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The Six Million Dollar Woman Amy Dean raised millions for training, education and research. How was all that money actually spent? Labor officials won't say, but others are talking. By Najeeb Hasan THE NOTION of criticizing Amy Dean might seem heretical for many. She was "San Jose's unofficial mayor," feted in public proclamations as an advocate for social justice. Still influential a year after moving to Chicago, Dean must now defend her reputation against allegations of sloppy and possibly improper financial conduct during her stewardship of two powerful local institutions. In December, a wrongful-termination suit filed by a former employee accused unnamed officials of the South Bay AFL/CIO Labor Council of "numerous illegalities ... including massive use of union and company credit cards ... for personal use, outright embezzlement of union and other funds, blatant pilfering of union and other moneys ... and other abuses of fraud, embezzlement and theft." A draft of a letter by the attorney who filed the suit contains references to "hundreds of thousands of dollars of union dues, charitable contributions and grants for the working poor being directed to personal use" and "using positions ... as defenders of union members and the working poor to embezzle money from other organizations, such as the California Board of Governors for Community Colleges." Dean and her successor, executive Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, deny the allegations against the organizations, but earlier this month they rescinded an offer to release documents that they say will put the accusations to rest. The only document they produced in a March 8 interview was a printout of an email containing racial humor they say that their accuser forwarded to a colleague. No-nonsense, direct, dogged, intelligent and, most of all, Chicago tough, Dean appeared to walk on water during her 12 years in Silicon Valley. While in her mid-20s, in 1991, she joined the South Bay Labor Council as its political director. By decade's end, the Mercury News named her one of the valley's 40 most powerful individuals, and The New York Times called her the "Christopher Columbus" of America's labor movement, guiding labor's flat-worlders through the uncharted seas of the New Economy. Dean's navigational talents quickly revealed themselves when, at 30, she was promoted to become the nation's youngest labor council leader. She deftly seized the reins of power at the 110,000-member organization, which represents the valley's firefighters, restaurant workers, machinists, roofers, sheet-rock tapers and plumbers--and won praise for halting an imminent and potentially devastating strike by the county's public transportation workers. Dean, though, had bigger ambitions than mediating local labor disputes. Though the region's major employer--the high-technology industry--had historically proved immune to unionizing, the stylish, petite labor boss set out to make organized labor a force to be reckoned with. Given SBLC's modest membership numbers, union dues alone wouldn't be enough to fund an agenda quite that aggressive. Within a year of capturing the top slot, Dean had filed papers to found a new nonprofit corporation. It would operate as a charity under the Internal Revenue Service's tax code and engage in research and educational activities while mining the foundation community for grants. She called it "Working Partnerships USA." Over the next six years, Working Partnerships would take in more than $6 million in revenue, according to financial statements obtained by Metro, two-thirds of it in tax-deductible donations from private donors and foundations like the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. In 2001, the statements show that WPUSA's revenues were $2.7 million, four times that of the South Bay Labor Council itself. SBLC's budget grew as well, thanks in part to payments from the charity with which it was joined at the hip. The two groups shared the same mailing address, offices, accountants and, for years, a common website domain. At first, SBLC provided free rent and labor to WPUSA. Then, as grants rolled in, cash started flowing the other way. Budgeted payments by WPUSA to the labor council for rent and administrative services totaled $439,000 between 2001 and 2003--about a quarter of the council's operating budget--according to internal documents obtained by Metro. Dean and Ellis-Lamkins say arms-length agreements govern the financial ties between the ostensibly independent entities, though they refuse to release minutes or agreements that confirm the arrangements. With both a politically active labor organization and a well-funded think tank under her effective control, Dean launched a series of policy initiatives and began slotting candidates in public offices. Though the law prohibits Working Partnerships from participating in electoral politics, it employs county Democratic Party chair Steve Preminger as its "Director of Union Community Resources." And co-tenant SBLC endorses candidates and marshals volunteers to walk precincts and make calls on behalf of candidates using an automated phone bank system owned by the labor council. With the 2002 election of Terry Gregory, who would publicly credit Dean for his 2002 victory, labor achieved an unprecedented level of local influence with six allies on the San Jose City Council. The labor-friendly council majority included Mayor Ron Gonzales, as well as a close Dean friend and protégé, five-year SBLC veteran Cindy Chavez, who hopes to succeed