Marijuana: The Culture War in San Diego

by ROCKY NEPTUN • Covered by Creative Commons copyright

Photos: Steve McWilliams, Eugene Davidovich

A seemingly dysfunctional San Diego City Council voted 7 to 1 on January 5 to stall many more months deciding the mere basics of regulating medical marijuana dispensaries by rejecting the modest recommendations of its own task force.

The transparency of its motives in setting up the task force rather than having staff prepare ordinances, shows its smoke and mirrors approach to the issue — pretend to do something, while an organizing effort of the usual NIMBY suspects gets under way. Someone named Grandma posted a right-on explanation, “Fork-tongued politicians,” she wrote, “I may be old but I know bait and switch,” while Fred Williams pointed out, “This is not leadership…it’s cowardice.”

With five of the councilmembers seeking re-election or election to another office and the two brain-dead tokens of identity politics blabbering along (at least Councilmember Carl DeMaio is honest in his usual right-wing, knee-jerk opposition), the Council showed that it seems too scared to help the many citizens who are in pain and need a safe, legal place to obtain medical marijuana as approved by California voters in 1996 through Proposition215.

The vote, which sent the plain and simple recommendations of the Medical Marijuana Task Force, to the Council’s Land Use and Housing Committee, is a ploy to allow organized resistance to the use of medical marijuana to focus on preventing the logistics of providing it for those in need by using zoning ordinances and building codes as weapons, like those used against youth arcades and adult entertainment. Tellingly, included in that vote was a requirement that local Planning Groups weigh in on the discussion; which is kind of like asking the Catholic Diocese where the abortion clinics should be located and the details of the permit O.K. process. The city’s half-dozen planning groups, for the most part, are made up of property owners and businesspersons wedded to land values, NIMBY’s all. (The City Heights Area Planning Committee where I was elected in 2001 was run by real estate interests.)

Now, a deceitful City Council and its big lie about wanting to really develop a comprehensive policy on medical marijuana use could laughingly be passed on as politics as usual if it were not for the fact that many innocent San Diegans are being persecuted and prosecuted by an ambitious, despotic District Attorney.

Bonnie Dumanis, Republican Party ideologue and personal tyrant, stepped in where a fearful City Council has failed to act and has been busting legal, legitimate users and dispensers of medical marijuana. Using her prosecutorial power to implement public policy in an attempt to appear tough on crime, she steps over the ruined lives, broken families and lost jobs of ill people who tried to follow the law as best they know how. Like a local version of former despot J..Edgar Hoover, without the secret dress, Dumanis seems to bully the Council by creating an illusion of crime around medical marijuana by selective prosecution and outright lies about the defendants, thus creating a trap for any politician who supports upholding California law allowing personal medical use of cannabis.

Buried in January 5th’s cowardly Council action was the quiet removal of any language calling for an ordinance to be drafted regulating the dispensaries. The hard-working 11-member Task Force on Medical Marijuana, established by the Council in September and co-chaired by my friend and former Council candidate Stephen Whitburn, labored to bring before the Council a set of common-sense recommendations on basic regulations such as dispensaries had to be more than 1,000 feet from schools, playgrounds, libraries, areas where children frequent and barred from being within 500 feet of one another. Also, the storefronts would have had to hire security and obtain appropriate land-use permits as well as limit the hours they are open and operate as non-profits. These fairly small recommendations from the Task Force were a natural process of the thinking of its members, mostly businesspersons, clergy, former police officers and professionals, rather than actual providers or patients.

However, one member of the task force, Mark Robert Bluemel, a San Diego attorney saw the matter clearly. He said the District Attorney’s misinterpretation of state law “has cruelly criminalized innocent medical marijuana users who not only suffer maladies but now face arrest, detention and federal charges.”

In early summer, the San Diego Renters Union proposed to the City Council that it find some statesmanship on this issue by setting up a permanent San Diego Medical Marijuana Regulatory Board, which would oversee the operation of the dispensaries including the cost, quality, personnel and non-profitability of the coops and cooperatives. The Renters Union suggested that if the providing process was taken out of individual hands and become a volunteer effort on the part of the organized group of patients, overseen by the city, then the District Attorney could not attack them on an individual basis as she has in the past.

While Councilwoman Frye supports the use of marijuana for medical purposes, her timidity reflects an interest in running for the County Board of Supervisors. “The goal here is to put in some guidelines that actually make sense and people can understand what the rules are,” she said “the guidelines put forward by the state are not clear.” Yet, even she did not support the humble suggestions of the task force.

However, the average citizens in San Diego are beginning to have their say on the matter. In a clear rebuke to the D.A. a Superior Court jury last week found Jovan Christian Jackson, 31, not guilty of five charges of possessing and selling marijuana illegally from a medical marijuana dispensary in Kearny Mesa called Answerdam Alternative Care.

Jackson’s attorney, Lance Rogers, successfully showed the jury that the collective operated legally and professionally. He said members of the collective were asked to show a valid doctor’s recommendation before obtaining any marijuana and sign an agreement to abide by the collective’s rules.

A San Diego police detective testified that he lied to a doctor, used a false ID and fraudulently signed a contract/agreement with the collective to make two buys in June and July 2008. Trying to find out who set up this ridiculous entrapment has been difficult. Steve Walter, the assistant chief of the narcotics office in the D.A.’s office agreed to talk to me and then backed out (could it be because Bonnie Dumanis has appeared on my annual list of San Diego piss-ants four years in a row?). Captain Miguel Rosario of the SDPD’s vice squad originally agreed to an interview about the marijuana busts, but when I e-mailed him a list of questions about the D.A.’s involvement, he quickly canceled.

Dumanis and the Culture War

San Diego’s District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis struts onto the stage. Her swagger, her measured pace, her menacing stare in front of the cameras reminds me of the persona John Wayne created on his way to becoming an American icon. As I watch Dumanis mount the platform, amid camera flashes and reporters’ shouts, my friend, who is Gay, whispers, “Who does this tough broad think she is — Raymond Burr in high-heels?”

“No,” I answer, “I know many really tough gals who are Lesbians; cab drivers, construction workers, even a few rodeo gals, whose personalities are real, they are warm, caring persons.

“This demeanor, this show, is not about Freudian over-compensation or being tough in a masculine world; it’s all about power and ambition,” I comment as she is book-ended on the stage by two modern “Dukes” of bluster and armed might, then-San Diego County Sheriff William B. Kolender, who allowed his deputies to shoot down unarmed Latinos in the barrios; and San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne, who protects murdering police officers, encourages brutality against the homeless and uses his detectives to circumvent city ordinances.

John Wayne, even though he provided a cultural context, a mythical arrogance to the national character, which continues to drive American Empire, never, personally harmed anyone in his illusion. Dumanis, on the other hand, wields her power as District Attorney to manipulate the legal system for personal ambition at the expense of sick people needing relief from their suffering and pain.

American Empire seems to be a double-edged sword. It is not just bombing distant cities to protect oil pipelines or corrupt world corporations. (Would Wayne’s modern movies show him gunning down Afghan poor in their own villages and homes?). Empire is also reflected in ideology and national assumptions. From the Romans to the British to modern Corporate-Owned Capitalism — an emerging state without defined borders and its own armed forces, as the movie Avatar spectacularly highlights — the domination of others and the plunder of national resources were always driven by a mind-set that depended on power and hierarchy.

Thus the flip side of U.S. troops making the world safe for Wal-Mart and McDonald’s is the other edge of the blade; narrowing the parameters of freedoms and liberties in our neighborhoods and in our everyday lives. Empire must own and control its base, provide wonderful motivations for conformity and terrible consequences for dissent and, most importantly, make alternatives not only impossible but unthinkable. Today, everywhere, human beings, either individually or in associations such as governments, are increasingly incapable of calculating possibilities because the freedom to choose is an illusion.

Like shoppers on an escalator or cattle prodded through chutes, there is no room to maneuver. Behavior is no longer innovative and spontaneous because consciousness itself [to stand apart, the ability to give things meaning] is hammered into a socially determined aspect of self. In a corporate-owned world, most of us are trapped by the lack of alternatives and increasingly, the ability to even imagine options. Human praxis, the reflective process of thought and action, has become stunted; liberty an illusion, and the notion of individuality a cruel myth.

C. Wright Mills’ warnings, decades ago, about the continuing constraints on human freedom by those who have institutional and economic power have come to pass. Political and economic tyranny, even the manipulation of truth itself, have become commonplace, with little dissent. Thus the San Diego District Attorney can go before the press and not only spoon-feed local journalists a fraudulent legal basis for her harassment and downright lies about her victims’ personal affairs, but she is never challenged by the media — even when her statements are not what the official court documents say.

Dumanis, like any self-respecting addict, is hooked on the egotism of power and the selfishness of wealth, the rewards of Corporate-Owned Capitalism, its high, its opiate, its material comforts, its insatiable requisite for supremacy’s self-definition and purpose.

