by Steve Early
Al Martinez was the shakiest member of their de facto slate. He had the swagger and self-assurance of an ex-cop but not much familiarity with local issues, including the fact that there was a sales tax measure on the 2014 ballot. At candidate forums, his bland generalizations about every conceivable topic except his own biography were embarrassing. One night he concluded the story of his charmed life with the revelation that now, “apparently, I am running for city council.”
A few weeks before the election, the East Bay Express did some fact-checking on Martinez’s work history. Reporter John Geluardi discovered that his career as a Richmond police officer had ended badly. In 1983 the RPD arrested and charged Martinez with nine felony counts after he broke into an evidence locker and took cocaine being held for evidence, a sawed-off rifle, and a handgun belonging to a fellow officer. Because the arresting officers mishandled drug evidence involved in the case, Martinez was acquitted after a twenty-three-day trial.
Moving Forward had already invested more than $60,000 in Al Martinez’s candidacy and $262,000 on its campaign to discredit Eduardo Martinez from the RPA. But the newspaper’s report on the former’s criminal case and his refusal to discuss it led Chevron to sever all ties with him. The campaign websites of Moving Forward and Richmond Working Families for Jobs deleted him from their list of endorsed candidates on the eve of the election. In its exposé of Martinez, the East Bay Express also took voters down memory lane regarding Donna Powers’s work history. During her first two years on the Richmond council, in the early 1990s, Powers “received national media attention” for keeping her day job of many years, “working as the topless mermaid at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco.”
During her Chevron-financed political comeback in 2014, Powers did not make much of a splash. As Geluardi reported, she “was somewhat aloof and attended only a few of the twenty candidate forums,” perhaps assuming that Big Oil’s expenditure of $330,000 on her behalf made showing up and answering questions unnecessary. At one appearance, before the League of Women Voters, Powers seemed out of touch with changes in the city during the decade and a half she had lived elsewhere. She claimed that Richmond’s crime situation was still so bad that “many of my friends refuse to come here.” Both Richmond public safety unions still had her back, though. Their Chevron-funded mailers on her behalf claimed she had “made our community safer” in the 1990s and would “keep our community safe now” if returned to the city council.9
ELECTION DAY AND NIGHT
On November 4, 2015, Donna Powers didn’t have to persuade any out-of-town friends to brave Richmond conditions to serve as her poll watchers. Chevron-backed candidates had plenty of paid helpers performing such civic duties. Moving Forward deployed them as part of an election-day operation that provided free rides to the polls and, reportedly, free pizza vouchers for anyone who voted.10
On the RPA side, there were hundreds of volunteers holding signs, handing out slate cards, and distributing other literature at twenty-nine voting places, including the Nevins Community Center in Richmond’s Iron Triangle neighborhood. There I found Jessica Montiel, a Richmond resident for thirty years who was taking a day off from her school district job in Berkeley. Montiel has been a campaign volunteer for the RPA since Gayle McLaughlin’s first run for mayor in 2006. She described RPA cofounder Juan Reardon as a personal hero who first got her involved in local politics. Before that she didn’t care much about voting, but with Reardon’s encouragement she became a California Green and got so active in the RPA that she even considered running for city council herself. Richmond might be a working-class city, Montiel told me, but there are “great minds here.” Its last decade of progress should be “a total model for other cities,” she said.
On the street corner opposite of where I spoke with Montiel, I met forty-eight-year-old Byron Miller, who was earning a day’s pay by taking the field against Team Richmond. A player of basketball, baseball, and flag football until “the streets and drugs” led him away from sports, Miller had dropped out of Richmond High in the ninth grade. The intervening years had not been easy for him. His most recent job had been at Home Depot in San Rafael. Now he was laid off and unemployed. “That’s why I’m doing this,” he explained, brandishing his Nat Bates sign. Miller had voted for Nat too and thought highly of Corky Booze because he “gets his points across” and “work[s] for the betterment of the people.”
