GRAY PANTHERS COMMITTEE MEETINGS & EVENTS

All meetings and events take place at 2940 16th Street 200-4, unless otherwise noted

GRAY PANTHERS OF SAN FRANCISCO

Board Meeting Wednesday, Jan 8,12:30PM, Library, 100 Larkin, 3rd floor, Martin Paley Room Newsletter Committee Thursday, Jan 9, Noon

Book Club Monday, January 27, 10:30-Noon Celtic Café, 142 McAllister (between Hyde/Leavenworth)

Membership Meeting Tuesday, January 21, 12:30-3PM

Unitarian Universalist Center 1182Franklin@Geary

Join in a Discussion of Actions for 2014

Call For compassionate release of Lynne Stewart Director of Bureau Prisons Samuels (202) 307-3250/3062, Attorney General Holder(202) 353-1555, President Obama (202) 456-1111

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Our Holiday Party!

Our holiday party was a rip-roaring success! Good food, good people, lots of them, and good cheer. A van load of unexpected & welcomed guests arrived from assisted-living home, AgeSong. One bit of busi-ness was transacted; new members of the GP board were approved by acclamation and include Deetje, David A., Denise, Kay, Rhoda, Kaye. (more pictures at GP Website)

Call for her compassionate release

Attorney General Holder(202) 353-1555, President Obama (202) 456-1111 And our representative, Pelosi 415-556-4862

January Meeting Come join in our round table discussion of what we Gray Panthers want to plan for 2014. Share your story of when and why you joined and the actions you participated in. We will also hear a bit of history about Gray Panthers

Letter to Editor from GP member Excessive waste of resource Thirty-five years of peaceful assembly to honor the memory of George Moscone and Harvey Milk is shattered by the presence of hundreds of police. The police were not menacing. What was menac-ing was the waste of precious resources. Re-sources that should be used for pressing issues such as the rising number of people without homes. The police presence and the whirring helicopter above was an insult to the memory of Moscone and Milk who came into office with a sense of genuine compassion and hope for all San Franciscans. The police in our day are hardly a symbol of hope and compassion. Instead they are the opposite. This is brought out daily when homeless people are har-assed and minority youth are killed, all mostly to protect the one percent’s property and pathways. What is needed is a better deployment of our po-lice to help and protect and not menace our citi-zenry. Our legislators need to seriously consider how we deploy our police force and calculate the cost. The original idea to surround the celebrants of Moscone and Milk at the memorial may have been to help and guide traffic but it was done in excess, costing tens of thousands of dollars. How does a helicopter fit into this picture? Denise D’Anne San Francisco

¡Presente!

Nelson Mandela

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."

Reminder Board Members

Notice January Board Meeting Main Library —3rd floor,

Martin Paley room

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Detroit:Canary in the Pension Mines

Our fourth largest city was forced into bank-r u p t c y . This could be a tem-plate for gutting city

funds and pension plans to satisfy the hunger for profits by Wall Street banks. Corporations like BofA & UBS have put in place the ability to take priority over other bankruptcy claims—mainly pension funds. Detroit's retirees could lose about 80 cents on the dollar. Moody Credit rating agency even stated that if Detroit cuts its pension obliga-tions, other cities could follow the example. Over the past 5 years, 2,350 public jobs have been cut to solve a crisis workers did not cause. The federal government can bail out Wall Street, Chrysler, GM, but not Detroit—Motown—the home of auto-mobile manufacturing and strong unions.

Real Cause of Detroit’s $18 Million Debt

The crisis is not the city’s pension fund obligation. Detroit, like many cities, took out loans with low short-term interest rates under banks’ risky lending based on the deceptive practices of swaps & de-rivatives. After the financial crisis of 2008, De-troit’s property values fell by 77%, causing lower tax revenues. At the same time interest rates on the city’s debts from borrowed loans rose. As Andrew Elrod on Al Jazeera English explains, “Under the terms of the swap, the interest rates the city was paying were fixed to higher pre-recession levels, while the interest payments the city received from the banks in return were pegged to the Federal Re-serve's new post-recession lower interest rates, which dropped precipitously as the Federal Re-serve cut interest rates to stimulate borrowing in the resulting recession.” In 2009, Detroit’s credit rating was downgraded allowing BofA & UBS to cancel swaps and demand $450 million dollars im-mediately! Unable to pay, the city agreed to in-crease the amount of its fixed payments, and allow an insurance company to guarantee its debt by a lien on some tax revenues. Kevyn Orr, Detroit's emergency manager, has been granted expanded

powers to abrogate the collective bargaining con-tracts of public-sector unions to avoid a bank-ruptcy altogether. Orr wants a new $350 million loan (with a $120 million service fee) from Bar-clays to pay off Bank of America and UBS! Gov-ernor Rick Snyder appointed Orr under legislation promoted by ALEC, the organization that funneled big money into his election. One of Orr’s solutions to the pension crisis is to freeze Detroit’s two pen-sion funds — a move that would stop city workers from accumulating any more service time and shut out new employees from existing plans. This is a new 401(k)-style pension plan that would be set up. This idea comes directly from ALEC which set this as part of their priority legislation agenda this year. Pensions are deferred wages, money due workers as cash in their regular paychecks for la-bor supplied to the city that is set aside. This same attack on pensions is also taking place in Chicago. Judge Steven Rhodes, handling the city’s Chapter 9 case, decided to ignore a Michigan Constitution provision barring any reduction in pension benefits to already retired public sector workers. He ruled that pensions were “contractual obligations,” no different from any other bill the city owes but lacks the money to pay.