Gonzales as San Jose mayor. In addition to developing an international reputation as an innovator and assembling a well-oiled local political machine, Dean's personal economic fortunes soared as well, thanks mostly to her good luck in the Silicon Valley's booming real estate market in the late 1990s. Though labor sources say she started out making less than $30,000 a year at the labor council, she and her husband left as a millionaire couple when, according to public records, they sold the home they bought for $650,000 in 1996 on exclusive Newport Avenue in San Jose's Willow Glen neighborhood for $1.65 million in 2002. According to published reports, the two are building a 6,000-square-foot home in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood. Partnership, Not Platitudes These days, Illinois-based Dean is working on a book and is a contract employee of both SBLC and WPUSA. During a March interview at the Almaden Avenue Labor Temple, Dean was happy to talk about how labor uses its power locally. "What distinguishes us from other labor communities is that often labor builds political capital, but it's never really clear toward what end it's leveraging it," Dean says. Sitting in Ellis-Lamkins' simply decorated office--peach-toned with a few small art pieces and a futon resting against a tangerine accent wall--Dean displayed the passion and charisma that has made her America's leading voice of New Labor. A trim, young-looking 40, Dean wears black pants and leather half-boots. Her highlighted shoulder-length hair falls onto a silk Burberry scarf tucked into the neck of a black sweater. Ellis-Lamkins is dressed casually and sits behind a cinema-screen iMac. Their matching Treo PDA phones rest on the utilitarian laminate desktop. "In other words," Dean continues, "labor goes out, works hard, sees itself as an important part of the electoral coalition of the candidate but doesn't have a share or an equal role in the governing coalition of that elected official. "When we first started, there were always the proper platitudes [about labor] given by elected officials. We decided that we needed to ensure that before people came in and offered proper platitudes that we had the opportunity to exchange ideas with those folks. Let me just say, we have one litmus test for elected officials: Do you or do you not believe that working people and their institutions can be legitimate stewards of the economy and the political process?" Dean proved an effective partner to business and government, working with local political leaders and groups such as the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group and the Chamber of Commerce to pass local transportation sales tax initiatives and push for affordable housing programs. Until it was struck down in the courts, she supported the effort of labor-allied Councilwoman Nora Campos to replace management at the Tropicana shopping center through eminent domain. With her political clout and Working Partnership research studies, Dean also convinced the city of San Jose to adopt "living-wage" standards and argued for incorporation of "community benefits" such as low-income housing and child care into city vendor and development agreements. Business opposed the measures, arguing that if San Jose raised its requirements, it could make the city less competitive than neighboring cities that held no such standards. In Not Your Father's Union Movement, a collection of essays published in 1998, Dean discussed strategies for building local labor movements in the new economy. She cites two young workers: Richelle Naroyan, a college graduate from Santa Cruz who can only find "a succession of $7-an-hour jobs" despite her degree; and Alejandro Rodriguez, a Nicaraguan refugee whose position as a shipping clerk at Hewlett-Packard was subcontracted to a temp firm. Dean employs these two characters to discuss the changing employment landscape. Corporations might still be big, she writes, but they hire fewer people, preferring to subcontract work out to smaller firms; meanwhile, workers like Naroyan, who once might have found long-term stability under one employer, instead jump from job to job. The discussion, which argues for more flexible unions to accommodate the new realities, concludes by offering Working Partnerships in San Jose as an example of how to bridge the gap between organized labor and the New Economy. "Through Working Partnerships, we are 'reinventing' our own local labor movement with an eye toward offering high-tech workers the representation and services they truly need, not the kind the labor movement believes they should want," Dean writes. Restless in the Ranks The experiences of Raj Jayadev, the 27-year-old editor of San Jose's De-Bug magazine (who has also written freelance articles for Metro), offers an altogether different picture of New Labor and its high-profile efforts to represent the valley's temporary work force. ("De-Bug [which has a grassroots focus on the valley's temp economy] wouldn't be here if Working Partnerships was doing its job," wryly notes student activist Adam Welch.) Like the characters in Dean's essay, Jayadev was a young UCLA graduate who couldn't find steady employment and worked as an assembler for a temporary agency subcontracted by Hewlett-Packard. In the documentary Secrets of Silicon Valley, two filmmakers track Jayadev as he organizes fellow temporary workers to protest shortchanged paychecks and unhealthy conditions at the plant and is subsequently fired and, finally, wins an unlawful-termination ruling from the labor commission. Dean, who appears briefly