When asked about changes in the city, Miller, unlike his candidate, saw many positive improvements. “Chief Magnus has done a lot,” he told me. “He’s made a difference with crime, violence, and all that shooting. He came in with a plan and he utilized all the resources to make it happen.” What Richmond needed now, Miller believed, was “jobs and more programs for kids like the Police Athletic League.” Without better things for them to do, local youths will be “sitting inside playing video games, which make it easy for kids to pick up guns, do acts of violence.” His own election-day choices notwithstanding, Miller wondered whether “it’s time for new blood” in Richmond because “lots of politicians say they’ll do this or that—and then it don’t happen.”
Three Richmond politicians who have tried to make things happen returned to the RPA office after a final, wearying day of campaigning. When McLaughlin, Beckles, and Martinez arrived, their campaign headquarters was packed with supporters. In the absence of any early returns, Team Richmond’s own nervousness and uncertainty was palpable. McLaughlin thanked the assembled volunteers for insuring that “grassroots democracy is alive and well in Richmond today.”
About a mile away, in his storefront headquarters on Macdonald Avenue, Nat Bates had every reason to expect better early returns than the numbers his son was posting on the wall. As preliminary totals went up, the small crowd of supporters was no longer in a confident mood. The big box cake with white icing and lettering proclaiming Bates “Our Mayor” went untouched. Bates and Booze were both facing defeat, by growing margins, in their respective races. Jim Rogers, who had never called them out on their misbehavior, was losing too. By 10:30 p.m., with half of Richmond’s precincts reporting, the council candidates backed by Big Oil were far behind Team Richmond. As the mounting totals for McLaughlin, Beckles, and Martinez were announced, there were groans and gasps of dismay at Bates headquarters.
A middle-aged man in a 49ers jersey tried to rally spirits in the room by declaring: “It’s just half time. We’re going to come on back in the third quarter!” But Corky Booze, a new arrival to the celebration-turned-wake, didn’t foresee any second-half rally by Team Bates. Its eighty-two-year-old quarterback was now slumped wearily in a plastic chair a few feet away. Wearing a gray suit jacket over a white campaign T-shirt with his own picture on it, Nat looked deflated in the harsh fluorescent lighting. Booze, meanwhile, turned to the nearest pair of ears in the room, which happened to be mine. Like a voluble commentator on pro football, he began a post-game analysis of the RPA’s unexpected success. “I truly believe that the amount of money Chevron spent made them beneficiaries of a sympathy vote,” he told me. “Chevron did not play this game right. When you attack people, they get a sympathy vote.”
Booze did credit the RPA with a strong ground campaign, although he claimed that many of its election-day volunteers had been imported from Berkeley and Oakland. “The progressive group started campaigning a year and a half ago,” he observed. “The RPA was very serious. . . . They played very dirty with me and Nat. They had eight or nine people at every polling place, handing out slate cards, with a special emphasis on people who couldn’t speak English.” (In a city where half the population speaks a language other than English at home, this wasn’t a bad idea!)
According to Booze, the election results confirmed that Richmond “has turned into Berkeley 100 percent due to this progressive movement.” Richmond politics no longer had any place for someone like him because he was just “too outspoken.” As for his own voter base, he was bitter about its failure to support him over his younger black opponent and make
Bates the next mayor. “We cannot save the African American community if they don’t want to save themselves,” he declared.
At Tom Butt’s election-night bash, the mood was jubilant. There was, of course, good news to celebrate, not bad news to gradually absorb. Just after midnight, unofficial tallies showed Butt winning, with 51 percent of the roughly eleven thousand ballots counted so far. Bates had placed second with about 35 percent of the vote. Uche Uwahemu, the young lawyer, management consultant, and immigrant from Nigeria, who tried to straddle the pro- and anti-Chevron divide, received the other 14 percent.
