UC’s Chief Investment Officer Envisions Coal-Fired Power, Cement Factories as “Green” Investment Opportunities

Jagdeep Bachher, chief investment officer of the University of California.

The news this week that the University of California’s chief investment officer (CIO) will not be recommending divestment from fossil fuel companies to the university’s governing board of regents isn’t a surprise.

A coalition of UC students, faculty, staff and alumni have pressed the UC regents to divest from fossil fuel stocks and bonds. On Tuesday, the UC’s CIO released a recommendation that regents not pursue divestment, and instead develop “a framework for the management of environmental, social , and governance considerations.”

UC’s CIO, Jagdeep Singh Bachher was recently hired by the regents to run the university’s finances, more than $90 billion in funds. Bachher previously helped run the Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo), the sovereign wealth fund of Alberta, Canada. While helping pick investments for AIMCo, Bachher steered the province’s money into coal, oil, and gas companies and projects in North America, China and beyond. He also prioritized renewable energy and clean tech investments. But nothing in his record indicates that he would support divestment from fossil fuel companies. Instead it appears that Bachher sees clean tech as simply one part of a diversified investment portfolio which includes fossil fuels.

AIMCo’s stock holdings, disclosed in this SEC filing, show that the Canadian province’s savings are concentrated in oil and gas companies. About $1.8 billion of the total $8.9 billion in stock owned by AIMCo, roughly 20% of the total, is in an oil, gas, or coal company.

AIMCo’s single largest stock investment is a $374 million stake in Bonanza Creek Energy, an oil and gas company that utilizes fracking techniques in North American oil patches.

AIMCo’s second and third biggest investment positions in publicly traded stocks are Canadian Natural Resources and Suncor Energy, two Canadian oil companies that are excavating the tar sands, arguably the most environmentally destructive energy projects in the world.

In 2011 Bachher co-authored a paper about investment opportunities across the economies of Alberta, China and India. Bachher focused on investments in energy, calling Alberta a “veritable bank vault of natural resources,” meaning mostly oil and gas.

Bachher also portrayed these investments as opportunities to develop “clean energy,” but it’s clean energy built atop a fossil fuel base.

For example, Bachher singled out AIMCo’s investment in Calera, a California company that aims to capture CO2 emissions and use them to manufacture materials like cement. To leverage China’s five year economic plan, which includes contracting with Peabody Energy to build massive coal-fired power plants, Bachher hopes that companies like Calera will capitalize from the expansion of coal fired energy to utilize some CO2 emissions to create “green cement.”

Peabody Energy, one of the largest coal companies in the world, had a voice in UC’s recent deliberations around the question of whether or not to divest university funds from fossil fuel companies. As I reported in this week’s East Bay Express, Gregory Boyce, Peabody’s CEO, was invited by Bachher to speak to the UC regents task force considering the question of divestment.

The UC’s Spies, Cops, Weaponeers and Colonialists

Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano’s appointment as the University of California’s 22nd president is part of a long tradition of militarizing the university from the top down.

Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano’s nomination to be the 22nd president of the University of California announced days ago has already provoked skepticism and opposition from numerous faculty and students. Christopher Newfield, a professor of English at UCSB, wrote on his widely read blog that Napolitano is “unqualified to be a university president,” due to her lack of academic background and knowledge of how universities operate. “She has no political network in California,” added Newfield, “no local knowledge of the players, no constituency in the state, no national or state-based academic network, no direct understanding of the state’s history or current society.”

The UC’s graduate student union which represents thousands of student employees across the ten campuses, from Berkeley to San Diego, stated in a press release that they are “shocked and troubled,” by Napolitano’s nomination. “We fear that this decision will further expand the privatization, mismanagement, and militarized repression of free speech that characterized Mark Yudof’s presidency and will threaten the quality and accessibility of education.”

UC president Robert Dynes center front with Los Alamos weapons lab executives. In center background is Robert Foley, UC vice president for Laboratory Management. The poster hanging in the background celebrates Los Alamos Lab’s trident nuclear missile program.