Her place in the continuing cultural wars for economic purposes, where everything is made into a commodity and sold at a price, even the health of one’s one body and the alleviation of pain, is assured as she persecutes and prosecutes medical marijuana users in San Diego. The violence of stalking ill persons, particularly fellow LGBT people, for personal ambition makes her addiction to wealth and power even more sad and pitiful.

My mother advises me not to suggest a fierce District Attorney is vindictive, deceitful, power hungry and a crook. Of course, dear old mom lives in the far-off piney woods of the Ozark Mountains and worries about her only son; she doesn’t see the shattered lives and broken families that Dumanis has scattered around San Diego neighborhoods.

I assure my mother I have nothing personal against the D.A. In almost 20 years in San Diego, I have never been arrested or even had to pay a traffic fine. I can pity Dumanis for her infirmity, her madness, the tyrannical, autocratic abuse of authority, like Richard Nixon or Jack Abramoff; and still fight the system that allows one person to have so much power to destroy lives, circumvent state law and the will of California voters and great personal greed.

“The authoritarian ideology she represents, owned by corporate dollars and backed by the armed might of all our militarized forces is what I fight,” I tell my mother, “not this tragic, fleshy android, another piece of equipment in Empire’s mechanism.”

Love and Death of a San Diego Hero

Dumanis is, indeed, just another delusional villain in a long list of San Diego prosecutors and legal violence which, under corporate-owned ideology and the police power of local authorities, has disrupted lives, harassed, entrapped and imprisoned many innocent people and led to the martyrdom of one of San Diego’s greatest heroes — Steve McWilliams.

The only time I ever saw Steve McWilliams laugh was in early summer of 2005; little realizing that soon, like a Buddhist monk wrapped in flames, he would use his own life as a metaphor for justice and light in a society gone blind with fear and greed.

I stood there talking to him, as I often did when he walked his dogs along the sidewalk in Normal Heights, discussing the weather, the dogs or the large garden I tended. With great sadness, he looked beyond my eyes, over my left shoulder, watching the bulbous clouds as they slid through the blue-green brightness. As the gray shadows moved over the daisies and roses; he remarked how, as human beings, driven by either selfishness or compassion, we can make the world either ugly or beautiful.

On his walk back, where the street ends at the edge of that great San Diego canyon, Mission Valley, he was on the opposite side and watched as I came out of the courtyard just as someone was pulling their dog off the grass, leaving a large pile of doggy-doo. Now, I had a shovel in my hand, so I scooped it up on the shovel and walked behind, yelling “Sir, you forgot something.” All the neighbors came out to witness his attempt to ignore the selfishness and contempt reflected in this act. Steve joined in that communal laugh.

It will take more than a shovel, even a skip-loader, to trail behind Judge Reuben Brooks or former U.S. Attorney Carol Lam and all the other government tyrants. Not even a freight hauler could carry the blood, anguish, wasted lives in prison, the pain and suffering they have created in their obscene efforts to control our lives.

McWilliams, nailed to a cross of pain for his efforts, fought the power of the state to regulate our personal freedoms and choices, not only for himself but every person in need of inexpensive medication without side effects. Yes, the truth shall set you free, and the government and media, both owned by powerful pharmaceutical companies, don’t want you to know that you can grow your own medicine in a coffee can, right there on the table in front of the window, alongside the geraniums and ferns.

If Steve, who suffered from severe neuropathic migraines caused by a traffic accident, had continued quietly to self-medicate with marijuana, as he had after his arrival in San Diego in 1997, he would still be with us today. However, his integrity and compassion drove him to found, with his partner, Barbara MacKenzie, Shelter from the Storm, San Diego’s first Medical Cannabis Resource Information Center.

He sought not only to empower sick people in pain with information but to liberate them from the evils of store-bought chemicals: manufactured dangerous pills, without long-term study, with threatening side-effects, developed primarily to make others, CEO’s and wealthy investors, richer.

He understood that the power of the federal government has been bought; from the President, through Congress to the Supreme Court, they have been ordered by their corporate masters to make the world safe for profit. This is what the War on Drugs is all about; why there are over 2 million young people, mostly of color, in our prisons and jails, more than the rest of the world combined.

Poor folks don’t have the resources for Valium or Prozac, so they have been criminalized, persecuted and stigmatized by the fear mongers as an excuse, the learning methodology, over the years, to build the links of the chain — a prison state, with the police and military in control, to protect the rich and to punish all who dissent.

When President George W. Bush was re-elected, a new phase in the clash of freedom over corporate tyranny began. The federal police system, using its years of experience in the hoods and barrios, moved its battle lines into middle-class neighborhoods, to win the cultural war, once and for all; to mop up the last vestiges of hippie notions and free will. Using simple-minded, cruel judges like Reuben Brooks, who McWilliams in his suicide note called “a wretched, evil little gnome,” and ambitious, ruthless agents of fear, like Carol Lam, they sought total control of our private lives.

And while the Obama administration has sought to stand down a little on the federal offense against marijuana users, local Right-wing elements and tyrannical ideologues like San Diego Police Chief Lansdowne, using his badge and taxpayer money to fund his goon squads, have went after San Diego medical marijuana users, even though that use is protected under city ordinances (as well as state law).

Steve McWilliams called himself an “impeccable warrior” in his death letter. He was facing the usual fascist response to dissent — prison- and in increasing pain, under court order not to grow or use the natural herb of relief. Saying he refused “to allow the government to control my life,” his last words were that he had “given ever thing to the cause — all my possessions, my time and, now, my life.”

In an obituary posted on the IndyMedia Web site in July 2005 I wrote the following: “Our greatest tribute to Steve, will be our own efforts toward overcoming hypocrisy and selfishness; to fight this increasingly cruel, authoritarian government on behalf of our children and neighbors. Steve, like all great and noble persons of history, hands back through space and time the courage to be free. His walk with love and death widens that path that we all must take; to make our lives meaningful, loving and liberating.”

One of Dumanis’ Victims

In his brief 28 years, Eugene Davidovich has followed all the rules, adhered to the law and lived an exemplary life. Yet, today, he stands broken, alone, homeless, persecuted and in daily pain. Clean-cut, honest spoken, go-getting; he was a child of the American dream, going from good son to impressive student to serving his country in the military. Afterward there came a fine loving marriage, a young son and a promising career in the computer programming field.

When the migraines came several years ago, he followed convention; visiting his doctor, prescription after prescription, with side-effects, until a friend turned him on to the benefits of medical cannabis. Again, following all the rules, Davidovich joined a medical marijuana collective, got a doctor’s recommendation and a city-issued patient card. Self-medicating, effectively and cheaply, he continued his family’s support, confident that he was a law-abiding citizen following the guidelines issued by the California Attorney General as outlined in Proposition 215 and adhering to the city codes and ordinances that legalized and regulated medical marijuana use.

Early in 2009, along with other legal patients of citywide medical collectives and cooperatives, he was swept up in what appears to be an illicit conspiracy by Police Chief Lansdowne and the ambitious Dumanis, to use the power of the badge and the prosecutorial muscle of the D.A.’s office to overturn and nullify city ordinances adopted by our elected officials.

Representative democracy appears to be under attack in San Diego as the Police Department, under the apparent orders of the D.A., has broadened a legitimate campaign against drug use on military bases and our campuses called alternately called “Operation Endless Summer” and “Operation Green Rx” into a witchhunt against medical marijuana users, particularly in our LGBT community.

Week after week, Davidovich and other legal cannabis users, trudge down to City Council meetings, hoping for fairness and justice, using the open forum period to plead their case. And week after week, eight sphinxes sit, roll their eyes, study reports and continue to ignore the persecution of San Diego citizens or the usurpation of the representative process in San Diego by dictatorial powers. Now, they have added insult to injury by withdrawing a mandate for city action on any kind of protection from the predatory D.A. and leaving the 30 or so dispensaries in legal limbo at risk of more attacks by Chief Lansdowne’s twisted priorities.

If the Police Chief can attack legally protected patients, as he is doing in Operation Green Rx; if the District Attorney ‘s office can tell a judge that they have arbitrary and tyrannically decided that San Diego’s ordinances and laws are invalid [which they did at the preliminary trial of Donna Lambert] without ever informing the City Council or using the legal process to go to a Superior Court or Federal judge to get them overturned: then we have moved ever closer to an Orwellian state.

“I believe in our justice system, in the rule of law,” Davidovich told me over coffee when I interviewed him in late 2009, “If I had done anything wrong, if I had broken the law, then I would simply plead guilty, accept a plea bargain and end this nightmare.” His fight back, is, indeed, our struggle. If his rights, his legal protections are not valid and can be withdrawn on a prosecutor’s whim or ambition; then, are any of us safe?

Davidovich, who followed the rules, yet ended in this Kafka-like nightmare, and all the other ill San Diegans, who thought they were protected by law, only to be attacked and prosecuted by those very authoritarian forces that should be protecting their legal rights, need our help.