In a message to supporters the next day, Butt professed to be genuinely surprised at his victory. Two years after trailing Bates by two thousand votes in the city council race that was such a total blowout for the RPA, Butt came away with a bigger mandate than Gayle McLaughlin had received in her two mayoral races. In both of her three-way contests she won with a plurality of the vote. Of the eighteen thousand ballots cast in person and by mail in 2014, Butt received an actual majority. The mayor-elect credited his success to a collaborative effort with the RPA that mobilized voters who were turned off by Chevron, impressed with the remarkable progress Richmond had made in recent years, and tired of city council meeting disruptions. Chevron’s roster of close friends on the council was reduced to one—Nat Bates, who had two years remaining in his term.
Chevron’s $3.1 million expenditure on a single municipal election was so jaw-dropping that it drew widespread media attention. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow—who displayed a giggly second grader’s fascination with the sound and double meaning of the mayor elect’s last name—did a series of reports on Richmond’s oil-stained politics. Post-election she had an “astounding” victory to hail. On his show, Bill Moyers discussed Richmond developments with Bernie Sanders, after his visit to the city. A few weeks later, Moyers welcomed a victorious Gayle McLaughlin and Harriet Rowan, an enterprising young investigative reporter who described Richmond Confidential scoops on Chevron spending. “Not only is it a big story because it’s so much money,” Rowan explained. “It’s a big story because it’s an example of the real-life implications of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.”11
Locally San Francisco Chronicle editors hailed “the rising spirit of independence” displayed by the Richmond electorate. The more conservative Contra Costa Times urged Chevron to “apologize for its horrible slate of candidates” and “excessive, abusive campaign,” saying that the company had “lost its credibility with the community—again.” Chevron ignored this suggestion. Instead the company defended its expenditure of $140 per voter as a League of Women Voters–type of service to the public. Big Oil’s goal, it said, was merely “to fund direct communication with voters so they could make informed decisions about which candidates are best to lead Richmond.”
Chevron spending in Richmond equaled the total amount it devoted to congressional races in 2012 and 2014 throughout the entire country. In those election cycles, the company similarly sidestepped the cap on donations to individual candidates by running its cash through a super PAC aligned with GOP House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). In mid-term elections for the House, in 2014, higher-spending candidates from either party won 94 percent of the time, often with the help of negative advertising that buried opponents with fewer resources. In the context of Richmond, the result was different, in part because of the smaller scale of the electorate. Enough voters had personal contact with RPA candidates or their well-organized supporters to realize that the picture being painted of them was a “lie factory” production.
In Richmond even beneficiaries of Big Oil’s extraordinary largesse had post-election regrets. “There was so much mail from Moving Forward that when I scraped together to put my own pieces out, no one paid attention,” Donna Powers complained. “People were throwing everything in the garbage because they were so fed up with it.” During her campaign, of course, Powers never objected to promotional mailings on her behalf or Moving Forward hit pieces directed at her competitors. Yet post-election even she was exasperated by their content. “How many times do we have to hear that Jovanka ate lamb chops?” she asked.12
Charles Ramsey did acknowledge that Moving Forward’s mountain of mailers “might have got my profile out more.” But, in his post-election view, the company’s spending just hurt his own fund-raising efforts. “I had a hard time raising money for my campaign because it looked like Chevron was supporting me,” Ramsey said. “People thought, ‘We don’t need to support you.’”13 During the campaign, Ramsey had in fact confided to Eduardo Martinez that his real challenge was finding ways to spend the $100,000 he’d had no trouble raising from contractors and building trades unions. Many normal campaign expenses didn’t have to be covered by them, thanks to the quarter of a million dollars spent by Moving Forward on Ramsey’s behalf.