Yudof of course was UC’s cigar chomping, bald, and gruff president recruited from the University of Texas in 2008 to replace Robert C. Dynes and whip the school’s administration into shape. Dynes was a physicist who presided over various scandals including one that has been emblematic of the decline of universities across the U.S. over the past two decades: bloated and growing executive compensation packages even while colleges trim their budgets, lay off faculty, and hike tuition. UC’s executives were lambasted in the press for their six-figure salaries and cronyism until the Regents, that lofty board of millionaires, mostly friends and donors to the Governor of California given ultimate power of the nation’s largest university, told Dynes it was time to retire back to his laboratory at San Diego.

Mark Yudof while president of the University of Texas signing a joint management agreement with Lockheed Martin executive C. Paul Robinson to co-manage Sandia National Laboratories, a nuclear weapons facility in Albuquerque. Sandia Labs also does perhaps a billion dollars of contract research for the CIA, NSA and other spy agencies.

Napolitano is a departure from Yudof and Dynes in that she doesn’t appear to have been selected purely for her unique qualifications to handle the crisis de jour for the University. Yudof cleaned up Dynes’ mess.

Dynes was recruited by several of the Regents in order to assemble Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a private corporation in which the university is a partner with Bechtel. LANS, as it’s called, was a creature of necessity; in the early 2000s another set of scandals —spying, theft, and various deadly accidents— threatened one of the UC’s most prized possessions, it’s sole, lucrative, and much coveted contract to manage the nation’s largest nuclear weapons laboratory in the high desert of the Land of Enchantment, New Mexico. Dynes arrived largely to assemble the UC’s joint bid for the contract with Bechtel and a few other large military-industrial corporations. He was successful in keeping UC wed to the nuclear lab. (Yudof actually led a counter-bid through the University of Texas and Lockheed Martin to wrest LANL’s contract from UC, but failed.)

Prior to Dynes was Richard Atkinson, an academic’s academic, a former head of the National Science Foundation, and Chancellor of UC San Deigo. Many UC faculty today look back on Atkinson as the ideal type, his reign the good old days, the high water mark for UC, untainted by worldly corruption and materialism, a set of little cities upon golden California hills where patient scientists and scholars could plod away at their research unhurried and secure in tenure and prestige.

But the UC has always been run by cops, spies, and weaponeers. The second board of Regents included Irving Scott, owner of a proto-Northrop Grumman, building warships for the U.S. military. Scott’s company, the Union Iron Works, built the USS Oregon battleship which was deployed in the 1890s to the Philippines where it shelled the Filipinos into submission – for their own childish good said UC’s leaders.

San Francisco’s Union Iron Works, a forge for battleships and weapons. The arms factory was owned by one of the UC’s first regents. Dozens of military-industrial executives have held seats on the Board of Regents providing an organic link between the Pentagon’s industrial contractors and the university.

UC’s tenth president was selected partly based on his anthropological work in service of the growing U.S. imperium in Asia. David Prescott Barrows led the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, “re-educating” the Filipinos, indoctrinating them into American culture, and the English language used by their new rulers. Barrows was molding colonial subjects. He once wrote as if he were molding play dough: “the physique of the Filipino is also being modified for the better. The race is physically small, but agile, athletic and comely.” Barrows concluded in a patriarchal tone, “in the face of these benefits the Filipinos are not unappreciative.”

UC insider John McCone (right) led the CIA for four years, 1961-1965, and was also a Deputy Secretary of Defense, Under-Secretary of the Air Force, and member of the Atomic Energy Commission.

By the time Clark Kerr took the reigns of UC in the 1960s, UC had become the uncontested heavy weight champion of the military-industrial-academic complex. Yale could certainly boast deeper ties and more recruits sent yearly to the CIA, but UC Berkeley had John McCone, industrialist, weapons manufacturer, and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and for his crowning achievement in the halls of the national security state, director of the CIA from 1961 to 1965. Yale sent the future spies; Berkeley’s patron McCone ran the circus. Today there is a building named after McCone on Berkeley’s campus, but history is alive too. If one looks deeper into UC’s federal labs, and into its administration and faculty, one will find live lines to Langley.

The UC Regents visit a thermo-nuclear weapons testing facility at the Los Alamos Laboratory in the 1960s.

