Saddle up for even more American Apparel attention. Mother Jones presses famed anti-AA crusader Chicken John to reconcile the Mission’s anti-American Apparel-ism with the fact that at any given moment, a giant fraction of Mission hipsters are wearing American Apparel clothes. And Chicken John doesn’t waver. In fact, he hates waverers—like people who live in Berkeley, for example. They’re so wishy-washy:
“You can’t be squishy. You’ve got to come up with something and then I’m going to retort. You can’t give me Berkeley. Because Berkeley doesn’t work. We’ve all been to Berkeley. We all hate Berkeley. No one wants Berkeley. Berkeley is like, ‘Well, sort of like this, and kind of like that, and whatever, I don’t know, whatever you’re into I’m against it and whatever,’ and it’s impossible to do business. Everything is amorphous and squishy and a giant blob of bureaucracy that just takes over.”
Ah, that warms our Berkeley-grad-students’ hearts.
Stephen Elliott, major anti-AA organizer, writes an open letter to the Chronicle, calling ’em out for failing to send any reporters to the planning commission meeting, but nevertheless letting two columnists rail against Missionites’ anti-corporatism.
The AA flap even gets a nod from Rush Limbaugh. Believe it.
And in non-AA news—there’s just a little of it—the SF Examiner editorializes in favor of the controversial gang injunction, saying crime stats show a “meaningful improvement” in neighborhood safety.
Lastly, at a breakfast meeting of businessfolk, Mayor Newsom released the outline of a “local stimulus” package that includes one measure to let artists use vacant buildings rent-free, and another to jumpstart small businesses with $5,000 to $10,000 microloans.
Gold from Yelp of all places –
from the mother jones article… this has got to be mr j: Whoever it is.. well written and well spoken.
Chicken John can obfuscate and puff up meaningless rhetoric like a real politician all he wants but he’s never going to get more than a few thousand votes for mayor until it least pretends to have some internal logic behind it.
The fact of the matter is that “formula retail” is a label that was invented long before companies like American Apparel existed. In fact, the ban is designed to encourage businesses to make the “ethical” decisions that they do. And the nice thing about conditional use hearings is that their power is conditional and not universal. So does the opening of one store in a vacant storefront hurt independent businesses? Not in this lifetime.
Community Organizing is wonderful when it’s used to do good. Chicken John apparently sees it as some shakedown tool he and his friends can use to get attention or bend successful people to their knee to beg or barter. Shockingly, count the “I”s in this interview and compare them to the “We”s.