Author: Alfredo Casuso

Media Contact:  David Perry & Associates, Inc/David Perry  (415) 676-7007 / news@davidperry.com

Union Square Businesses Celebrate Expanded Reopening This Monday September 14

11 September 2020 — San Francisco, CA: In a late afternoon press announcement yesterday, San Francisco Mayor London N. Breed, Dr. Grant Colfax, Director of Health, and Assessor-Recorder Carmen Chu, co-Chair of the City’s Economic Recovery Task Force, announced that San Francisco is moving forward with additional loosening of COVID-19 protocols on Monday, September 14 including many businesses in the Union Square Business Improvement District area.

“Union Square is the heart of San Francisco,” said Karin Flood, Executive Director of the Union Square Business Improvement District. “For the last few months, our heart has still been beating, but slowly. Starting Monday, more and more of our businesses will pump a little faster, and with a little more joy, as we cautiously continue to bring back San Francisco, and Union Square, to full speed and full economic health.”

San Francisco’s resumed reopening started on September 1 and will continue on Monday, September 14 with additional outdoor and indoor activities, including services that are opening earlier than the City previously announced. The businesses and services that will resume indoors with limited capacity include hair salons, barber shops, massage services, nail salons, gyms and fitness centers with limited capacity. Only those services where face coverings can be worn at all times by everyone involved will reopen at this time.

As previously announced, hotels, outdoor family entertainment centers, drive-in entertainment like outdoor movies, and outdoor tour buses and boats will also reopen on the 14th under rules for outdoor gatherings. Indoor museums and galleries may submit health and safety plans the week of September 14th and will be able to open as early as September 21st following submission of their plan to the Department of Public Health. Additional services, businesses, and activities will resume over the coming weeks and months as long as San Francisco continues to make progress on limiting the spread of COVID-19.

To support a safer reopening, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development is coordinating the distribution of free personal protective equipment for San Francisco’s small businesses. Small businesses that would like to request a 30-day supply of hand sanitizer, surgical masks, and face shields should coordinate with their nearest participating community-based organization. Program details and availability can be found online at https://oewd.org/free-ppe-available

According to yesterday’s news release from the San Francisco’s Mayor’s Office, The City’s reopening plan is available online at SF.gov/reopening. Reopening is dependent upon San Francisco’s Health indicators remaining stable or improving, and the plan is subject to change. All San Franciscans must do their part to limit the spread of COVID-19, including face masking, social distancing and handwashing. The reopening of most activities and businesses requires limited capacity and health and safety plans. San Francisco continues to evaluate ways to bring higher risk activities, including indoor movies, dining, bars, night life, and offices back safely.

San Francisco’s Path Forward to Reopening:

Monday, September 14 – Low Risk Outdoor and Indoor Activities 

• Indoor personal services, such as hair salons, barber shops, nail salons, massage services, tattoo and piercing, with limited capacity
• Indoor gyms, including one-on-one personal training, at limited capacity
• Hotels and other lodging, including short-term rentals
• Places of worship and political activities (one person at a time indoors for individual prayer or campaign office use; up to 50 people outdoors)
• Outdoor tour buses and open-air boats, with limited capacity
• Drive-in movies, with limited capacity
• Outdoor family entertainment, such as mini-golf, batting cages, and go-carts, with limited capacity, (but not amusement park rides and playgrounds at this time)

September 21 – Indoor Museums, Zoos, and Aquariums and TK-6^th grade in-person learning

• Indoor museums, zoos, and aquariums at a limited capacity and with a submitted health and safety plan
• In-classroom learning: TK-6^th grade on rolling basis with approved health and safety plan

GOAL: End of September, Low Risk Indoor Activities

• Places of worship, with limited capacity (25% of capacity indoors, up to 25 people; up to 50 people outdoors)

GOAL: October, Middle School in-person learning

• Middle schools, in-person learning, on rolling basis with an approved health and safety plan

GOAL: November, High Schools, additional learning activities

• High schools, in-person learning, on rolling basis with an approved health and safety plan

Media Contact: David Perry & Associates, Inc/David Perry(415) 676-7007 / news@davidperry.com 

San Francisco Hotels Allowed to Open This Monday September 14

10 September 2020 — San Francisco, CA: In a late afternoon press announcement today, San Francisco Mayor London N. Breed, Dr. Grant Colfax, Director of Health, and Assessor-Recorder Carmen Chu, co-Chair of the City’s Economic Recovery Task Force announced that San Francisco is moving forward with additional loosening of COVID-19 protocols on Monday, September 14 including allowing San Francisco hotels to reopen.