McCone was just one among many of UC’s ultra-powerful spooks and Pentagon dons who sloshed money and personnel and gadgetry between Washington and California. After Clark Kerr’s ouster by right-wing, red hunting Regents and the nation’s paranoid FBI director, Charles Hitch took over the nation’s biggest and still fast growing university. Hitch was an economist brought to UC Berkeley to teach business, but his scholarly expertise lay in the economics of military budgeting. Among his greatest hits: The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age; Decision-Making for Defense; The Defense Sector and the American Economy, and; Defense Economic Issues, all very dry tomes patiently and authoritatively discussing the most scientifically effective ways to spend billions of tax dollars on nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles. Professor Hitch was appointed assistant secretary of defense by Kennedy just prior to his taking the post of UC president. It was a natural progression.

Skeptics of Napolitano’s nomination to be UC president point out that running a big federal bureaucracy doesn’t make for skills transferable to UC, but in Hitch’s case that was in fact part of the reason the Regents selected him. Hitch was a budget man for the Cold War defense contractors and Uncle Sam. He was also chairman of the Budget Review Board and the Capital Outlay Review Board for UC while on faculty. So what better man to run the entire integrated show, not just lecturing and writing about how to budget the military-industrial-academic complex, but in fact drafting the operative budgets for the Pentagon and later the UC?

Napolitano does differ from the previous 21 white men who presided over the University of California in being a woman. She’s not different at all with respect to her career and connections to the national security state. Plenty of UC’s leaders, from Chancellors to the Regents to the President have been insiders in the Pentagon, the nuclear weapons complex, and other branches of the warfare state. However, DHS chief Napolitano is unlike the previous UC presidents in that she an academic outsider, and that is the singular and new difference she signals, a full departure from a presidency that once required the credentials of scholarship and pedagogy, even while it was scholarship and teaching in service of war and empire.

UC: A University, or a Biotech Company?

Vernon Bowman

Last month the University of California intervened in a high stakes U.S. Supreme Court case on the side of the agribusiness giant Monsanto Company by filing an amicus brief stating that the university would be harmed materially if Monsanto doesn’t prevail. On the receiving end of UC’s legal argument is Vernon Bowman, a 75 year-old grain farmer from southern Indiana who has been battling Monsanto in court for several years now. It was already a David v. Goliath kind of fight, pitting an elderly guy in overalls against a global corporation with a bottomless pocket for legal expenses; the entry of UC into the court’s deliberations makes that two Goliaths.

Monsanto alleges that Bowman stole from the company years ago when he purchased soybean seeds from a local grain elevator and planted them in his fields. The seeds were second generation crop from a previous year’s harvest, the original seeds of which had been purchased from Monsanto by a different farmer. This second generation seed stock was found to contain genes that made the soybeans resistant to glyphosate-based herbicides, known to the public as Roundup, making them “Roundup Ready” in Monsanto’s lexicon of trademarked phrases and proprietary industrial farming systems. Monsanto, after deploying agribusiness spies to detect the genes in Bowman’s fields, took the farmer to court. The handful of big biotech companies like Monsanto that dominate the trade in GMO seeds have prosecuted dozens of similar cases, winning nearly every time in lower courts, exhausting the legal resources of their opponents, and building support in case law for the idea that intellectual property ownership can extend into the very DNA of life, and that the legal owners of genetic “technologies” should have full control over the total reproductive power of the organisms they alter. Bowman is the farmer who fought back, all the way to the Supreme Court.

On February 19 the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Bowman v. Monsanto. The tenor of the discussion, which lasted for just over an hour, was decidedly hostile to Bowman and his counsel, letting the lawyers from WilmerHale, Monsanto’s billion dollar law firm, sit back and relax. Chief Justices Roberts, Scalia, Breyer, and Ginsberg interrogated Bowman’s lawyer, often with obvious contempt in their voices, as he struggled to lay out an argument against Monsanto’s interpretation of US patent law. Under the law, Monsanto seems the clear favorite to win. US property laws have been molded for over two centuries by a profoundly anti-social doctrine emphasizing private control over technology and the financial gains to be made from invention. What’s relatively new is the extension of these propertarian doctrines into the essence of life itself, but thus far the courts and legal profession haven’t allowed the contradictions inherent in this obstruct their valorization of capital over life.