What We Can Do

1. Call, write or e-mail your City Councilmember and demand they quit hiding from the issue and develop ordinances that protect the rights and access of legal users of medical marijuana.

2. Contact the District Attorney’s office and insist that this blatant political use of her office to persecute and prosecute legitimate medical marijuana users stop.

3. Contact San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne and suggest that department manpower spent lying to doctors, falsifying documents, and infiltrating professional co-ops and collectives should cease. Scarce funds could better be used to fight real crime against persons and property.

Compass’s The House of Yes: A Fitting Farewell

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Photo: Courtesy Compass Theatre

Wendy MacLeod’s The House of Yes isn’t the greatest play — or the best production — Compass Theatre has given us, but as their farewell to the playing space at 3790 Sixth Avenue in Hillcrest where they’ve been since their inception it’s a fitting piece that plays well to this plucky little theatre company’s strengths. It offers a provocative premise, incisive direction by Jay Mower, quite credible settings for a community theatre and, above all, finely honed acting by a more than capable ensemble cast. It’s also the sort of black comedy-drama Compass has always done well. Most of their best modern-dress productions have been of this sort of play, offering outrageous situations that at once amuse and shock, even though MacLeod is hardly a “name” author in the sense that David Mamet (whose classic scripts Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo gave Compass two of its most artistically and commercially successful productions) is.

The House of Yes, premiered in 1990 and made into a film in 1997 with Parker Posey, Tori Spelling and Geneviève Bujold, is actually set in 1983, in Washington. D.C. The principals — Mrs. Pascal (Lee Donnelly) and her three children, sons Marty (Jason Perkins) and Anthony (Bobby Schiefer) and daughter Jackie (Laura Massey), Marty’s fraternal twin — live in a fancy house next to one of the residences owned by the Kennedy family. The Kennedys take on a symbolic role as a locus of influence and power, a family able to keep their skeletons buried in a way the Pascals can’t — and Jackie has made her namesake, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a sort of lodestar of glamour and effortless beauty.

Jackie is also insane — she’s just been released from a “hospital” when the play opens, and it doesn’t take us long to figure out what kind of hospital — and as we watch her it’s like watching a train wreck. Neither the other characters nor the audience quite know in what direction the glare-ice of her mind is going to take her next — and Laura Massey enacts this part of the character by speaking in a deliberately babbling voice and moving her body and limbs in great arcs that physically dramatize her unpredictability, nervous energy and drive. The crisis of the play is precipitated when Marty arrives at the Pascal home for Thanksgiving dinner — and accompanying him is Lesly (Karenessa LeGear), his live-in girlfriend and fiancée from New York, the only non-Pascal in the dramatis personae and a down-to-earth proletarian (she works in a doughnut shop and Marty tells his family that “she smells like powdered sugar”) whose disorienting presence chez Pascal — at a time when the house is being menaced by a hurricane and the meal they were cooking falls victim to a power blackout that renders their electric stove inoperable — triggers a string of psychological and sexual crises.

MacLeod’s debt to Harold Pinter in general and The Homecoming in particular is almost too obvious — though in Pinter’s play it was a father, not a mother, at the center of the family whose prodigal son is re-entering their lives with a new girlfriend in tow — but she’s able to ring new changes on those old chimes. Her script is performed with loving care by director Mower and his cast. Jason Perkins gives us Marty as a man who at first seems to have escaped the orbit of Jackie’s craziness and made a normal life and relationship for himself — and he seems to be as perplexed as we are when Jackie goes after him with both barrels and tries to pull him back into her world. Bobby Schiefer is physically a bit hard to believe as Perkins’ brother, but he acts his part with a kind of befuddled naïveté and his deliberate stiffness and nerdy line readings express the gulf between him and his high-powered siblings.

Lee Donnelly’s matriarch was probably a cliché before she was born, but within the limits of the character she’s properly imperious as she sets herself squarely in the eye of this hurricane — the one going on inside, not outside, the Pascals’ home. Karenessa LeGear has just the right appearance for Lesly — interestingly, her bio in the program lists her mostly as a musical performer but she’s just fine in this non-singing role — and she does a good job projecting a sort of Everywoman who loses her own bearings amidst the Pascal craziness. The ending of the play is unexpectedly violent — at least if you don’t see the warning on the lobby wall that firearms are used in the piece — but it makes sense in terms of all we’ve seen before.

Compass’s physical production is generally good, though there are a few flaws. One wonders why, in an otherwise convincing room set — designed by Adam Lindsay, built and painted by George Bailey, and filled with ghastly “antique” furniture that seems credible as the sorts of pieces these demented rich folk would own — the artwork on the Pascals’ walls is represented by empty frames. Also, it’s a bit disappointing that we don’t see the famous outfit in which Jackie went to a costume party as the real “Jackie O,” complete with blood spatters on the jacket and macaroni bits glued to it to represent John Kennedy’s brains as they spattered after he was shot. (There is a Jackie O. jacket, but costume designer Lisa Burgess — whose work elsewhere is spot-on — spared it the accoutrements we heard about in the script.) Mitchell Simkovski’s lighting design and especially the uncredited sound design do a good job of suggesting the hurricane looming outside, carefully referenced by MacLeod as a metaphor for the one blowing within the Pascals’ walls (and a real-life hailstorm that hit early in the play on January 20 just added to the verisimilitude).

Dale Morris, founder and executive director of Compass Theatre, is looking for a new space and trying to find something affordable and easy to get to (two qualities that in the real estate market all too often seem to cancel each other out!). While it’s to be hoped that this marvelously ambitious little company finds a new home and continues to grace San Diego’s theatre scene with productions like this, The House of Yes is an appealing conclusion to their nine years in Hillcrest and a play everyone interested in this quirky sort of comedy-drama should see.

The House of Yes is playing at Compass Theatre, 3790 Sixth Avenue in Hillcrest, every Thursday through Sunday through February 14. Performances are at 7:30 Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays. For tickets and other information, call Compass Theatre at (619) 688-9210 or visit www.compasstheatre.com on the Web.

David Swanson Lays Out 16-Point Plan for U.S. Left

Former “After Downing Street” Organizer Takes On the Obama Cult

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTO: From David Swanson’s Web site.

“In Virginia, we started making a big community garden and everybody pitched in and worked on it, digging ditches to make sure we’d get water to the garden, and with a little effort we were getting some success,” progressive organizer, activist and author David Swanson told his audience at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church Friday, January 15. “Then this crowd of rain dancers showed up and said we ought to have a rain dance, and they would bring us the water and we wouldn’t have to dig for it. It’s going to be four years of water and we wouldn’t have to dig for it. It was going to be rain we could believe in. So we did the rain dance and then we had a little rain, and everybody said, ‘It worked!’ And they convinced themselves that it worked, until they realized it was just raining the same amount it always did. Did you really think, did you really believe, that a rain dance was going to fix everything? No. Then why is everybody so discouraged because we had this stupid rain dance, and why are we saying we shouldn’t bother to dig ditches anymore because the rain dance didn’t work?”

Gradually it dawned on the over 150 listeners that Swanson meant this story as a parable — they certainly “got it” once he parodied President Obama’s campaign slogan with the words “rain we could believe in” — and though his story was just one illustration of a 16-point program he outlined, sometimes facetiously, for the Left in America, in many ways it summed up his message. Though he was ostensibly there to promote his book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, Swanson’s agenda was bigger than his title. It was an effort to get the Left to rethink its whole national strategy, focus on local issues and campaigns, and tune out all the chatter about presidents and elections. Noting that he was speaking on the 81st anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Swanson said, “Monday is National Volunteer Day for Martin Luther King. When are we going to have a National Non-Violent Resistance Day for Martin Luther King? He said, a year to the day before he was shot, that a nation that puts more money into its military than social uplift is headed for disaster — and today the U.S. government is spending more money on the military than on everything else combined.”

Swanson, who first achieved fame in activist circles as part of Cindy Sheehan’s “Camp Casey” outside then-President George W. Bush’s compound in Crawford, Texas in summer 2005 and was active in the organizing around the Downing Street Memo — a leaked document from the British government that showed Bush had meant to invade Iraq from the get-go — issued an impassioned, often acerbic presentation with little patience for self-styled progressives pursuing strategies and tactics different from his. He was particularly withering in his scorn for any so-called “progressive” who still believes in or trusts President Obama. “The White House has just proposed a $780 billion military budget, plus a $34 billion ‘supplemental appropriation’ for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus the military spending hidden in the State Department, Department of Energy, Homeland Security, NASA and the CIA, not to mention the bulk of our debts, which are for past military adventures,” Swanson said. “How would we have reacted if President Bush had gone to Copenhagen and given a speech glorifying war while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize?”

The first of Swanson’s 16 points — some of which were serious, some satirical — was, “Realize that on most issues we’re a majority. We think we’re a fringe group and the rest of the country is crazy. A strong majority of Americans would support taking one-third of the military budget and spending it on other things. We see the compassion of the American people after something like the earthquake in Haiti. We need that same kind of compassion towards the people in Iraq.”