for two or three seconds in the background of the nationally broadcast film, was interviewed during the filming process, but none of her quotes made the cut. Her input was too "sound-bite"-ish for their film, say the Berkeley-based directors. "[Working Partnerships' temp service] was kind of more on paper than it was reality," elaborates Deborah Kaufman, one of the filmmakers. She says Dean "talked a lot. But there really wasn't a lot there at the time. ... We weren't really impressed with the actual what-was-happening. "I think she did great political work--living wage, for example. [But] here we were doing this film that was inspired by ... friends that were not part of the boom, not the millionaires, and we're looking around and seeing the people who weren't getting rich, and there was Amy Dean, having meetings with all these high-tech people and really getting a thrill out of sitting at the table with them. "At that time, before the bust, the strange kind of euphoria that people were part of, and she was a part of it, you know, that there's no end in sight to growth--there was except for the people who weren't part of it. "And [Working Partnerships' Bob] Brownstein was the one who gave us the best metaphor, which is not in the film, [when] we asked him, 'How would you define what this is like? Is this another industrial revolution? ' "And he said, 'No, it's feudalism. You're either inside the castle, or you're outside the moat. And if you're in the castle, you're fully protected, you've got your health benefits, you've got your stock options and everything like that, and if you're a temp worker, you're totally outside the moat, and the ravaging bands are going to get you.' "And Amy Dean was having meetings with the people inside the castle, it seemed to us. Or, at least to me." Kaufman says that Dean, who is credited in the film, never called the filmmakers back to provide feedback. It's plausible that Dean was simply too busy; Dean says she never saw the movie that centered on the theme of her work. "I would try to tell her that she was on too many committees to be able to manage them all responsibly, but Amy would respond, 'You're right, but this is my world, this is what my world is like.' What can you really say to that?" asks one of her former assistants. It's also no secret that the valley's brightest labor leader had a thin skin and a short temper. For a public figure, keeping those two traits under wraps required some agility. "She would go screaming around the office--I couldn't even tell you why; maybe over nothing--but if somebody important was coming into the office, she was so in control, so nice," another former labor council employee remembers, still puzzled. "You're like, what the hell is going on here? She was screaming just now; now she's offering tea." In 1999, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Pete Carey wrote a Mercury News piece on a long-standing national program that kept a labor staffer on the payroll of the United Way Silicon Valley--in this case Democratic Party chair Steve Preminger. In the midst of a high-profile crisis over an $11 million shortfall that required United Way staff reductions and funding cuts to recipient organizations, labor balked at eliminating United Way's $174,000 underwriting of labor council salaries, office space and secretarial support. This despite a recommendation against the "special" relationship by the charity's chief financial officer, whose views came to light after United Way board member Mike Fox Sr. released a memo to the Mercury News. Dean, a United Way board member at the time, lobbied the charity's president to continue the arrangement. The labor council had argued that the two staff members, who spent a third of their time doing United Way fundraising and the other two-thirds on labor council and union business, were needed to secure the $2.1 million in United Way payroll plan contributions that came from union members. United Way's Dennis Wootten, who wrote the leaked memo, valued the two labor staffers' contributions at roughly $11,000. Fox downplays scuttlebutt that some of the charity's wealthy, conservative donors expressed irritation with paying Preminger's salary while he worked at the labor council, the unofficial headquarters for valley Democrats. What Fox does say is that Dean went ballistic when the story broke and demanded to know who had leaked the memo. "We had a board meeting, and she [Dean] sits in this board meeting," Fox recalls. "And she's yelling. She said, 'Some fink around here turned information over to this hit-man reporter.' I said, 'Amy, I did it, I did it.' She didn't hear me. I said, 'The hit man was Pete Carey, and he's entitled to everything I gave him.' She felt attacked, though there was no reason she should have felt attacked. So next week, Amy gets this big show of force from labor--Luther Jackson had a few labor people from Baltimore, Bud Biscardo with the AFL-CIO. That's just Amy. She doesn't want to be attacked. Amy is just very volatile, and she goes off like that." Following the controversy, the relationship was reconfigured. United Way now pays Working Partnerships to employ Preminger, rather than employ him directly. Accountability "She's a very talented person, but her ambitions got the best of her," says a senior voice in labor who knows Dean well. "I will always ask myself, did she really, really care about those people, as workers? Or did she care more about how many accolades or how many recognitions she could get? "I don't know the answer to that, but it was always the question that I got. I