Watching City Hall #446
(3-24-06)
Newsom administration defends contract graveyard
(Attack on Kimo Crossman just tip of iceberg)
The lawyers who wrote the iron-clad contract that turned the sleepy little town of Sunol into a gravel pit are still at work. For the City Attorney of the City of San Francisco. No members of the public got to watch or participate in the deliberations by which the citizens of Sunol were sold out. When that particular contract came before the last ‘Willie Board’, it was presented as a fait accompli. That was a lie, of course, but the ‘Willie’ Boards never checked for veracity. Had they attempted to dig deeper, you may rest assured they would have gotten the same kind of stonewalling, obfuscation and character assassination that citizen Crossman is enduring while I sit here drinking a fine Rodney Strong (RIP, favorite vintner), Sonoma County, Cabernet Sauvignon from the Mr. Parnassus cellars of Savannah Blackwell and coincidentally, smoking a bowl of fine herb from the same locale (as a gentle rain falls across the Mission below Kalish’s big windows and I push my noon deadline and await the assemblage of my Friday Salon of the brilliant and the noble – Lord, I do have it good sometimes). Where was I? Oh yeah, the morning attack upon Crossman in the morning Examiner for requesting that the Newsom administration reveal meetings, calls, emails and the like concerning their deliberations upon the matter of who will control the City’s coming Wi-Fi network.
Crossman only wants the best for the City
And, the City, represented by City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s phalanx of corporate puppet lawyers, only want the best for the giant corporations who have the Mayor’s ‘pecker in their pocket’. As they view it, this is the natural order of things. Herrera has continued the shameful legacy of Louise Renne who’s husband, the PG&E corporate lawyer sent her to work daily (a’ la Michela Pier) with a to-do list always centered upon protecting the interests of the rich and burying the evidence as deeply as possible amongst the thousands of other crooked deals under lock and key in Herrera’s files. Those obsessed with such things will recall that a key element of Angela Alioto’s last run for mayor was a promise to dig into those contracts.
Herrera Teflon peeling?
Face it, Dennis is a nice guy, but he is the new Downtown Consigliore and he’s made the transition from the Renne regime without ruffling a single corporate feather. That’s a bad sign. This latest debacle (want another example? - try the Home Depot contract he wrote that requires the corporate bad guys to fulfill absolutely none of the promises they made to Sophie Maxwell and her gang of bought-off Uncle Tom preachers) … this latest contract is much worse and Newsom even knows it. It’s all about who controls communications in San Francisco all the way from government meetings, to porn and everything in between. It’s about privacy or lack thereof. Money is actually secondary here and that’s something that some people find hard to believe.
Homeland Security is the new Gestapo
And, Gavin Newsom works happily with them. Did you notice that the City’s ‘Office of Emergency Services’ quietly expanded their name to include ‘and Homeland Security’? It’s all about cameras with these guys. And eavesdropping on every type of communications and that’s just hunky dory with the City. Now, Homeland Security and Newsom need a Wi-Fi vendor with no scruples to extend the intrusion of the fascist state. Who better than the billionaires who erased the word ‘democracy’ from their vocabulary in order to do business in China?
How the City went about putting in the fix for Google and Homeland Security is the subject of most of Kimo Crossman’s requests made through the City’s Sunshine Ordinance. He must be onto something because he’s got Herrera worried. In this morning’s Examiner, City Attorney spokesman, Matt Dorsey sought to excuse the department’s refusal to make key documents created in the City’s 2 year effort to create another of their famous long-term, iron-clad contracts for Google (Homeland Security is always a silent partner) … Dorsey essentially told Kimo and the Ex’s Justin Jouvenal that it was just too darned expensive to have open government.
Hey, you can understand. If you let a gadfly like Crossman dig up one grave, someone else might want to exhume another. And, another. Shit, it could end up costing corporations billions of dollars in the long run. Did the City really need to destroy the little town of Sunol when the City had more money than ever in its history or was this a concession that someone paid Willie Brown to create? Why an iron-clad guarantee for a gravel company, but none for prospective employees of racist, Home Depot? Who’s been calling the shots here and on order from whom? Will the skankiest contracts all be signed by the same handful of assistant city attorneys?
The City Attorney spent 2 years in secret meetings with the Mayor’s office and Google hammering out this fuck job. Layer after layer of deceit and loopholes. Of course it’s going to take some time to go over the documentation. Point is, it is the public’s right to know who met who and who’s on who’s payroll or got contributions from who (the Chronicle reported this morning that Google gave Newsom himself thousands) … if they’d been above board with the process, they’d have no problem. Clearly, they weren’t. And, it’s been in the works since 9-11.
Remember the Communications Commission?
Yeah, those were the days and that was only a couple of years ago. Those addicted at my level will remember watching the Commission on TV while they (a couple of them, anyway) … while they waded through one corporate giant after another and seldom learned shit. Still, it was helpful for reporters and activists to learn the faces and hear the rap of the corporate beards. But, as I said, they never got anywhere.
Still, they were too close. One of Newsom’s first acts as Mayor was to destroy the commission and radically slash funds to the DTIS (Department of Telecommunications and Information Services) at the behest of his nervous corporate donors.
Two hacks were brought in to play clueless, well-dressed shills for Homeland Security and the communications giants. First was Ron Vincent, who proved his loyalty to Willie Brown on Treasure Island early in his career. Ron acts as liaison to other machine hacks ensconced far and wide. From the SFPUC, to the PD, Ron was the guy who introduced at-will Department heads to the truth about who was going to get what contract and for how much.
The other one, as they say, ‘ain’t from around here’. Before taking the helm at DTIS, Chris Vien worked for a company back east whose primary client was (and is) the National Security Agency. But, don’t expect a wonk. A 90 year-old Navajo with a wet blanket and a fire knows more about how to communicate than Chris Vien does. Time and again at the hearings called by D-5’s Ross Mirkarimi, genuine telecommunications geeks like Crossman, spread-eagled and skewered the NSA’s empty suit.
Shameless performance by David Pilpel & Peter Scheer
Kimo Crossman makes no money digging through files. David Pilpel (you know he went to school with Peskin?) … Pilpel runs a modest consulting business that sifts, defines and presents government data for a price. Peter Scheer, runs a much larger business that does the same thing. Both see Crossman as competition and the Ex’s slanted piece had no trouble getting them both to bad-mouth him. Scheer had the fuckin’ chutzpah to threaten the death of Sunshine, should Crossman and others like him continue to dig for the truth. Last week, Hellman stooge Ken Garcia took out after Marty McIntyre, another truth-seeker. Expect the editorial boards of both dailies to get onboard later in the week. Enjoy the rain.
Salon today is all afternoon.
Same place as last week.
Bring booze.
No food.
Unless you want to eat.