Ramsey also regretted not doing more RPA-style precinct walking and other forms of neighborhood campaigning “If I had to redo the election, I’d tell all the groups that I didn’t need any more money or support. I’d have been fully independent and done my own campaign completely,” he told a reporter.14
Among those taking note of how Chevron’s blitzkrieg backfired were representatives of labor, the African American community, and local business. “The fact that they’re getting less bang for their buck is pretty amazing,” one USW Local 5 leader told me after the election. If Big Oil’s political critics in Richmond could survive its retaliatory propaganda barrage, perhaps Chevron’s largest union could take a bolder public stand as well? Just three months later, refinery workers in Contra Costa County proceeded to do just that as part of their first industry-wide strike in thirty years.
Other political activists, public officials, and community leaders condemned the election tactics of Chevron and its allies. A victorious Jael Myrick noted that Black Men and Women (BMW) and the Black American Political Action Committee (BAPAC) “tried to use ugly politics in my race and the mayoral race. That is why they are becoming irrelevant. They tried to play these dumb games and they don’t work with my generation.”15 Kathleen Sullivan, leader of Black Women Organized for Political Action (BWOPA) agreed that “folks in Richmond just want something different.”
When interviewed on election day outside a neighborhood polling station, Sullivan complained that Bates supporters had chastised her for “dividing the black vote” in the 2014 mayoral race. After interviewing all three mayoral candidates, BWOPA members had endorsed Uwahemu instead of Bates. As Sullivan talked with voters and handed out flyers for Uwahemu, she expressed exasperation with “people trying to run the race card all the time.”
In a post-election interview for this book, Alvin Bernstine, pastor of the Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church, faulted BMW and BAPAC for their “lost focus” and attempt to turn “black against white,” in a contest where the real difference between candidates “was not ever around race, it was around principles.” County supervisor John Gioia, who backed Beckles and Butt, agreed with Bernstine and echoed Myrick’s assessment of the 2014 electorate. “Richmond voters have changed and evolved,” he told me. “Whether you’re black, Latino, or Asian, you’re less responsive to racial politics today.”
Vernon Whitmore, the former publisher of a black community newspaper who was about to become CEO of the Richmond Chamber of Commerce, told me he wanted to distance that organization from the biggest employer in town. “I’d like to get the Richmond chamber, which has always been perceived as an arm of Chevron, away from that 100 percent,” Whitmore said. After the election he extended a rare olive branch to the RPA. He invited Mike Parker, the socialist critic of Chevron, to speak at his inauguration as chamber CEO in January 2015, along with the city’s newly elected mayor, Tom Butt, and former mayor Irma Anderson. It was the first chamber dinner since the RPA was formed to be attended by a table full of local progressive activists.
In contrast, Chevron was not inclined to change its approach to Richmond politics or reconcile with lo
ngtime critics. Post-election, its spending habits—now more widely scrutinized and chastised than ever before—were challenged on several fronts. Advocates for corporate responsibility sought more disclosure via rule making by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) or Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and, in the case of individual firms, corrective action by their own shareholders.
In a petition to the FEC, Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen organization asked why the most “politicized of polluters, Chevron”—the recipient of $1 billion a year in federal contracts to fuel military vehicles and provide other services—should be allowed to buy elections via “super PAC spending” when federal contractors have been barred from direct contributions to candidates and parties for seventy years.16 Editors of the New York Times appealed to President Obama to sign an executive order at least requiring federal contractors (including Chevron) to “disclose their donations to political candidates.”17 Pressure was also mounting on the SEC to impose a similar requirement, two years in the making, on all publicly traded companies.18
Shareholding activists, including those from public-employee pension funds, achieved some success curbing the anonymity of unlimited corporate contributions unleashed by Citizens United. After the New York State Common Retirement Fund began pressing the issue in 2010, “twenty-eight major public companies like Comcast and Delta Air Lines—adopted or agreed to adopt political spending disclosure procedures.” Impressed by this trend, one business journalist predicted that “forcing executives to justify political activities on the corporate dime, and allowing shareholders to object, could limit political spending altogether.”19