Better Solutions

Call for corporate banks to renegotiate loans, espe-cially in hindsight to the credit crisis brought on by these very banks. Detroit, like SF, could demand more tax revenue from corporations given tax breaks, collect unpaid taxes and close corporate loopholes. The American Federation of State, City and Municipal Employees has filed for an appeal of Rhodes’ ruling. The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) proposed a federally mediated deal that would protect its art from sale and disconnect the museum from city ownership into an independent nonprofit. The deal would raise roughly $500 mil-lion from a consortium of national and local foun-dations and funnel the money into retiree pensions on behalf of the value of the art at the DIA. Labor unions all over the country need to take this threat seriously, mobilize, and join with community organizations. If left as a precedent, all retirees both public and private sector work-ers could face unacceptable consequences.

Money Matters

The US government bailed out General Motors 5 years ago with $49.5 billion dollars. It has recov-ered $39 billion of that and considers the matter closed, losing $10.5 billion. GM now is sitting on $28.6 billion in cash. Home city Detroit is bank-rupt. (see p.3)...US bank regulators have approved the Volcker Rule which prohibits big banks from making risky bets for their own profit (called pro-prietary trading) with customers’ FDIC-guaranteed deposits - the kind of trading that 5 years ago led to government bailouts. Accordingly to Bartlett Nay-lor of Public Citizen this is a step forward but "it's really up to (federal) supervisors to enforce it and that is a matter of choice."… Speaking of banks, here is a partial round-up of some of the fines vari-ous big banks owe or have paid for all kinds of fraud. Bank of America:over $50 billion covering the past 13 years.Citigroup:$1.4 billion to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the US-owned mortgage firms. Wells-Fargo: $869 million to Freddie Mac. And JP Morgan-Chase: $13 billion. Of that $13 billion $222-261 million will go to CALPERS, the California Public Employees Retirement System, and $19.5 million to the California State Teachers Retirement System - plus interest. SAC Capital, a hedge fund, was fined $1.8 billion for insider train-ing. No bigwigs have gone to jail… Speaking of bigwigs, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, was paid $21 million in 2013 in salary, bonus and stock. He made $11.7 million in 2012. And McKesson Corporation CEO John Hammergen got $50 million in 2012 and his pension benefits are valued at $59 million.

Some Things to Watch in 2014

1)City College:the accrediting commission wants to close it. At least three law suits are trying to pre-vent closure, filed by the City of S F, the Califor-nia Federation of Teachers, and the Save City Col-lege coalition of students and employees. Mean-while the locally elected college board has been replaced by an appointed overseer. 2) Warriors Basketball Arena proposed for the waterfront. Not only would it take over Piers 30 and 32. It includes building high-rise luxury con-dos and a high-rise luxury hotel on lot 330 across the street (8 Washington on steroids) and a 2.3 acre parking lot across the Embarcadero. It would cost the City up to $120 million which the Warri-ors say SF would get back in rents and property taxes. 3) PG&E. The state Public Utilities fined PG&E $8.1 million for substandard inspections of welded pipelines. The company also faces fines of more than $2 billion for the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion and multiple examples of inadequate record keeping. So far they haven't paid any of the penalties. Do you suppose they ever will? 4) Medicare. Instead of constantly defending the current Medicare we should go on the offense and demand its expansion and improvement. Full cov-erage, not 80%. Cradle to grave, not over 65 -or 66. No co-pays. Drug coverage - and the price of all medicines negotiated with big Pharma. Just to begin with. Make it a true single payer. 5)Social Security. Not a part of the national debt - a separate, solvent fund. No chained CPI that re-duces COLA. No cuts. No raising the eligible age to 66 or 67 - instead lower it to 60, remove the cap on income which pays social security tax (now $113,700),charge a SS tax on all other income. 6)We have been in Afghanistan for 12 years. We've been saving Iraq since 2003. A new record for growing opium was reached in Afghanistan in 2013. Iraq is a killing ground. Who has benefited besides the military-industrial complex? 7)Fracking. not only poisoning us & our environ-ment, but wasting water in the midst of a drought.

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Meet Ron Conway The Man Stealing SF! He is one of Mayor Lee’s closest advisors and has put more than a million dollars into our local elections.