The University of California’s intervention is a big deal, even if it was to be expected. UC’s amicus brief (which was actually spearheaded by a Wisconsin university research foundation) was co-signed by other schools that have close ties to big agribusiness such as the universities of Iowa, Illinois, Florida, and Nebraska. Joining them are the lobbying organizations of these schools which work to influence intellectual property laws, and to obtain research subsidies for their institutions. The entry of this academic gang into the case creates the appearance of a broad public interest in upholding Monsanto’s legal position in part because these are mostly major public land grant universities.

UC and its co-signatories argue in their brief that Bowman’s seed saving stands to undermine scientific and technological “progress,” and could even harm the public welfare. By failing to penalize Mr. Bowman for buying and using saved seeds that contained a patented gene, UC argues that the Supreme Court:

“would impair technology transfer operations and ultimately deny the public the benefits of existing and yet-unknown artificial, progenitive technologies.  The first buyers of artificial, progenitive technology could make an unlimited number of identical copies of the invention without having to compensate the patentee for those subsequent copies.  In a short period of time, the market for the technology would become saturated with copies.  The patent owner and its licensees would effectively lose the right to exclude others from practicing the patented technology over the full statutory term of the patent—which is a fundamental right conferred by the patent system.  This would devalue existing patents directed to artificial, progenitive technologies and remove any incentive for private sector entities to license and develop future technologies of this kind.  Ultimately, the public may never benefit from such inventions.”

Surprised the UC would make such pro-privatization arguments? You shouldn’t be.

The University of California is a behemoth in the biotech industry, and behaves more like a for-profit corporation such as Monsanto, than a public college with a broadly social mission when it comes to research and technology. UC owns more patents than any other university in the world. In fact UC owns so many patents, and files for so many new applications each year, that only a few major corporations rank above it in the yearly quest to monopolize new ideas and creations.

Total patents issued to UC on a yearly basis. (Source: UC, “Technology Transfer Annual Report, 2011.”)

Most of UC’s patents are medical and biotechnology-related, and many of them are leased to for-profit corporations to generate income for the different campuses, and the UC system as a whole. UC claims ownership of 3,900 different patents registered with the U.S. Patent Office, and another 3,729 patents registered with foreign authorities, according to the most recent report from the university’s Technology Transfer Office. Its even worth pointing out that the source I just cited, the UC’s Technology Transfer Office, is itself a direct product of UC’s voracious appetite to patent and sell its technological properties. Tech transfer is a full-time task run out of the UC president’s office, and through offices on each UC campus where staff and lawyers are busy finding ways to monetize the university’s knowledge production, and to penalize anyone who attempts to use UC inventions without a fee.

Over 1,477 of UC’s patented technologies are licensed, mostly to businesses which have commercialized them into various medical, agricultural, and consumer products. UC licenses patents to Monsanto, among many other biotech companies.

Since 2007 UC has pulled in about $100 million annually from royalty and fee income on these properties, and another $20 million from settlements with those who infringe on UC’s patents. Among UC’s most lucrative patents are GMOs modifying several kinds of strawberries, a citrus fruit, and a patent for recombinant DNA used to make somatotropin, the bovine growth hormone used in industrial cattle farming.

Total plant licenses issued by UC to biotech companies, including Monsanto. Many of UC’s patented plant products involve transgenic manipulation of food crops. (Source: UC “Technology Transfer Annual Report, 2011.”)

In fact in 2004 UC sued Monsanto over the company’s use of the DNA material used to produce bovine growth hormone. In 2006 Monsanto agreed to pay UC $100 million to settle the case. UC’s royalties from its bovine growth hormone patent, about $5 million in 2011, are on top of the $200 million settlement, and UC’s patent runs until 2023. UC has also sued Genentec and other lesser-known biotech and pharmaceutical corporations over multi-million dollar patent issues.

UC spends about $28 million each year employing a team a outside lawyers to manage its intellectual property portfolio. Most of their work involves enforcement of patent infringement claims against companies like Monsanto.

UC and its fellow universities filled their amicus brief with appeals to the public good, and advancement of noble goals like feeding the world. Specifically they argue that “In the coming years, artificial, progenitive technologies [like Monsanto’s GMO soybeans] promise to positively impact many aspects of Americans’ lives.  Reversal [allowing Vernon Bowman to use saved seeds containing Roundup Ready genes] here would undermine those positive impacts.”