Swanson’s second and third points called on American progressives to “realize how active we are” in spite of the way issues are reported in the mainstream media. “They just had a big rally in Maine telling Washington we don’t want our money going to the military, but no one outside Maine knew that happened,” he said. “There are great things going on here in California, but no one else knows about them. … We’re having a lot of successes you’ll never hear about. Just the fact that we made the Iraq war illegal got buried because we couldn’t stop it from happening, but it’s kept us from going into Iran. When we forced Alberto Gonzalez out of town, yes, we knew that someone just as terrible was going to replace him — that’s the risk you take — but the techniques were very valuable lessons. Counter-recruitment” — exposing the lies military recruiters tell young people to get them to sign up and making youth aware of non-military options — “is an area where we’re having successes all over the country. They can only fight the wars to the extent that they have the people to fight them.”

Point number four — and also a big area of emphasis in his later points — was “look at the things you can do at the state and local level.” Swanson argued that lobbying the President or a Senator and expecting to be able to influence them is a waste of time, and progressives should concentrate on members of the House of Representatives and officials in state and local government. “There are cities passing resolutions that if Bush and Cheney come there, they must be arrested,” Swanson said. “Clean elections” — the option that allows candidates who collect a certain number of petition signatures and $5 donations to have their entire campaigns paid for with public funds — “are being won at the state and local levels. … Health care [reform] is going to happen at the state level.”

At this point Swanson aimed one of his nastiest salvos at peace groups who raise large amounts of money to put occasional full-page ads in the New York Times — “a paper which shouldn’t be read,” he called it, ironically echoing the Right-wing media who also tell their audience the New York Times is not to be trusted. What’s more, his fifth and sixth points urged people to “try to go one week without thinking about or watching any soap operas or reality shows, or thinking at all about Obama. … Try to go one week without thinking about elections, past or future. Think instead about what you’re doing as a citizen to force change. If you need to throw out your TV in order to do that, line them up in front of the TV station downtown. They’re just the right height to make perfect benches for homeless people.”

Seventh, Swanson said, “your representative in Congress is not your friend — or your enemy. They’re an elected representative and you have to lobby them. You have to lobby them as if politeness isn’t the top value right now. You have to go after them in the media — and you have to go after all of them, even the ones who call themselves ‘progressive.’” As a case in point, he launched a slashing attack on Sonona County Congressmember Lynn Woolsey, who despite a good voting record on war and peace issues is currently campaigning for Congressmember Jane Harman -— who, Swanson said, “never met a war she didn’t like, and isn’t sure whether she works for the U.S. or Israel” — in a contested primary against primary opponent Marcy Winograd, whom Swanson described as “an activist” who’d put herself on the line for progressive issues instead of merely voting for it.

Indeed, like so many progressives and Leftists who reserve their nastiest rhetorical attacks for fellow progressives and Leftists they don’t feel are progressive or Left enough, Swanson went on to ridicule the entire Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives, which Woolsey chairs. “The worst thing Woolsey and others have done is have a ‘Progressive Caucus’ that isn’t a caucus and doesn’t stand for anything,’ he said. “The Blue Dog Caucus says, ‘Here’s a bill, here’s how we want to make it worse, and if you don’t amend it that way we won’t vote for it.’ The Progressive Caucus is just there to pad your résumé, They never took a unified stand on anything until recently when they said they wouldn’t vote for the health bill unless it contained certain things — and then when it didn’t contain those things, 55 of the 57 of them voted for it anyway.”

Swanson said that progressives should demand that their Congressmembers not only talk the right issue positions but actively lobby their colleagues for them. He also called on rank-and-file progressives to do “direct action” against their Congressmembers, including being arrested — which he called “one of the most exciting things I’ve done. … We are past the point where we have to be polite to these people. I know people who do this day after day.” After a facetious point number eight which claimed that doctors would say activism is good for you, Swanson said in point nine that the number one demand activists should be making of Congress right now is “stop the money for the war. There’s an obsession in D.C. with passing bills. You have bills that are good for talking bout won’t be any good to stop the war. You have bills to stop the escalation, or to have an exit plan in place.”

Instead of passing a meaningless bill the Senate will probably vote down and, even if they approve it, the President will probably just ignore, Swanson said our bottom-line demand should be that the House reject any additional funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The one power even an arch-Right winger and supporter of the imperial presidency like former Bush legal advisor John Yoo admits Congress has to stop a war is to refuse to pay for it. In point 10, Swanson suggested people look up his group’s Web site, http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/whipwars, for information on how to contact Congressmembers and sample arguments they can use against war funding. “Please phone your Representative at (202) 224-3121 and ask them to commit to voting No on war funding, and post below what they tell you,” the site said. “Thanks!”

Swanson’s point 11 was “do not get Astroturfed” — which, he explained, not only meant refusing to work in coalition with the Right-wing “teabagger” groups but (once again) breaking ranks with mainstream liberals in D.C. “If your union is asking the President or Congress what to lobby for, you’re being used as a prop,” he said. “They’re telling you what to do, when you should be telling them. “Every group has to be reformed from the inside — or ended.” His related point 12 was “don’t put the party ahead of the issues. … The fact that we’ve given the Democrats the power — the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress — is an opportunity. The filibuster is a Senate rule they can get rid of any time. We’re going to hold representatives accountable no matter which party they’re from.”

Point 13 was directly related to the theme of Swanson’s book: that over the years Congress has given up its constitutionally guaranteed powers to write the nation’s budget, to decide when the U.S. should fight a war, and many other issues to the executive branch. “Tell our Congressmembers that we want them to have more power — but to use it for us,” Swanson said. “Wars should not be up to Presidents, they should be up to Congress.” He said that for his first four months in office Obama was still writing “signing statements” and attaching them to bills, just the way Bush did, in order to allow him to ignore them or subvert their intentions. “Even though Congress is completely corrupted,” Swanson said, “it’s catastrophic to allow this much power to be in one person, and all Bush’s and Cheney’s evils are being cemented in place because a President of the other party is using and expanding them.”

Swanson called on Congress not only to start investigating the administration and issuing subpoenas but also to start enforcing them itself instead of letting the Justice Department do it. He said that Congress used to have its own jail in the basement of the Capitol where it ordered people sent who refused a subpoena to testify before a Congressional committee. “In 2009, Congress didn’t issue a single subpoena” to the executive branch, and, Swanson added, they only used their ultimate power — impeachment — once. “They impeached a judge for groping people,” he said. “If impeachment and subpoenas are gone, there’s no reason [for the administration] to listen to Congress — unless they stop funding the war.”

Swanson’s fourteenth point was that “there are Congressmembers who feel the way we do, but they’re cowardly or corrupt or won’t go up against the leaders of their party or the corporate media” He said we need to do more to pressure them to fight for their real beliefs rather than weaseling out or going along with other members or their party. After an ironic point 15 — a mention of the bill recently passed in the California Assembly Public Health Committee to legalize marijuana for adults — his sixteenth and last point was to “remember the words of I. F. Stone that the only fights worth fighting are the ones you lose, because you lose and lose and lose until someday someone wins.”

One audience member said global warming and other threats of environmental catastrophe don’t give us the luxury of waiting for generations and losing fight after fight until finally our descendants and successors win one. “The people who worked hardest for women to vote never saw it happen,” Swanson replied. “We have a short attention span, and yet we have no moral choice but to work at it. If you didn’t have the sense of moral choice, you wouldn’t be here tonight; you’d be at home. When a handful of people in the Czech Republic blocked the U.S. from putting in a military base, they won — and here in the U.S. we were told that Obama wasn’t building that base only because he wanted to suck up to the Russians.”

Asked about poll results indicating that people are responding to their disaffection with the Obama administration by flocking to Republican candidates, Swanson said, “I don’t think that’s an accurate prediction. My primary concern is we’re continuing endless wars, destroying the environment and making life unlivable on this planet. In D.C. people say things like, ‘We might want to look like we’re defunding the war if it creates a useful narrative for the next election.’ They should be saying, ‘We should use the elections to create a useful narrative to defund the war.’”

Other questions to Swanson were about the bank bailouts (he said, “I liked somebody’s proposal today that the bonuses be sent to Haiti”), the existence of nuclear weapons and the power they give to the President, the unwillingness of the Obama administration to seek repeal or even amendment of the USA PATRIOT Act and whether progressive activists should work in alternative political parties or bypass the electoral system altogether. On the last topic, Swanson said, “We should get rid of the crazy rules that prevent additional parties and independent candidates from winning. We need to fight for our principles through independent organizations not connected to the two major parties, whether they’re parties, PAC’s or whatever.”