Conway is also a premier Silicon Valley “angel” investor, backing Google, PayPal, Facebook, Twit-ter, Airbnb, Zynga, and those tech companies that have made living in SF too expensive for most of us. Conway heads the Mayor’s taskforce including tech CEOs, SF Planning & Urban Research (SPUR) & “members” of the Board of Supervi-sors, who will “discuss” our City’s future! Absent is any progressive community organization. Tech companies arrange private buses which pay no fees to the city and transport employees back and forth to Silicon Valley (SV). A good example of how Ron and others get perks for SV is BART’s recent announcement of a 5.2% fare hike for the future BART Silicon Valley extension. Tech em-ployees tend not to eat at local restaurants as food is supplied at the job site. Ron Conway’s, advo-cacy “non-profit” group, sf.citi, pumped $275,000 into passing Prop E, which changed the S F payroll tax into a tax on gross receipts for businesses in “selected” revenue brackets. Thus tech startups, which often run without profits for many years, will end up paying less taxes. “The payroll tax was a disincentive to place more jobs in San Fran-cisco,” Conway proclaimed. But San Francisco got the least possible benefit from additional “jobs” the proposition touted.

Conway’s non-profit, sf.citi.com, declares its pur-pose is ...“to encourage our membership in the im-plementation process along with the City Treasurer and other city financial agencies including the City Controller’s office.” In 2012, tech CEOs came to-gether to imagine a “smarter San Francisco... “to leverage power of the tech community around city action. . . collaboratively with City government.” So Conway gets non-profit status to market his businesses while subsuming government function, i.e., privatizing it in form of business-government partnership. In 2010, Conway, at a Bay Area Council, said.”We have to take the city back from progressives.”

New Path to Medicare For All

SF Gray Panthers and CARA are members of the Campaign for a Healthy California, the state-wide coalition for single-payer healthcare in California. The Campaign’s strategy is to have a ballot initia-tive for single-payer on the November 2016 Presi-dential election, in anticipation of 2017, when Obamacare lets states petition the US Congress to allow states to put federal Medicare and Medicaid payments into alternative plans like single-payer. There is no single-payer bill in the California leg-islature now, because nobody in the Senate or As-sembly will be an author, knowing Democratic legislators won’t challenge Obamacare. Last year, the Democrat-led Senate wouldn’t even allow a vote on SB 810, the first time in years. So the Campaign plans, in 2014, to sponsor a Pa-tient Bill of Rights that would plug the huge holes in Obamacare. The Bill could allow the insurance commissioner to regulate premiums, or it could require insurers to meet standards of care, or out-law useless high-deductible high-co-pay policies. Insurance companies will scream bloody murder, and during the uproar, the Campaign plans Town Hall meetings and a media campaign to demon-strate that it’s the insurance companies, not gov-ernment incompetence, that’s making Obamacare not work, and that we need single-payer to get rid of the insurance companies. A problem in recent years has been the lack of cur-rent data on the potential economic costs and bene-fits of single-payer, and assembling that data is a huge job. The Campaign will push the Legislature to put together a quasi-governmental Payers’ Com-mission composed of large healthcare purchasers like CalPERS, the fifth largest purchaser in the US, city governments, health departments, and corporations, to investigate the economic impact of single-payer. In 2015, the Payers’ Commission would hold hearings across the state, which would publicize single-payer’s economic benefits. In 2015-16, the Campaign would sponsor a state bill for the November 2016 ballot measure, saving the huge expense of a signature campaign, and giv-ing supporters a focus for the political campaign.

Gray Panthers of SF 2940 16th Street, Room 200 – 4 San Francisco, CA 94103 415-552-8800 http://graypantherssf.igc.org/ graypanther-sf@sonic.net

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We believe ALL people are entitled to certain fundamental rights: meaningful employment economic security decent and affordable housing quality health care a life of dignity from birth to death free from fear and abuse a world in peace

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Printed in House January 2014

Actions and Events Thursday, January 9, 9:30-Noon, SDA meeting, discussion on Disability access in housing. Friday, January 10, 12 Noon, State Building in SF: 350 McAllister St, “Building a Road Out of Poverty” California Partnership, a coalition of seniors disability, children’s, and poverty groups (including CARA) demand the budget surplus for healthcare, welfare, IHSS, and services that have been drastically cut in recent decades. Dress up as Wizard of OZ characters! Wednesday, January 15, 6:00PM, the San Francisco Public Library. 100 Larkin Street Kadir Nelson and his new book on Dr. King’s famed “I Have a Dream” speech. Wednesday, January 15, Richard Wolff, “Economic Crisis and System Decline: What We Can Do”, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley, KPFA benefit. $12 advance tickets 800-838-3006 Marcus Books & Modern Times. Or $15 /door

Friday January 17, Noon-4PM, SF Main Li-brary, West Coast Day of Action, Fight for a Homeless Bill of Rights, Info 415-346-3740 Tuesday, January 21, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Wednesday, January 22, SFConnected Swap Meet, 9:30 AM sessions begin 10:00AM, UU, 1187 Franklin “Got Skills Need Skills Want to Barter?” resource tables, information and presen-tations Must Register: 415-821-1003, FREE

Save Marcus Bookstore in the Filmore, Sign the petition: https://www.change.org/petitions/keep-the-country-s-oldest-black-owned-bookstore-in-san-francisco