Editor:
After attending Warren Hellman's bluegrass festival last weekend, Ken Werner needs to remind a lot of us why Hellman is a Bad Guy, as opposed to Chris Daly, "Defender of the Disenfranchised." And if Werner
is going to call people who disagree with him names, he's in no position to criticize Ken Garcia's journalistic ethics. My favorite line in Werner's piece: "Though Garcia was paid by the Chronicle, we all know he worked for people like Warren Hellman of SFSOS notoriety." It would be
helpful if Werner would supply some evidence for this; then we would all really "know" it.
Regards,
Rob Anderson
Randy,
While Hazel Dickens' performance at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival was a magical momement for me, I have a difficult time thanking Warren Hellman for his donation when it is dwarfed by the negative consequences of his political activities between festivals.
When Dickens played "America's Poor," a song "inspired by the experience of one of her nieces, a middle-aged woman in North Carolina whose textile mill employers persuaded her to train a crowd of younger workers, then abruptly moved the younger workers and the factory to Mexico, leaving her behind," you've got to wonder if Hellman made the connection between Dickens' lamenting the outsourcing of American jobs and the displacement of San Franciscans that he aids and abets regularly?
Does Hellman just not listen to the lyrics? Does he intentionally ignore them? Whichever it is his other activities reduce his promotion of working class, feminist appalachian performers to mean satire. Perhaps he likes the blues so much that he is grinding more San Franciscans into poverty so that he can take pleasure from the musical upshot of their travails?
Republican Hellman has donated more than $500,000 to conservative candiates and ballot measures in San Francisco over the past 5 years. Such luminaries as Linda Richardson, Amos Brown, Michael Yaki, Ed Jew, Burke Strunsky, Mabel Teng, Juanita Owens, Tom Hseih, Alicia Becerril, Jill Wynns, Kimiko Burton, Louise Renne, Andrew Lee, Finoa Ma, Proposition J, Care Not Cash, $5,000 against police reform, $175,000 to the Committee on JOBS, $75,000 to SFSOS and Heather Hiles have been the beneficiaries of his largesse.
Hellman was also the driving force behind an 800 car garage at the Music Concourse, demonstrating his committment to "Transit First."
In making these donations, Hellman has actively encouraged the clearcutting of San Francisco's poor and environment, and challenged most every forward thinking progressive initiative and candidate. For him to offer an annual $1.5m Bluegrass festival that drew perhaps the most caucasian crowd of any mass event in San Francisco is little more than a cheap bribe.
"There's a man in a big house way up on the hill Far, far from the shacks where the poor miners live. He's got plenty of money, Lord, everything's fine And he has forgotten the Mannington mine. Yes, he has forgotten the Mannington mine.
So don't you believe them, my boy, That story's a lie. Remember the disaster at the Mannington mine Where seventy-eight good men so uselessly died Oh, don't follow your daddy to the Mannington mine.
How can God forgive you, you do know what you've done. You've killed my husband, now you want my son."
-- Hazel Dickens "Mannington Mine"
Marc Salomon
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November 20, 2009
