I’ve been away from the blog again, this time absorbed in preparing some new content for a 2nd edition of Hidden San Francisco, forthcoming in 2025. But I should be able to crank out a few posts in the next week or two… we’ll see.
The view from my petanque court…
I’m in that part of the population that can’t understand for a second how so many people continue to support Donald Trump. But unlike most of those who I share that sentiment with, I am sure Harris will be a conservative corporate Democrat who earns our wrath within minutes of taking office. For some of us, she earned it already… The local San Francisco BayView newspaper, one of a dozen independent journalistic efforts I’ve recently given small donations to, ran a good interview by Ann Garrison with Bradley Angel of Greenaction where they discussed the emptiness of Harris’s claim to have been a vigorous prosecutor of environmental crimes during her time as SF District Attorney or as California Attorney General. In fact she did very little, and like Obama and Clinton before her, she has the political skill to waffle rightward as needed to defend the profitable interests of her friends and allies while sounding a vaguely populist note that invokes a “caring” facade. It’s really pretty repulsive. But no surprise.
Back when San Francisco still had the Bay Guardian weekly newspaper, it used to rail against the [Willie] Brown-[Phil] Burton Machine that dominated local politics since the late 1960s. Over the years it has persisted and brought along quite a lot of prominent politicians, Kamala Harris being at the current head of the class. Of course Phil Burton died decades ago but Nancy Pelosi ably filled his legislative shoes and between her, Willie Brown, and Dianne Feinstein, they were all skilled at bringing home the bacon to San Francisco one way or another. All are so connected that they are able to make corporate donations rain as needed. Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and a host of junior politicians coming up behind them are products of this carefully constructed “liberal” faction of corporate-sponsored and -controlled politicians. None will challenge any aspect of the power structure that prevails—not the military-industrial complex, not agribusiness, not the petrochemical/fossil fuel behemoths, and definitely not the new tech monopolists. That’s why the public clamor to fire Lina Kahn at the Federal Trade Commission is making for some riveting theater—how blatantly obedient will Kamala Harris be to her corporate overlords? I already know the answer, unfortunately.
from our always interesting Democracy Wall…
Anyway, as the title of this post has it, this is a truly numbing spectacle. Of course I’d prefer the corporate war-mongering Democrat with tepid climate policies and a likelihood of supporting women’s health care over the deranged Fascist wannabe dictator who wants to burn everything to the ground as fast as possible while taking his cut of everyone else’s business… what a choice! But if you are in the throes of the quadrennial madness that thinks it makes a really big difference which faction of the ruling class is running the show, well, I’m as puzzled by that as I am by the imperviousness of Trump’s support.
On the Latino USA podcast with the always wonderful Maria Hinajosa they had a roundtable about journalism and Latinos with some veteran reporters. They acknowledged that journalism has shrunk in the past decades—less resources to cover news, and narrower intellectual space in which to do it. No surprise. In fact, I’ve been thinking about this sort of by accident over the past month as I increasingly tune out the mainstream news of the New York Times, Washington Post, SF Chronicle, and especially CNN, MSNBC and the pure propaganda of Fox. The endless hysteria over breaking (non)news, the obsession with (meaningless) polls and the horse race, the weather catastrophes each treated as a one-off as though the climate catastrophe isn’t at the root of the endless floods, fires, droughts, and refugee crises… the biased coverage of wars, or the complete omission of any mention of them!… journalism, owned by a few major media corporations, is not even entertaining! And it’s a long way from what I would consider legitimate journalism.
Luckily there are a number of credible alternatives if you want to seek them out. Harry Shearer’s hilarious weekly Le Show does a great job of presenting a lot of news that disappears before you ever hear about it (especially regarding the nuclear industry, microplastics, the Olympics, and “news of the Godly” i.e. church scandals). I find myself glad to connect with Matt Stoller’s reporting on monopolies (on Substack); David Sirota’s news site The Lever and his new podcast called The Master Plan about the systematic corruption of the U.S. government going back to the 1960s and early 1970s; The Intercept; DropSite News; Ken Klippenstein on the National Security State; Gil Duran at The Nerd Reich; regular essays on TomDispatch; Ed Zitron’s often hilariously bitter podcast and newsletter Better Offline; 404 Media, a collective of several journalists who left various online sources; San Francisco’s go-to source of news has remarkably become none other than Mission Local who have been doing great coverage on the local elections among other things; and of course there are all the old standbys: local radio stations KALW-FM, KPFA-FM, KPOO-FM, shows like Democracy Now, and the less rushed journalism available from The Nation, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Mother Jones; neighborhood newspapers in San Francisco like the aforementioned BayView, and El Tecolote and Potrero View.
I’m sure I’ve left a few off my list that I’ll think about later… the point is that I’m having to do a lot of á la carte shopping to get my news. I have to sort through a dozen online sources and about that many podcasts, and another dozen or so print magazines that arrive regularly in my mailbox. How I wish there was a decent newspaper and a solid TV newscast I could get all these sources compiled and edited through! Has someone invented that yet?
I’ll be back in a few days with a more typical post, talking about a bunch of books!
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