The universities aren’t the only parties to file briefs with the court. Numerous other biotechnology companies, the lawyers who represent them, and other intellectual property proponents filed briefs supporting Monsanto. One of these briefs, offered by BayhDole25, illustrates the degree to which the partisans of GMO technology have confused their legal arguments with ethical and moral appeals:

“This compensation [from patents] in turn supports long-term investment in new technologies for the continued vibrancy of U.S. agricultural biotechnology, where the private sector now provides the lion’s share of R&D critical to continuing agricultural productivity gains. Like never before, innovative agricultural biotechnology companies play a key role in the commercialization and assimilation of advanced technologies for creation of economic and social value in the United States, as well as to meet global challenges associated with population growth and climate change.”

Similarly impossible to prove value-laden language permeates the other briefs in support of Monsanto. For whatever reason these corporations, including the university-corporations like UC, feel their case must rest on more than just the letter of U.S. patent law, which does read in their favor.

It’s perhaps worth noting here that BayhDole25, a group founded to promote technology transfer between universities and corporations, is run by a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist and a university researcher who claims to have been “the first person to receive a patent for a transgenic organism.” The Bayh Dole Act from which they take their name was passed by Congress in 1980. It was a watershed moment in terms of the incentives it created toward further privatization of U.S. universities. Prior to Bayh Dole university researchers using federal funds were required to hand over any patentable inventions to the U.S. government. After Bayh Dole schools could take out the patents on technologies arising from federal research conducted under their auspices.

The San Francisco Giants of Real Estate, Tech, Finance

Easily the biggest winners of this year’s World Series are the owners of the San Francisco Giants baseball club. The Giants franchise is owned by a limited partnership called San Francisco Baseball Associates, L.P. There are 32 partners invested in the club, but it’s widely understood that most just possess a couple million in share equity, while a few hold the controlling shares. None of the owners are purported to be very active in the team’s management except Lawrence Baer, a minority owner and president and CEO of the club.

Share values in the Giants partnership have grown enormously since roughly two-dozen investors bought the baseball club in 1992 for about $100 million. At last estimate the Giants franchise was valued at $643 million. With their second World Series title in under three years sealed and their fan-base rapidly growing, that price is likely to have shot up. So who exactly is getting rich?

Charles B. Johnson

The largest Giants shareholder is Charles B. Johnson, estimated net worth of around $4-5 billion. That makes Johnson the wealthiest man in baseball. Whatever money Johnson has made off the Giants is small potatoes compared to the fortune he started with.

Johnson’s money comes from Franklin Resources, a mutual fund company his father founded. Johnson is pretty much Bay Area royalty, about as elite in both the social and economic sense as they come. He’s a trustee of Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, and has been a member of the corporate policy lobbying group the Bay Area Council.

Johnson lavishes money on conservative, anti-labor causes and political candidates. Just this year Johnson gave $200,000 to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super PAC, and $50,000 to the pro-Mitt Romney Restore Our Future super PAC, in addition to many other causes. Johnson is also the largest funder of the campaign against California’s Proposition 30 which would raise taxes on the super wealthy to fund education; he gave an anti-30 committee $200,000. Johnson has also contributed $50,000 to Proposition 32, the California ballot initiative that would virtually ban union money in California politics.

Charles B. Johnson’s home, the Carolands Chateau in Hillsbourough, CA.

Earlier this year Johnson held lavish fundraising events for Mitt Romney in his opulent Hillsborough mansion, the Carolands Chateau. In previous years Johnson invited George W. Bush to hold fundraisers at Carolands also.

Charles Johnson’s partner in business at Franklin Resources, a man named Harmon Burns, was until 2006 the largest share owner of the Giants. His death in that year passed his shares on to his wife, who then died in 2009 leaving the stake to be split between their daughters, Tori and Trina. In other words, majority ownership of the Giants rest with three people whose fortunes come from the Franklin Resources, Inc. company.

Peter Magowan, the Giants’ former managing partner who is credited as the catalyst for bringing the current group of owners together to buy the team in 1993, remains a large shareholder. Like his fellow owners, Magowan’s money doesn’t originate in baseball. And like more than a few of his fellow owners Magowan inherited his fortune. Magowan also shares the conservative, anti-labor values of some of his fellow Giants owners.