know she was polishing her own image, which, hey, that's part of the political process--you can't dislike a person for that. The question is: Are they doing it with insincerity to the persons who they are supposed to be there to serve, or worse yet, are they doing it at their detriment?" Teddie Lavallee says she was fired from the South Bay Labor Council last year. (Dean and Ellis-Lamkins contend she was a temporary worker whose contract was not renewed.) The spunky accountant, a Republican, had been at the job less than four months when she came to the ironic conclusion that the labor council and Working Partnerships, while publicly championing employee rights, were not all that great employers themselves. "For a labor council, they don't live by the labor law," yet another former employee who worked at the labor council for more than a year believes. "This is to say, for being a labor organization and preaching to the rest of the world about what organized labor could or should be, they don't do anything in-house." As one example, the employee says, "They have awful maternity policies." Lavallee also alleges that Ellis-Lamkins used the company credit card to purchase a computer for her mother. When asked about the computer, the labor leader evaded the question three times. Later in the interview, she returned to the subject unprompted, volunteering an explanation--that she used the organization's nonprofit discount to obtain a better price on the computer--not the organization's funds. When Metro asked to review the records in question, Dean and Ellis-Lamkins initially offered to provide the credit card statements within 48 hours. "I've spent my life being committed to accountability," Dean, who calls herself "a public servant," said. Two days later, an email from Ellis-Lamkins instead of the documents arrived. It read: As a follow-up to our meeting on Monday, March 8th, we wish to inform you our attorneys have advised not to discuss matters that are the subject of current litigation. Therefore, we will not be responding to additional requests for documents or interviews. Upon the successful resolution of litigation, we will reconsider requests from your organization. The labor council has also refused to release other documents, including many unrelated to the litigation. For example, Dean and Ellis-Lamkins have not cooperated with numerous requests to view WPUSA's Form 990 for the year 2002, a legally mandated financial disclosure that nonprofit organizations must make publicly available. Multiple requests for the 990 were met with the instruction to contact their Oakland attorney, William Sokol, who did not return numerous messages left on his office voicemail, on his home answering machine and with his wife, in addition to an email sent to to his Blackberry mobile device. SBLC's lack of transparency actually predates the litigation, the stated reason for noncooperation. On Dec. 3, nine days before Lavallee's lawsuit was filed, Dean emailed Metro's editor in response to a Nov. 10 information request seeking information. The newspaper was seeking information about Dean's pension plan, which appeared to be improperly disclosed in organization tax filings signed by Dean and which had been the subject of a previous article, about which Dean was not pleased. In the email, Dean wrote: I can assure you that every dime that I have ever received from the Council has been authorized. I am not, however, willing to entertain Najeeb's burdensome and overbroad request for Board minutes, resolutions, pension documents and other materials. The burden is not on me to disprove the Metro's misleading article. To the contrary, it is the Metro's burden to investigate the truth of its statements, and, where one of its junior reporters has failed to do so, to correct them. For more than five months, Metro has sought to penetrate the financial secrecy that surrounds one of the valley's most influential politically active institutions. Instead of providing information, however, the organizations' leadership has lawyered up and engaged in a pattern of obstruction and delays. Social Justice Indeed, the creation of Working Partnerships was perhaps the difference that elevated Dean above other labor leaders in the country. While the shell of Working Partnerships had already been in place during her predecessor's tenure, it was Dean who fashioned it into the formidable, nationally recognized social-justice organization it is today. Not all of labor was pleased by Working Partnerships' social activism. John Neece, former head of Building and Trades, for example, wanted nothing to do with the organization's advocacy for the poor. "I represent workers," says Neece. Others had even more damning doubts. "I think whoever said Amy's more about personal image than social justice had it on the money," a former employee says. "Amy's an extreme narcissist. Narcissists would do anything to prove that they're right. She's definitely no Mother Teresa. Maybe her staff is concerned about social justice, but Amy has her own personal agenda." Dean, for her part, dismisses criticisms from former staff, saying they are just bitter because they couldn't hack it. "If you're simply talking to people who were let go because they couldn't meet performance," she says. "But you gotta talk to--you can't believe how many superstars that have come out of this place, young people of color that are rocking and rolling in this valley, that will say, 'The only problem I have is that this was my first job, and I didn't get how good it was'." What's remarkable about Working Partnerships, which