Town-Hall Meeting Bitterly Critical of Pride Board

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: Joyce Marleb and Stephen Whitburn; Ken St. Pierre; Ben Cartwright; Pride volunteers at the meeting; attendees taking a vote on whether to ask the Pride board to reinstate the former staff members

“I know all of you are concerned about Pride and the community,” former Greater San Diego Business Association (GSDBA) chief executive officer Joyce Marleb said at the start of a contentious and highly emotional town-hall meeting Sunday, January 10 about the future of San Diego’s Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) pride events. Called by veteran community activist and former Pride board member Nicole Murray Ramirez, who booked the big room at the LGBT Center but allowed Marleb and former San Diego Democratic Club president Stephen Whitburn to MC instead of doing so himself, the meeting was full of slashing criticisms of the current board members of San Diego LGBT Pride for their decision to fire executive director Ron deHarte.

The public meeting followed two private ones on Friday, January 8, one with former board members of Pride and one with volunteers and so-called “ambassadors” — fundraisers — for Pride. DeHarte, who sent a letter saying he had been “advised” not to attend the meeting (he didn’t say by whom) but wanted to be there in spirit, claimed that the Pride board had fired him on January 5 because the previous day he had written an open letter condemning the board’s decision to award a $5,000 bonus to its chair, Dr. Philip Princetta. Two other top staff members of Pride, Jeff Redondo and development director Ken St. Pierre, resigned in protest after deHarte was fired, and both appeared at the January 10 meeting to explain their positions.

“Last Monday [January 4], Ron deHarte brought the staff together for a meeting and told us about the issue,” St. Pierre told the 300-person audience January 10. “On Tuesday, the three board members were at the office and terminated Ron, and the staff reassembled with the board members, who told us their side of the story.” St. Pierre said the staff members then conferred with each other and he and Redondo decided “we cannot work for an organization that rewards board members with money in this unethical fashion.” St. Pierre said he would personally find it impossible to ask people to contribute money to Pride — the job of a development director — when it might be spent to reward board members personally for their services.

“We had a tough decision to make,” Redondo added. “We sat down and it was a struggle for all of us, and there were two [other] staff members who were unable to make that decision [to resign].”

Diametrically Opposed Versions

Though Whitburn and Marleb made it clear at the start of the meeting that they were open to hearing from supporters of the Pride board’s decision to fire deHarte, no one offered public comment supporting the board. None of the board members attended the meeting themselves, and their only public statement on the issue has been an open letter published on the Pride Web site and in the January 7 Gay & Lesbian Times. That letter and deHarte’s January 4 letter to the board, which was read on January 10 and also passed out in written form at the meeting, tell almost diametrically opposed versions of the board’s decision to award Princetta the $5,000 “stipend” and deHarte’s role in it.

“The board has violated their fiduciary duties,” deHarte wrote, “by (1) after receiving advice from the Executive Director [deHarte] on December 17, 2009 that paying $5,000 to the Chair is a self-dealing transaction, the board refused to reverse their action; (2) reaffirming their decision on December 29, 2009 by retaining Philip Princetta as a board member and Chair, and not requiring repayment of the $5,000; (3) knowingly conducting private meetings unannounced to the Executive Director or the public, from April to October 2009, giving an impression of secret back-room dealings; (4) excluding executive director input, not seeking advice of the organization’s attorney or accountant prior to paying the board Chair $5,000 for service to the organization dating back to 2002; (5) violating the organizaiton’s bylaws which require that no director be compensated; (6) violating the articles of incorporation of San Diego Pride under the principal [sic] that it was not organized for the private gain of any person; (7) violating the long-standing tradition of volunteer service as a board member of San Diego Pride and offering an unprecedented payment for services; and by (8) placing the organization in a position to be investigated by the Attorney General for engaging in self-dealing.”

The board’s open letter — bearing only a corporate signature and not attributed to any specific individuals — acknowledged that the $5,000 payment to Princetta was an “indiscretion” and said Princetta had already returned the money to Pride. But the letter also said the stipend “was given of pure intention, lack of malfeasance and just plain ordinary love for an individual who has donated literally thousands of hours of his time and energy at the expense of his own business and personal life to this organization and the community it serves.” The board’s letter claimed that deHarte, far from opposing the payment to Princetta, had actively offered suggestions on how to cover it up which the board members felt were unethical.

“On December 17, 2009, over two months after the check for $5,000 was drawn, two board members were approached by the Executive Director with a plan that he said could make this entire issue ‘go away,’” the board’s letter said. “That plan was for Philip Princetta to resign prior to December 31, 2009. By doing so, he would not be listed on the IRS 990 form and as such the stipend to our board chair would never have to be disclosed. From a legal standpoint, Dr. Princetta and the Board knew this idea was inappropriate and certainly not transparent. One can only imagine our dismay that the Executive Director of this outstanding organization would devise such a plan.”

The board members also released information that Ron deHarte had received a $5,000 payment from the organization in addition to his salary as Pride director, and that other Pride staff members had received a bonuses totaling $7.000. A number of people at the January 10 meeting were under the impression that the board had released that information to discredit deHarte and make it seem like he was part of the problem, ignoring the legal difference between paying extra money to a salaried staff member and giving a stipend to a member of a presumably volunteer board. Leann Marchesi, herself an executive director of a 501 ( c ) (3) organization — Elder Help — said she read deHarte’s bonus quite differently from the impression the Pride board was trying to give: as a vote of confidence from the board to deHarte that helped convince her that their later decision to fire him was purely revenge for his having publicly blown the whistle on the $5,000 stipend to Princetta.

Community Service Concerns

But for many of the people who took advantage of the community comment section of the January 10 meeting to speak out, the $5,000 payment to Dr. Princetta was only the last straw in a series of decisions by the Pride board which they felt has taken the organization away from its community-service roots. Alex Sachs, legislative director for the San Diego Democratic Club, said that the $5,000 payment to Princetta was “a symptom of a greater lack of transparency” on the part of the board members. “They purchased a building without community input, and reduced the disbursement of funds [from Pride] to community organizations without explanation,” Sachs said. “Pride is ours, and we need a Pride that’s transparent and responsible.”

San Diego Democratic Party chair and former San Diego Democratic Club president Jess Durfee said, “I was concerned when Pride redefined itself as an organization, from just organizing the annual parade and festival to attempting to compete with the Center. I’ll take blame for not speaking out sooner, but when they bought a building without community input, that was a violation of trust. When it radically cut back the contributions to community organizations, that was another violation of our trust. We are seeing the outcome of a long struggle. It’s good we’re retooling it, but it’s going to cost us a lot of pain and embarrassment.”

Larry Baza, current president of the San Diego Democratic Club and one of the former Pride board members who attended the January 8 meeting and signed a consensus statement read at the Center on January 10, recalled that he had served eight years on the Pride board. “I was brought on by Christine Kehoe in the late 1970’s after one group failed and another came in,” Baza recalled. “We had one goal in mind: to make Pride successful, safe and have it pay for itself. We succeeded in doing that. I feel the same guilt for staying silent when Pride began to fundraise for itself a year ago and competed with women’s health, AIDS and the Center.” Baza also said the purchase of Pride’s building should be investigated to see if that, too, was a self-dealing transaction.

Mike Passante, who worked for Pride as a volunteer in the 1980’s and joked, “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” compared the problems facing Pride to the financial disasters that brought down AIDS Foundation San Diego in the 1990’s. He criticized the current board for jacking up the costs of the festival, both the ticket price and the cost to rent a booth. “It’s supposed to be for the people,” Passante said. “Make it more affordable for youth and make the booths more representative of our community by offering space to community organizations at a price they can afford.”

Veteran community activist John Laird had another criticism of the Pride board: in 2009, without any warning or explanation, they stopped letting active-duty military personnel into the Festival for free.

Wendy Sue Biegeleisen, a former Pride board member who has volunteered for the events continuously since the 1980’s, pointed out another clause in the Pride bylaws that the current board has either set aside or consistently ignored. According to the bylaws, Biegeleisen said, “40 percent of the board members must be women and 40 percent must be people of color. That has been waived for a number of years. Disregarding the Pride bylaws is huge because it doesn’t respect what Pride is. The one token woman on the board is a big problem. Ron deHarte had the responsibility to whistle-blow long before this issue. It was his responsibility as executive director to point out to the community that these commitments were not being respected.”

Self-Perpetuating Board

Many community speakers voiced their frustration at the legal position they are in because the current Pride corporation is structured as a self-perpetuating entity with the board members unaccountable to anyone but themselves. Towards the beginning of the meeting, co-chair Whitburn had read excerpts from Pride’s 16-page bylaws, including Article V, “Membership,” which states that Pride has no community members and all power to run the organization is vested in its board. The following article, “Directors,” stated that the board shall elect new members and set its own size, but it cannot have less than four members nor more than 20. Several speakers seized on the last clause and said that at the moment Pride cannot legally operate because it has only three board members currently serving. Representatives of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence argued that Ron deHarte is still legally the executive director, on the ground that the board doesn’t have the authority to fire him because there aren’t enough board members for the group to do anything.