Peter Magowan (picture from Caterpillar, Inc.’s web site).

His grandfather was the founder of the investment bank behemoth Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America) and also a founder of the Safeway Corporation. Magowan’s father ran Safeway, and Magowan himself was elevated to the position of CEO of Safeway in 1979. By then the company had become the supermarket titan it is today.

Like Charles Johnson, Peter Magowan is a reactionary conservative who actively throws money against social justice causes. Magowan has lavished hundreds of thousands of dollars on Republican Party candidates John McCain, Carley Fiorina, and Paul Ryan. Earlier this year Magowan gave Karl Rove’s American Crossroads a $75,000 contribution toward defeating Barack Obama and other Democrats in key states, as well as $25,000 to the Restore Our Future super PAC. Earlier this year Magowan gave Wisconsin governor Scott Walker a $10,000 contribution to fight the recall campaign initiated against him by labor unions after Walker attempted to abolish collective bargaining.

Magowan is known as an anti-union corporate manager from his earlier years running Safeway. When Safeway was taken private in an LBO orchestrated by KKR in 1986, Magowan led an effort to bust up unions inside the company and drive down wages so as to drive up profits for the new private equity owners. “Our intention is to discuss with the unions those divisions that are having profitability problems, in our opinion entirely because of the fact that we pay higher labor costs than our competition in several markets that we operate,” Magowan told the LA Times during the company’s restructuring.

In addition to his current ownership stake in the Giants, Magowan also sits on the boards of Caterpillar, Inc. and DiamlerChrysler. Caterpillar has been widely criticized for selling bulldozers to the Israeli government through U.S. Foreign Military Sales Program. These bulldozers are used to demolish the homes, businesses, and farms of Palestinians.

The Giants owners aren’t just conservative tycoons. Among the minority owners of the Giants are some Democrats also. Giants owner Philip Halperin runs the Silver Giving Foundation, a philanthropy he created with money he amassed while working as a partner in the Weston Presidio private equity firm. Halperin’s official biography on the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies web site (where he sits on the advisory board trustee) says that at Weston he was, “focused on information technology, consumer branding, telecommunications and media,” and that he “previously worked at Lehman Brothers and Montgomery Securities.”

Halperin contributes relatively small amounts to the Democratic Party and candidates in any given year. He also sits on the board of Autonomy Virage, a company that specializes in developing surveillance systems for corporate and military clients.

More than several of the Giants minority owners are real estate tycoons, a fitting source of wealth given that the Giants baseball franchise itself has been a major force in a broader effort by San Francisco’s landlords to further gentrify the entire city and drive up land values. The Giants’ downtown stadium seamless connects the financial district (the product of 1960s and 1970s urban “renewal”) with China Basin and Mission Bay. The latter areas have seen enormous real estate investment in the 1990s and 2000s, including numerous luxury condo and high-rise apartment projects ringing the AT&T Park and the University of California’s brand new medical school campus (around which biotech companies are in a frenzied push to claim land).

Some of the Giants’ current owners have been keen to cash in on this speculative frenzy. An article from a 1997 issue of the San Francisco Business Times describes one case:

“In March, Allan Byer, a minority partner of the San Francisco Giants and owner of the Byer California clothing manufacturing company, beat out three other investors to plunk down $3.15 million for an aging and empty brick warehouse at 128 King St. On paper, the deal makes little sense. According to the San Francisco Tax Assessor’s office, the building is worth just $316,194. Why pay 10 times that much for an old building that hasn’t earned a dime in decades? The answer lies directly across the street, where in the middle of November, the Giants will hold a groundbreaking ceremony to start construction of PacBell Park, the team’s new 42,000-seat stadium. On opening day in April 2000, tens of thousands of people will stream into the stadium for the game, most of them passing directly in front of Byer’s property, which by then likely will house two or more restaurants — tables packed and cash registers humming.”

Other big shot real estate investors who own minority stakes in the Giants include David S. Wolff of the Wolff Companies, and Scott Seligman of the Seligman Group. Wolff controls a huge portfolio of Houston office properties.

