashlights — customers sat on overstuffed sofas while undressed ladies cavorted about in the altogether carrying red flashlights which they used to illuminate their endearing young charms. [Read more →]