The fact that Pride is a legally incorporated nonprofit under Internal Revenue Code section 501 ( c ) (3) and the bylaws give the board total legal authority over its operation left a lot of the community members feeling frustrated. Though virtually everyone who addressed the question called on the present board members to resign and allow new members to take over and give the organization a fresh start, they also realized that their only alternatives if the current board members refuse to step down are to boycott the Pride events altogether or to seek legal recourse either from the California Attorney General, the San Diego County district attorney or the courts. The frustration came from the sense that such actions will only jeopardize the Pride events and the cause for which many of these people have given money or worked as volunteers, and could lead to a cancellation or a dramatic scaling-back of the Pride parade and festival.

“The volunteers are the workforce and the backbone of the organization,” said Ben Cartwright, activist with several community organizations and the designated representative of the Pride volunteers and “ambassadors” who met January 8. “A lot of volunteers have said they would step down if the current board remains and the executive director [deHarte] is not reinstated. We want to see the three-person board resign and an interim board appointed. We want a more open community meeting process and an end to secret meetings. … We made Pride what it is, and we can’t work for an organization that does this with its resources. We can’t do fundraisers and ask people for money.”

“The trust of the community in the board has been shattered,” said former development director St. Pierre. “It’s a shame that all the trust of our community in Pride has been shattered by three people.”

“I’m less interested tonight in the question about the stipend to one board member,” said Pride technical director Seth McCloskey. “The question is whether the current board members can continue to serve. I believe they cannot. We should thank them and move on because they can no longer be effective in that capacity.”

“The board not only violated their fiscal responsibilities but the trust of the community,” said community business owner Nick Moede. “In the last year we donated $10,000 to Pride. As long as the current board members remain, I will not donate anything — and a lot of other business owners feel the same way.”

“What can we do if the current board refuses to resign?” said Frank Jones. “Do we simply boycott Pride?” With those questions, Jones summed up the dilemma facing a lot of the people at the January 10 meeting: they’re convinced that the current board members have forfeited the community’s trust and are jeopardizing Pride — but boycotts and calls for investigations, the only things they can do about it legally, also jeopardize Pride.

“I see a specific problem with the structure of the board, in that it is self-appointing,” said Virgil Bowen, president of the California Cyclemen’s Motorcycle Club (CCMC), one of the oldest 501 (c) (3) corporations in the Queer community. (In the 1970’s the state of California would not incorporate an organization with the words “Gay” or “Lesbian” in its name; thus, the original Pride committee had to incorporate as “San Diego Lambda Pride” and the first Gay Center as the “Center for Social Services.”) Bowen said not only does the current Pride board have to go, but the new board should “consider putting together an outside group” from the community that would have the power to hold board members accountable.

Volunteer Chris Bellagio-O’Keefe, who lives in both San Diego and New Orleans and formerly served on the Pride board in Tampa Bay, Florida, said that for the last three years Tampa Bay has not had any Pride events at all because of a struggle similar to the one brewing in San Diego. “That could happen here if you do not heed this,” he warned.

Not only has the current Pride board shown no signs of retreat — in their January 5 open letter they said, “The Board … has no intention of resigning. Instead we are going to apologize to the community and ask them to open their hearts to forgiveness” — but there’s clearly no legal authority that can make them go if they don’t want to. What’s more, as one speaker on January 10 pointed out, legally they can’t resign because of a clause in the Pride bylaws that says that once the board is below four members, no one can quit until enough replacements are brought on to take the board back to full strength.

Questions and Votes

Though there was a pretty broad-based consensus in the room on January 10 that the current Pride board members should go for the good of the community and the events, no one quite knew how to implement the last item on the meeting’s agenda; “Based on the community comment … discuss whether the assembled community wishes to identify and articulate any areas of community consensus.” Co-chair Whitburn interpreted that to mean that the people in the room should vote on whether the Pride board members should resign and whether deHarte, Redondo and St. Jacques should return to their jobs. Despite the uncertainty of some people in the room as to whether the meeting should be voting on those questions at all, the votes took place anyway.

The call for the current board members to resign passed so overwhelmingly Whitburn declared it approved by voice vote. Only one person definitively opposed it, and there were about 10 abstentions. The call for the reinstatement of deHarte and the other two staff members was more controversial, and was hampered by the inability of the two people counting the votes to agree on the totals for each side. Between 69 and 74 people voted to demand deHarte’s reinstatement, with 28 opposed and 21 abstentions, while the motion to demand St. Jacques’ and Redondo’s return passed with 64 to 66 votes in favor, 18 to 22 against and 23 to 24 abstentions: a messy procedural result that took place as some people were already leaving and those who remained felt frustrated at their inability to bring down the current Pride board without also hurting Pride itself.

Asked by San Diego Democratic Club board member Bob Leyh what the word “consensus” meant in the call to the meeting and whether that meant a simple majority of those present (in most organizations that use the term, “consensus” implies unanimity), Whitburn said, “We will not categorize the vote. We will be specific about the numeric count. Everything in this room will be out in five seconds flat anyway. We will put that in the form of a letter and send it to the appropriate recipients.”

Pride Goeth Before a Fall

commentary by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

When I first read the coverage in the Gay & Lesbian Times of the so-called “Pridegate” scandal, my reaction could have been summed up by Yogi Berra’s famous malapropism that it was “dèja vu all over again.” I’ve been active in San Diego’s Queer (I hate that stupid set of initials, “LGBT,” and I try to avoid using it unless I’m quoting someone else) community since 1983 and I’ve been writing about it in various publications nearly that long. I can remember all too well in the 1980’s, when these sorts of controversies about Pride happened virtually every year — the board that ran one year’s Pride would be accused of hiding assets or taking money or not representing some interest or other, and it would be brought down in a spectacular auto-da-fé of community finger-pointing — and quite frankly I was glad to see the Center take over the Pride events in 1989, bring order, stability and continuity to the project and ultimately spin off Pride into the separate nonprofit corporation that exists today.

So I had a sinking feeling when I read about the whirlwind of events in the first 10 days of 2010: Pride executive director Ron deHarte’s “whistle-blowing” letter to the board about their decision to pay their chair, Dr. Philip Princetta, a “stipend” of $5,000; the board’s firing of deHarte the next day; the resignation of two other Pride staff members, Ken St. Jacques and Jeff Redondo, in sympathy with deHarte; and the sequence of three meetings on Friday, January 8 and Sunday, January 10: private sessions with former Pride board members and current volunteers and “ambassadors” — i.e., fundraisers — on Friday and a public “town-hall” meeting at the Center on Sunday that attracted over 300 people, the biggest crowd I’ve seen in the Center’s main hall since the building’s former owner rented it to outside organizations for progressive political superstars like Bernie Sanders and Jim Hightower.

On the one hand, I was flabbergasted that the current members of the Pride board had seen fit to offer their chair $5,000, $5 or 5¢. I’ve served on community boards before, including two stints on the Pride board itself — on an interim board appointed after another collapse in 1986 and on the final board for the 1987 events — as well as two years (1990-1992) on the board of Being Alive San Diego. If there was anything that was drummed into me during that experience, it was that being on a nonprofit board means being a volunteer. You don’t get any money from such service except for expense reimbursements, and if your treasurer is doing his or her job you don’t even get expense reimbursements unless you can document them up the proverbial ying-yang. Whether there’s some dipsy-doodle that’s been introduced into nonprofit corporate law since the last time I served on the board by which they can legally pay their board members, I still think it’s morally wrong.

Indeed, in the “real” nonprofit world — the one represented by the big social-service and arts organizations — board members are expected to bring money to the organization, not take it out again. The inelegant slogan often used to characterize the role of a nonprofit board member is “Give, Get or Get Off” — either donate out of your own pocket, fundraise or quit the board. One of the most embarrassing moments at the January 10 town-hall meeting was when former development director Ken St. Jacques — “development,” in case you didn’t know, is nonprofit-speak for “fundraising” — was asked how much money the Pride board members had personally contributed to the organization. The answer: at least $20 per month under the “Friends of Pride” program that all Pride board and staff members agreed to participate in as an example to the rest of us whom they were trying to get to enroll.

So the idea of a board of directors of a (presumably) nonprofit organization whose bylaws contain the boilerplate provision that the organization is not to be run for the personal gain of any of its members (you don’t get to be a nonprofit corporation, and the tax exemptions therefrom, if you don’t make that rule) voting a hefty chunk of change to its chair absolutely horrified me. But so did the name of the person who issued the initial call for the town-hall meeting on January 10 to discuss it: Nicole Murray Ramirez. My long memory flashed me back to 1986, when after allegations that board members had allowed festival receipts to be stolen (which were later proven untrue, by the way), the previous Pride board had fallen, Nicole organized a meeting at which a new Pride board was elected by whoever happened to be there — and that board was totally ineffective and another board, which included me, had to come together at the last minute to save the events.