“This is good news for thousands of hotel workers and a good day for everyone who loves San Francisco,” said Kevin Carroll, Hotel Council President and CEO. “Tourism is the beating heart of San Francisco and our hotels are our City’s smiling face. This, truly, marks a turning point in our recovery – economically and psychologically. San Francisco’s hotels being allowed to reopen is a true sign to the world that San Francisco, itself, is reopening.”

The Hotel Council of San Francisco is a non-profit membership-based organization advocating for the economic and social vitality of the hospitality industry in San Francisco. Their membership roster includes over 200 hotels, allied members, and partner organizations. The Hotel Council is dedicated to protecting the San Francisco hospitality industry and connecting its members to support the growth and success of the industry.

The COVID-10 Prevention & Enhanced Cleaning Guidelines put forth by the Hotel Council of San Francisco have been designed to make sure that all hotels are fully ready to re-open.

The 44-page document, the result of more than three months of intensive meetings, input and interaction with hospitality industry leaders, health and safety experts including Cal/OSHA, the CDC, guidelines from the American Hotel & Lodging Association and the California Hotel & Lodging Association in addition to the San Francisco Department of Health & Human Services is available online at:

https://hotelcouncilsf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/4-COVID-19-Prevention-Enhanced-Cleaning-Guidelines-for-Hotels-Hotel-Council-071720-HBO-Clean.pdf

“Never have our hotels been safer, cleaner or more prepared to welcome guests,” said Carroll from an earlier statement. “Our enhanced safety protocols are above and beyond what is required. San Francisco being able to welcome back guests is an important sign that our recovery, carefully and with all prescribed precautions, is underway. As other communities and cities throughout California have shown, when hotels re-open, tourism and economic renewal follow.”

Media Contacts: 

Sebastiaan Faber: (212) 674-5398 / sfaber@oberlin.edu

Maria Hernandez-Ojeda / mhern@hunter.cuny.edu 

ONLINE EVENT WILL CELEBRATE REDEDICATION OF NATIONAL MONUMENT

On September 12th, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) will be rededicating the fully restored national monument to the Lincoln Brigade, located on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. This online event, scheduled for 2 PM PDT, welcomes all those who treasure the legacy of the 2,800 American volunteers who joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War to defend the Spanish Republic and stop international fascism in its tracks.

The event will feature speakers and performances to celebrate and reflect on the significance of the national monument, which was designed by Ann Chamberlain and Walter Hood and first inaugurated in 2008 by then-mayor Gavin Newsom. Speakers include acclaimed author Isabel Allende, the architect Walter Hood, and the recipients of the 2020 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, No More Deaths/No Más Muertes. The event will be broadcast on ALBA’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/AbrahamLincolnBrigadeArchives/) on September 12th at 2 PM PDT.

As it commemorates the almost three thousand U.S. volunteers who put their lives on the line to defend democracy and the Spanish Republic, the national monument to the Lincoln Brigade uses landscape architecture and public art to celebrate working people and the cause of social justice more broadly. Its location, Embarcadero Plaza, has long been associated with the struggle for labor rights, the fight for equality, and protests against climate change. 

For more information on ALBA, please visit www.alba-valb.org, and for more information on the monument itself, please visit https://alba-valb.org/event/san-francisco-monument/ 

ALBA Online San Francisco Monument Celebration

Saturday, September 12, 2 PM PDT | Streamed Online on Facebook The event will be broadcast on ALBA’s Facebook Page

Media contact:
David Perry & Associates, Inc. / David Perry / news@davidperry.com / (415) 676-7007

President Trump’s Republican Role Model:

The California Governor Who Refused to Call Out the National Guard and Promised to Pardon Anyone Convicted of a Lynching.

AMERICAN INCENDIARY POPULISM by John D. Murphy

1 September 2020 – San Francisco, CA: A pardon promise at the height of the Great Depression by the Chief Constitutional Officer of the State of California, Republican Governor James “Sunny Jim” Rolph, shamelessly exploited—as President Trump is shamelessly exploiting—the political and moral gravitas of his elected office. The evening of the Sabbath, the day after Governor Rolph’s pardon promise was carried on radio stations and in newspapers throughout California, a press-estimated mob of five to ten thousand men, women, and children jammed St. James Park in San Jose, California (in present-day Silicon Valley), to witness the lynching of two men falsely accused of the kidnapping and murder of the scion of a wealthy San Jose retailor. 

Author John D. Murphy capsulized the intensity of the horrific event in his book American Incendiary Populism: “The blood-lust vigilante howl of the hometown lynch mob was heard ten miles away.”

Murphy,  a founder of the University of Phoenix authored an insider account of its formation and what transpired at the nation’s first accredited for-profit university after he resigned in 1997: “Mission Forsaken: The University of Phoenix Affair with Wall Street.”Subsequently, he wrote and produced the award-winning feature film, Valley of the Heart’s Delight based on the Republican politics of the 1933 San Jose lynching starring Pete Postlethwaite, Bruce McGill, and Gabriel Mann.