as an educational nonprofit has more freedom to seek funding than the labor council itself, is the meteoric rise of its budget. While the general assumption in San Jose is that the organization operates on a modest budget, the reality is quite different. And without transparency, there's no way the public will know if amid the financial chaos, funds raised for charitable purposes were used for personal, political or other uses prohibited under the strict guidelines governing 501c3 corporations. If nothing else, the success of Working Partnerships demonstrates Dean's considerable fundraising clout. After hovering just under $120,000 during the first two years of its existence in 1995 and 1996, according to public filings, the Working Partnerships budget made steady and sometimes astonishing gains every year after. In 2001, total revenue jumped more than a million dollars, from $1,558,611 to $2,681,702. Not bad for an organization that, in its first Toys for Tots community service drive in 1994, depended on $24,234.96 in donations (a good chunk coming from Lockheed Corporation) to purchase $23,160.93 worth of toys, mostly, interestingly enough, from noted union haters Wal-Mart, according to documents filed with the California Secretary of State. Many former employees were reluctant to speak about their experiences with the labor council and Working Partnerships because they feared being identified. "[Working Partnerships] was an absolute mess," one employee says. "There were very little records. We had a whole lot of grants, and we were obligated to our funders to show them what we produced and where the programs were going. Frankly, the programs were crap." Several foundations funding Working Partnerships, former employees say, rarely saw detailed numerical breakdowns of where the money was going. Indeed, one employee asserts, "Nothing was quantified. I never understood when Amy and Phaedra would talk about a project. I never understood what the heck they were trying to do. It was the most vague and obtuse language I've ever heard in my life. I thought, God, am I the dumbest person on Earth? Or does this not make any sense? "I slowly began to figure out that it didn't make any sense," the ex-employee adds, saying that earmarked money was often used for general purposes--or spent on "what needed it most." "However, the foundations were very explicit: This money is not to be used in the general fund. The foundations are not stupid--most of the money was supposed to go to that specific project. I don't know where the hell the money went. I can't for the life of me figure out where it went. What I saw was that every time someone had questions, every time an employee said something isn't right and tried to fix it, the employee was terminated. Except no one ever said they were terminated; they resigned. I honestly thought people were resigning. It wasn't until I figured out that people in my department were being asked to resign that I figured out they weren't actually resigning. "In theory, Working Partnerships is all very brilliant. Amy is an incredibly savvy, bright woman who is very, very political. I think actually, to be perfectly honest, she's all those things. She's also very frightening. She became a figurehead. She traveled--I couldn't even tell you how many days out of the week--and all the everyday things fell to Phaedra. "I have to be fair to Amy. I don't know if Amy knew the whole story. I'm sure she knew part of it." One of the funders of Working Partnerships' staffing agency, the Flint, Mich.-based C.S. Mott Foundation, provided $450,000 to Working Partnerships USA between 1998 and 2001. The grant to fund skills development programs for low-paid clerical workers was not renewed, according to foundation Vice President Marilyn Stein LeFeber. "The plan developed for the project was well thought out, but the anticipated performance levels were never achieved for a variety of reasons, most of which related to inexperience with the staffing agency industry during the three-year demonstration period," Stein LeFeber explained in an email. While at the helm of the labor council, Dean routinely received accolades from the AFL-CIO for her initiatives in Santa Clara County. Like the Times, AFL-CIO bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., describe Dean's work as "innovative," though, when asked to elaborate, it's mostly the accomplishments of Working Partnerships they cite. The organization's most notable success has arguably been the passage of living-wage laws in San Jose. However, since that milestone--an occasion that Dean had promised was just the beginning and an accomplishment that's still touted on virtually all labor's public relations literature--no other Santa Clara County city passed a similar law. "I think the community benefits work is really the evolution of living wage; really it started with the property tax rebate in '95, then it went to living wage, and now I think what we're saying is, What kind of community standards exist around public investment?" says Ellis-Lamkins. "So in the beginning, it was property tax rebates. Then we talked about living wage spread to rest of country--Los Angeles, Denver, Washington, D.C. And now, I think, the next phase is community benefits. I think San Jose is the place it began; I think Sunnyvale will be another place that we go to for community benefits." Meanwhile, one of the most oft-repeated criticisms about the direction of labor under Dean's tenure and that of her successor, Ellis-Lamkins, is what's described as a glass ceiling for rank-and-file union