The big problem with Pride — and the reason it’s so often a flashpoint for community criticism, both constructive and otherwise — is that its main purpose is to produce the Queer community’s largest and most important public event: the annual Pride Parade and Festival. For better or worse, these events are our outreach to the non-Queer community; they’re the source of the images that get plastered on the TV news and they give a lot of straight people who don’t know any Queer folk (or, more likely, don’t know they know any Queer folk) virtually their only impression of who we are, what we do and how we party. What’s more, the Pride events are also our community’s greatest source of self-definition: they’re the images young Queer people just coming out see and from which they learn how to manage this peculiar aspect of their lives. Virtually every Queer person I know cherishes their memory of their first Pride event as an important “rite of passage” in their journey from self-hatred and self-doubt to a mature, “out and proud” Queer identity.

It’s the sense of ownership the Queer community has in Pride that leads to the difficult balancing act in how it’s run — and to the unusual venom with which the controversies arising from it are fought. Pride has become San Diego’s second largest community event (after Comic-Con) and, according to Mayor Jerry Sanders, it brings in an estimated $21 million in badly needed tourist income to San Diego. Obviously an organization that puts on an event that big can’t be run on the ad hoc basis of the community-based Prides of the 1970’s and 1980’s. But in taking Pride away from the volunteers and participants and giving it the order and structure of a formal business, the current events show that we’ve erred too much in the other direction. San Diego Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Pride appears today to be under the control of board members who confuse their legal authority over the events — which appears, based on the way they’ve structured their bylaws, to be absolute — with moral authority to do whatever they like with the corporation and its treasury.

They’ve steadily moved resources away from the community and towards themselves. They bought Pride a building as a permanent headquarters, and to pay for it they drastically cut back Pride’s contributions to other community organizations, including outreach to Queer youth, women’s health and people with AIDS. They’ve jacked up both the admission price to the Festival and the cost of renting booths — thereby freezing out many community organizations and instead filling the booth spaces with corporations and other businesses, many of them from outside the Queer community who regard us purely as a market niche from which they can extract money. Even something as seemingly minor as ending the free admission for active-duty military is an example of the Pride board giving the finger to the community, and one can’t help but wonder if they thought, “We’d better do that before ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ gets repealed and we’ve got a lot more military people we’d have to let in free.”

The Pride volunteers and contributors who oppose the policies of the current board are facing a horrible dilemma. They can’t do anything to harm the current board or force the board members to resign without also hurting the Pride events themselves. They can boycott, they can refuse to contribute, they can seek investigations of the Pride corporation to determine whether the stipend to the board chair and some of its other actions violate the law — but all those things will do is make it harder to produce the Pride events. They can form a rump Pride and try to do their own event, but that will only dilute the resources available; either the city would take sides and grant one group permits but not the other, or the two Prides would compete for money, resources and volunteers and there would be two half-assed Pride events instead of one good one.

What Is to Be Done?

So where do we go from here? Short-term, the Pride board members need to get off their ego hobby horses and work with the volunteers and former board members to find qualified, competent, broadly respected people to fill out the board and prepare for the 2010 events. They also need to find an executive director with the needed skills to run the show. This may or may not be Ron deHarte, who’s shown his competence at producing a certain kind of Pride event but who may not be the best candidate to take Pride to the next level. But Pride — not only the organization but also the event and the very concept — is showing signs of age and declining community interest, and merely returning to the status quo ante, as many people at the January 10 town-hall meeting seemed to want, is not going to solve its problems.

Long-term, the first thing Pride needs to do after the 2010 events is to rewrite its bylaws to create a membership structure. The regular Pride crises of the 1980’s showed the dangers of allowing the events to be controlled by shifting ad hoc coalitions whose only qualification for membership was showing up. The current Pride structure has overreacted in the other direction; in the name of order, stability and continuity, they have created a corporate monster that gives a self-selected board of directors way too much power and offers no checks, balances or accountability. This may work fine for a conventional nonprofit with a focused mission — to run a health clinic or a symphony orchestra — and one which relies on a handful of big donors (who tend to be the corporate rich, comfortable with business-like structures similar to those in the profit-making world), but it clearly isn’t working for the producers of an event that is supposed, more than anything else, to be the voice and expression of an oppressed community.

What Pride needs now, more than anything else, is a membership structure, a way of holding the board members accountable and allowing the people who actually make Pride happen — the volunteers on the ground and the community members and businesses who contribute money, goods and services — the final say. I don’t think Pride should become an open membership organization, but I do think they should rescind Article V of the bylaws (the one that says they don’t have members and the board has final say over all aspects of the organization) and replace that with a pledge system by which you would earn the right to be a member of Pride — and therefore to elect its board — through contributions of either money or volunteer time. Organizations in the Leather community routinely do this now. So do law firms when they decide which attorneys have brought in enough money and business to merit “making partner.”

I would suggest that the Pride corporation hold an annual meeting approximately one month after each year’s Pride events. The business of this meeting would be to credential the people who had earned Pride membership based on their contributions to the events; to present an audited financial statement of income and expenses for the events; and, once the new members were credentialed, to elect the new board. Part of my plan would end multi-year terms on the board; board members would have to stand for election every year. The meeting would also include an open-mike section for public comments, similar to the one on January 10, so ordinary community people would have their chance to talk about the events and make suggestions for next year in a communal, non-adversarial manner. The recommendation offered on January 10 for an advisory committee of former board members is also a good one, and should be instituted.

Beyond the question of organizational structure, we should also be using the opportunity created by this crisis to rethink some of the basic assumptions of Pride itself. Many of my politically progressive friends long ago stopped going to Pride or supporting it because they feel it has lost its way. Instead of either a political statement or a community celebration, it has become a business, pure and simple, aimed at making money and perpetuating itself rather than serving the community. Certainly the 2010 board and future Pride organizations should get back to what former board member Larry Baza said were the purposes of Pride when the current structure evolved in the late 1980’s: making the parade and festival self-supporting and donating any profits from the events (after keeping a certain percentage as seed capital for next year) back to the community in the form of grants to social-service organizations and other worthy nonprofits serving the Queer community.

But the “reboot” of Pride should go beyond that. Certainly a Pride parade and festival should include plenty of opportunities to party, but it should also acknowledge that the event whose anniversary Pride celebrates, the rise of a Queer liberation movement in 1969, was a political challenge to a status quo that had kept us marginalized, repressed and invisible. Lesbian activist and socialist Sherry Wolf made a good point when she spoke in San Diego last December and pointed out that the original Pride events started in the Queer “ghettoes” and moved outward, spreading our bodies, our images and our messages to the broader community. Modern-day Pride events do the opposite; they start on the outskirts of the Queer neighborhoods and move in, sacrificing outreach for comfort and community-building for feeding the bottom lines of Queer businesses. In an era in which the Queer community’s biggest political need is to reach out to, and build the support of, non-Queer people, we should be able to figure out a way to re-route the Pride events so they not only entertain our community but show us at our best to the rest of America.

We need a broad community debate over how best to stage the Pride events for the 21st century and how to combine their various purposes — outreach, awareness, politics, business opportunities and entertainment — without the partying and money-making parts swamping the rest as happens now. The Pride celebration should include programs celebrating the history of the Queer movement (including the parts of it that happened before the Stonewall Inn riot in New York in June 1969!) and acknowledging the fact that our very existence as a people, as well as our right to equality, is still a matter for deeply contentious political debate in a nation whose people have voted against our right to marry virtually every time they’ve had the chance. I’m not saying we necessarily need to go back to an annual “rally” with a bunch of predictable speakers and almost no one in the audience; perhaps this year’s Pride organizers, or a future group, could mobilize theatre people to stage plays dramatizing our history and inspiring us for the future.

We also need to make Pride more user-friendly. The current Pride organization has adopted the same business model as the newspaper industry: continually charging more money for a product (the Pride festival) that either doesn’t change from year to year or gets less and less interesting. Pride needs to see the community as a constituency, not as pockets to be milked. It’s shameful that there are Queer community organizations that don’t exhibit at the festival because they can’t afford it — and it’s even more shameful that the Pride board has spent the money they’ve made by selling booth space to straight corporations instead of Queer activists on buildings and bonuses for themselves and their staff, while slashing grants to community organizations. We are a highly creative people, and we can do a lot better with our community’s premiere annual event than a static festival run by a self-serving board that appears to have forgotten that the original purpose of Pride was “community service” in every sense of that term.

Dump the Health Insurance Bill

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Since Barack Obama took office as President almost a year ago, progressives have sat nervously on the sidelines as Congress debated proposals to “reform” the health insurance industry. With Obama and the major-domos in Congress refusing even to consider getting rid of this vulturous cancer on the American body economic — an industry that sucks up to 40 percent of every dollar we spend on health care and offers precisely nothing in exchange — the health-insurance debate quickly settled into a series of cliffhangers like an old movie serial. Would the final bill contain a “public option” to challenge the private insurers in the marketplace, an already anemic compromise rendered even more impotent as it was run through the Congressional meat grinder before the putrid Joe Lieberman killed it altogether? Would it contain any effective controls on the cost of health insurance or pharmaceutical drugs? Would there be any rational reason for progressives to support it once it emerged from both houses of Congress and into the clutches of the secret “conference committee” formed to reconcile the vast differences between the House and Senate versions?