Murphy argues that President Trump, like Governor Rolph, is the political beneficiary of the heartless complicity of fellow Republicans by his endorsement of armed citizens engaging demonstrators ludicrously depicted as tools of a vast radical left-wing conspiracy.  “Unread and uninformed about the inherent dangers of populist pandering, President Trump and his spineless Republican fellow travelers constitute a lethal challenge to the most successful and admired democracy in world history,”  Murphy warns.

“Even the monomaniac ego of President Trump has some catching up to do with fellow Republican Rolph,” Murphy went on to say. On the afternoon prior to the San Jose lynching , Governor Rolph canceled his trip to the Western Governor’s Conference in Boise, Idaho to prevent Democratic Governor Frank Merriam from deploying the National Guard because he had left the state. The morning following the lynching,  despite gruesome descriptions of the horrific lynching in newspapers and stomach-turning coverage filmed live by newsreel cameramen, Rolph boastfully renewed his pardon pledge.

“Governor Rolph’s gilding of his refusal to call out the National Guard with the pardon promise had electrified news editors and publishers who dispatched some two hundred reporters, photographers, and cameramen to witness the biggest news story since the Crash of ’29,” Murphy recounts. Murphy asserts the free press was complicit in protecting the lynchers by disfiguring faces in news photos. “Two innocent local men were convicted in the court of public opinion and executed because of the ‘get out of jail free’ card issued by Governor Rolph. President Trump is effectively providing the same pass to armed citizens confronting demonstrators,”  Murphy asserts. 

A subsequent charade to hold  the lynchers accountable pointedly excluded Governor Rolph and the 60 some members—respected business and civic leaders—of a San Jose Vigilance Committee who executed a successful conspiracy to remain anonymous. Later appointed Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, then Alameda County District Attorney Earl Warren, oversaw a coroner’s jury hearing into the death of the victim of the kidnapping and murder allegedly avenged by the lynching because his body had been discovered in Alameda County. Warren publicly faulted his fellow law enforcement and government colleagues for failing to properly enforce the law and falsely blamed the lynching on otherwise honest, decent, and law-abiding citizens who supposedly rose up spontaneously in the quest for justice in a broken system.

Warren made no mention of the highly visible public role of fellow Republican James Rolph or the anonymous San Jose Vigilance Committee conspirators in providing absolute freedom from criminal or moral accountability  for all those participating in or witnessing the lynching.

“President Trump’s consummate failure to be a leader for all the people has resulted in the deaths of over 180,000 Americans from the pandemic, a number he and his minions blithely dismiss as statistics. Trump’s profoundly reckless fomenting of violence between citizen and citizen must absolutely be rejected in November’s presidential election ,” Murphy strongly believes. 

Media Contact: David Perry & Associates, Inc/David Perry
(415) 676-7007 / news@davidperry.com

San Francisco Hotels To Open Mid September

“Today’s announcement by Mayor Breed is life-saving good news for the employees of San Francisco’s hotel community”

1 September 2020 — San Francisco, CA: San Francisco’s hospitality community and tens of thousands of currently un-employed hotel workers – and hundreds of thousands of others supported by those jobs — had reason for optimism today following Mayor London N. Breed’s press conference announcing a date for the reopening of San Francisco’s tourism economy.

“Today’s announcement by Mayor Breed is life-saving good news for the employees of San Francisco’s hotel community,” said Kevin Carroll, Hotel Council President and CEO. “Never have our hotels been safer, cleaner or more prepared to welcome guests. Our enhanced safety protocols are above and beyond what is required. San Francisco being able to welcome back guests is an important sign that our recovery, carefully and with all prescribed precautions, is underway. As other communities and cities throughout California have shown, when hotels re-open, tourism and economic renewal follow.”

Although there are many specifics yet to be confirmed, today’s announcement was the first tentative stop forward to restore San Francisco’s number one economic engine: tourism. Since March when COVID first hit, the San Francisco Hotel Council has been actively engaged in planning for the reopening of hotels, shuttered to tourists for over five months, leading to devastating hardship for frontline hotel workers.

“No one is more committed to the health and safety of employees than our hotels,” said Carroll. “Our enhanced cleaning protocols that we announced last month are a testament to our commitment to everyone’s safety, worker and guests alike. “

About the Hotel Council of San Francisco:
The Hotel Council of San Francisco is a non-profit membership-based organization advocating for the economic and social vitality of the hospitality industry in San Francisco. Their membership roster includes over 200 hotels, allied members, and partner organizations. The Hotel Council is dedicated to protecting the San Francisco hospitality industry and connecting its members to support the growth and success of the industry.