members. In other words, the people who make the decisions about what's good for the labor movement are predominantly people who have never worked a union job. Rather, the staff at both the labor council and at Working Partnerships is made up largely of young college graduates with degrees in public policy or social work. "Walk in their offices there," says one critic. "Tell me what the average age and experience of those people, and tell me where they come from. You shouldn't shut out young people; you need young people to believe in the labor movement. I do believe you need to cross-pollinate because you get inbred. But I also believe from the rank-and-file there is wonderful, smart, engaging talent out there that can do it just as good or can do it better than some sort of young, idealistic person coming in. "There weren't any rank-and-file in that place [under Dean] unless they were volunteers," the union member continues. "In that structure that was built, there was a kind of distant, elitist structure. And, I would submit, if you have a bunch of people that have virtually no experience and you put all of them in the labor movement, then you always know more than the rest of them, don't you? And, in part, that's what was at work there." Dean, meanwhile, notes that the trend of hiring from outside traditional bases is national, not just local. "Two things that have always fascinated me about the business community are: 1) the attention that they pay to organizational culture, and 2) their ability to proliferate best practices across their universe," Dean says. "What's important about this point is if the social justice movement is going to grow, we've got to do this. Everything I've learned about organizational culture, and everything I've learned about how do you run organization--it's been sitting and looking at the great leaders in our backyard in industry. ... I think there's nothing mutually exclusive about supporting working families and creating an environment where working families could be successful and supporting an environment for businesses to be successful. They're not mutually exclusive. "In fact the last time America created a set of accommodation in the New Deal; it was in recognition of the fact that we could create an environment where working people and government and industry can peacefully co-exist." Power Plan Dean's effective coalition building with business and government undoubtedly contributed to labor's emerging prominence in Silicon Valley. To what ends will labor's new power be used? "There were a lot of programs that she did that were AFL-CIO programs, programs through which she gets AFL-CIO recognition," reflects a source knowledgeable about labor in the valley. "But the question is, how many new workers have been organized? So what's it all about? What's this program do? Where does it really lead? What is all this political nice stuff for? "When you don't put in programs that make a difference for workers, and you don't put them in because you want to do what's politically correct and what looks good, I think it's a travesty. I think it's a violation of a person's responsibility. "I think Amy had a wonderful opportunity because the council was a different council when she stepped into it. There were a lot of new people coming in that she could be very much a part of and have a plebiscite that was hers, open-ended to run with. She had a labor movement that settled down. But this whole departure of going after the contract worker in the high tech--certainly, intellectually and pragmatically it's a topic that needs to be addressed in the American labor movement. There's no doubt about that. "The only thing I'd ask is who and what did that serve? What I mean is, the last time I checked, if you look at the percentage of members organized in traditional jurisdictions, we haven't gotten even 50 percent. It says to me that there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. It didn't help the labor movement, the building trades, the industrial unions, the public unions; it didn't help all those other unions while they're under attack and trying to defend the contracts they have and maybe trying to move forward," the labor expert continues. "The labor movement has to organize, and she's out there doing the whole high-tech temp worker thing. Did that serve those affiliates in the labor movement in moving forward? I don't think so. Maybe, maybe. But I don't think it's difficult to argue that it didn't more serve her looking good in the national AFL-CIO labor movement than it did her affiliates and the working people in the valley. I think there are those labor leaders, when you get up in the morning and you go to a little restaurant and you see the carpenters sitting down at the table because they're having breakfast because they went to the hiring hall and they weren't sent out that morning--I think a labor leader has got to ask themselves, why is that? How can I make it better? I don't think that was part of her program," the source concludes. Dean, meanwhile, demurs: "I also know that we got people from the left that say you're not down enough ... you're sellouts," she says. "And we got people over here saying you want to try and destroy the economy, and you want to be stewards of the economy, and you're going to destroy the economy. That's sort of the environment that we work in: you're going to destroy the economy, and you're not down enough. We have friends everywhere." Send a letter to the editor about this story to letters@metronews.com. [ Silicon Valley | Metroactive Home | Archives ]