We now have the answers to these questions: no, no and no. The final bills passed by both houses of Congress, especially the Senate, are pustulant boils on the body politic that deserve, not final enactment, but to be lanced. There is no reason for anyone to the Left of Attila the Hun to support legislation that is a blatant corporate welfare program to the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, raising the already bloated U.S. national debt by $1 trillion or more just to make rich insurance and drug company executives and investors even richer. Any parts of the bill that might have actually helped solve the problems with American health care have been meticulously scissored out of it, and what’s left is a giant giveaway of borrowed money that will most likely doom the Democratic Party nationwide in the next two elections whether it passes or not.

The outcome shouldn’t be all that surprising. From the get-go, Obama’s administration has been under steady pressure, not from the Left but from the Right — both the Wall Street corporate Right and the maniac talk-radio, Fox News, “teabagger” Right. Whether the youthful minions who organized to help elect Obama were genuinely progressive or just impressed by the messianic figure Obama cut during the campaign, they’ve disappeared into the woodwork and are now totally irrelevant as a political force. So is the Left in general, reduced to its usual choice — wring our hands in frustration and keep supporting Obama, hoping for crumbs from his and Congress’s table; or wring our hands in frustration and absent ourselves from electoral politics altogether (or from the major parties, which in the U.S. amounts to the same thing), thereby allowing the Right’s ideological crazies to take over the country completely?

Let’s have a look at what the health “reform” bill will — and won’t — do. First, it will require that everyone in the country purchase the health insurance industry’s product. For the first time in U.S. history, a private industry will be able essentially to levy a tax on the whole population — one that you will have to pay, with the same threats of prison or fines that apply if you refuse to pay the government’s own taxes. What’s more, the insurance industry will be able to set the rate of that tax at whatever it likes — with the government supposedly picking up all or part of the tab for people who can’t afford it. The mandate (which Obama opposed during the primary campaign) is sometimes justified by comparison with the mandate in many states (including California) that people who drive buy auto insurance — but there, at least, people have the choice not to drive. The health insurance industry will be the first in the nation’s history that will be able to impose a private levy on every single American simply for living here.

Second, far from weaning the American health care system off its dependency on private insurers, it will lock that dependency even more strongly into place and make it ironclad. Those progressives in Congress who rationalize their votes for this bill by saying it’s a “first step” towards reforms that will de-emphasize private health insurance are living in a land of illusion. Third, it bears the stink of the corrupt private deals that were made to pass it — including a provision that, to attract the vote of Democratic senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, exempts his state from paying Medicare fees all 49 other states must contribute to the federal program. Fourth, it sells out one of the most loyal Democratic Party constituencies of the last 30 years — pro-choice women — by making it virtually impossible to obtain a health insurance policy that covers abortion and reproductive choice in general. And fifth, it doesn’t even cover everybody; by the administration’s own reckoning, it will still leave about 20 million Americans with no way to pay for health care at all.

What the health bill won’t do is impose any meaningful cost controls on either the health care industry in general or the private health insurers. Anything that might have made it a true health care reform — that might have taken a serious look at why U.S. medicine costs so much more than any other advanced industrial country’s and how our system could be changed to deliver health care more efficiently to those who need it most — has been reduced to a handful of grants for “pilot projects” that will no doubt putter along for years and produce reports less than 12 people will read. Insurance companies will be able not only to have captive customers for their product but to charge whatever they like for it — and, like the corrupt Wall Street bankers who took billions in federal aid to keep their institutions afloat and then paid themselves humongous bonuses instead of actually lending out the money, they have the assurance that the government will keep making up the difference between what they charge and what people can afford, at least as long as China keeps lending us the money to pay for it.

The bill even carefully preserves all the abuses President Bush and a Republican Congress wrote into Medicare Part D, the prescription drug coverage plan. Obama made his peace with the drug companies by promising not to challenge the provision of Part D that actually prevents the government from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower prices from drug companies. He also kept in place the so-called “doughnut hole” — the bizarre setup of Part D that puts a cap on coverage and forces seniors to pay for their drugs out of pocket until they’ve paid a certain amount (usually enough to bankrupt them and/or wipe out their estates) until the coverage kicks in again.

The health bill’s few remaining supporters argue that, despite its rampant giveaways to giant industries that already make more money than they know what to do with, it’s worth passing anyway because it has provisions in it that supposedly curb a few of the most blatant abuses of health insurance companies. What we’re supposed to be getting in return for the over $1 trillion poured down the mouths of the health-insurance vampires is a ban on their denying coverage for people with “pre-existing conditions” (meaning if you actually need coverage, you often can’t get it) or setting lifetime caps on a policy so that once you run out of the money the insurance company has set aside for you, you’re S.O.L.

But anyone who believes that passage of the bill will mean an end to pre-existing condition exclusions or total policy caps probably still believes in Santa Claus. Among the things health insurance companies do with the up to 40 percent of the American health-care budget they suck out without doing anything for it are hire high-priced attorneys who have probably already rewritten their companies’ regulations so they’ll be in technical compliance with the “reform” bill while they continue to do business — and screw their consumers — the way they do now.

The real tragedy of the health issue is it didn’t have to be that way — but we on the Left didn’t do enough to make it happen. Instead of letting the Right crash the Congressional town-hall meetings and attack the entire idea of government involvement in health care, we should have been disrupting them and demanding that single-payer and other alternatives to a private, for-profit insurance industry be seriously debated. Instead of letting the Right mount a march on Washington to denounce Obama as a Kenya-born socialist Muslim, we should have been out on the streets criticizing him for what he is — a weakling who has essentially subcontracted his economic and social policies to giant corporations, continued America’s insane imperialism through his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and offered a disaster of a health “reform” that will enrich all the wrong people and take America’s health care system further into profit-driven unsustainability.

We didn’t do that because we don’t want it badly enough. The tale of Franklin Roosevelt telling a group of progressives in his office that he agreed with everything they wanted but “now you have to go out and make me do it” has been bandied about a lot this year, but the truth is that the anemic, pathetic excuse for a Left in this country isn’t, and hasn’t been for decades, strong enough to put pressure on anybody to do much of anything. Yes, part of that is because the government mounted three major campaigns of sustained repression against the U.S. Left in the 20th century — in the 1910’s, the 1940’s/1950’s and 1960’s — and each time the Left revived, it was smaller and less of a mass movement than it had been before. Also, part of that is due to the control of the mass media by giant corporations that have narrowed the range of acceptable political debate in this country to center-Right and far-Right.

But part of that is our failure, too. One of the most annoying characteristics of the American Left is its utter misunderstanding of the relationship between electoral politics and direct action. The Right gets it: they work in the Republican Party but refuse to be of it. They support Republican officeholders and candidates, all right, but always with one hand on the door, ready to walk if their demands aren’t met. Progressives don’t: either they bind themselves to particular candidates with an almost religious devotion and think the mere election of a good person who says the right things will solve all the problems; or they turn away, aghast at the compromises any politician needs to make to function in a capitalist system whose ruling class funds their campaigns, and either waste their electoral efforts in alternative parties or don’t vote at all. Often, in fact, they do both those things in succession: they flock to a Kennedy, a Carter, a Clinton, an Obama, then turn away again in disgust when those people don’t prove to be the secular messiahs their more credulous progressive supporters were hoping for.

The 2010 and 2012 elections are shaping up as mega-sweeps for the Republican Party, at least in part because the blatancy with which Obama’s administration has opened the doors of the treasury and shoveled (borrowed) money towards giant corporations — Wall Street bankers and investment companies, auto companies, and now health insurance and drug companies — while utterly failing to revive the economy or expand employment has discredited the whole idea of government intervention in the economy and convinced many voters, particularly independents, that Ronald Reagan was right all along when he said, “Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.” The Republicans are also benefiting from what the late political scientist V. O. Key said was Americans’ tendency to vote “retrospectively and negatively” — to vote against what they haven’t liked in the immediate past rather than for something they would like in the future. In 2006 and 2008 this tendency worked for the Democrats; now that Obama owns the recession, the health care debacle, the Wall Street bailouts and the quagmire in Afghanistan, it’s the Republicans’ turn to benefit from voters’ revulsion at the status quo.

Ironically, this gives progressives another reason to vote against the health bill: the probability that it will never take effect anyway. Many of its provisions don’t kick in until 2013 — and if Republicans regain control of Congress in 2010 and Sarah Palin or some equally demented Republican freak unseats Obama in 2012, it’s likely the first act of the new administration and Congress will be to repeal the bill before it’s ever put into practice. Political analysts are eagerly debating whether the Democrats will suffer more harm in this year’s election if the health bill goes through or if it dies — but the Democrats are likely to take a bath this year either way, so progressives like Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer need to vote their consciences, rediscover their spines and kill this bad bill themselves rather than letting the Republicans do it now or three years hence.