Scott Seligman’s company owns the Sterling Bank & Trust, and numerous office properties in California, Nevada, and Michigan. Seligman has been singled out as the ugly face of gentrification in San Francisco by non other than Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the famed poet and owner of City Lights books. Back in 2001 Seligman was in the process of evicting tenants from a building he controlled in the Mid-Market area (the same part of San Francisco now being colonized by Twitter thanks to a big tax break the Board of Supervisors gave the company). In a press release Ferlinghetti lashed out:

“A developer from Michigan, Scott Seligman, who runs Sterling Bank and Seligman Western Enterprises, wants to gentrify the Mid-Market zone. Not to make the City a better place but to make his bank account a little fatter. He wants a better class of tenant. No more photographers or poets or translators or editors or painters. No more small businesses serving the City. No more small nonprofits, like Streetside Stories, which publishes work by 650 middle school kids every year to foster a love of reading and writing.”

Ferlinghetti was trying to draw a line: “It’s long past time for San Francisco—the people who live here and care about the place, the politicians, the small businesses, the kids who will inherit either a theme park or an exciting, urbane City—to stand up and stop the development juggernaut.”

AT&T Park from the air, obviously a jewel in king gentrification’s crown.

Of course the development juggernaut stumbled for a couple years, but then raged on. The Giants new ballpark was a key piece in advancing the juggernaut not only because it linked gentrifying regions of the city, but also because it secured a much desired form of high-priced entertainment for the tech and finance employees quickly populating trendy neighborhoods like Soma and the Mission. These highly paid, college educated urban pioneers have driven out thousands of long-time residents, mostly Black and Latino families whose existence sullies the theme park atmosphere, and who can’t pay the rapidly rising rents making men like Seligman very wealthy.

Meanwhile tickets to a Giants baseball game have shot up in price, making an outing to even the most mundane mid-season match too costly for some San Franciscans. Ball games have become something of a posh affair. The restaurants that ring AT&T Park are pricey, as is the food and drink inside the games.

Nowadays many of Silicon Valley’s big companies —Google, Yahoo, Facebook— send fleets of company buses into San Francisco’s hipster enclaves like Noe Valley, the Mission, Bernal Heights and Soma to pick up their twenty to forty-something year-old engineers and code geeks, shuttling them on these private transit systems directly to work with onboard wi-fi and other so-called perks to keep them satiated. In the 1990s it was no surprise that the young workforce fueling California’s booming technology capital wanted to live in an exciting city and shunned the quiet suburbia of Palo Alto, Cupertino, and Santa Clara. They wanted city lights, “gritty” urban experiences, 2 AM burritos on 24th Street, over-priced coffee along Valencia, art galleries on Natoma, endless music and clubs, and yes, of course they’d want baseball. Most importantly, they’d be willing to shell out hundreds of dollars or more every year for tickets.

The owners of San Francisco Baseball Associates, L.P., and the companies, foundations, and non-profit corporations they control, own, or direct.

So it should be no surprise that filling out the minority owners of the Giants baseball club are mostly technology executives. They had both the money to burn thanks to their IPOs and buyouts, and they had the larger reasons of class interest to make what was seemingly a philanthropic investment in the 1990s when the Giants almost left San Francisco for Florida. The team’s majority owner back then complained he had been losing money after voters thrice rejected his efforts to get public funds to build a new stadium. Many observers thought the new owners were simply sacrificing a few million to keep the team in San Francisco; the Giants were also a pretty mediocre ball club then, and attendance at games, held out at the windy Candlestick Park, wasn’t the greatest. When the new owners took over they ended up getting millions in public subsidies to build the new downtown stadium by the water. Even though they claim to have been the first franchise to “go private” with ballpark financing, the Giants’ owners did in fact receive at least $80 million in infrastructure upgrades paid for by taxpayers. The stadium also sits on public land, leased to the Giants at a very cheap rate.

Of course the new owners weren’t philanthropists. They were operating as sharp business executives. The baseball club was a keen real estate investment, and a very strategic investment toward their larger project of keeping San Francisco hegemonic in the tech economy. This larger vision of urban development has involved rapidly eradicating working class communities and replacing them with yuppified landscapes populated by mostly white college educated newcomers. Surprisingly few in San Francisco have consistently criticized the Giants baseball club for playing a key part in this harsh gentrification campaign executed on a city-wide level.