I received a survey from Dr. Jasper Eshuis, Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, who is doing a community survey about People's Park. It includes questions about whether people support or oppose UC's building plans and related activism. The survey has all the elements of what we call a "push" poll, a survey designed to entrench, rather than discover, attitudes.
Somewhere in the survey it says, "It is important to me that people who are unhoused are helped, but not at the cost of less student housing." It then gave various degrees of support or opposition to that statement without offering the chance to question the question's false assumption - that there is a scarcity of places to situate housing such that we must destroy our parks to do so.
That assumption is the essence of the false dichotomy that enabled the assault on our landmarked park, which is, thanks to community action, now on the National Register of Historic Places. Dr. Eshuis' survey doesn't mention that just east on Dwight Way sits over sixty acres of properties[1] still used for UC housing and events, or that just west on Dwight Way sits a UC parking lot available for development, to mention only three. The widespread acceptance of this scarcity falsehood has put our town unnecessarily at odds.
The University of California has spent over seventy years trying to annihilate local East Bay culture surrounding its flagship campus, which was former swampland adjacent to what was initially the town of Oceanview, a hardcore working town of small farms, breweries, vaudeville halls, brothels, race tracks, jazz clubs and the rip-snorting, uncontrollable lives of the diverse cultures who came here for work and a chance to start over. UC hated it. It wanted the campus to be an isolated, serene, protected and controlled place where it could nestle into the traditions of Ivy League schools and imitate them. The most cursory look at its initial footprint tells the story. Their terror of even putting in a community basketball court for fear the "wrong element" would use it is documented in minutes of the regents' meetings.
Our town has lost so much, and continues to lose not just square footage and historic landmarks to the endless pockets of money UC sets aside for land acquisition all over the state. UC also nurtures connections to corporations which now surface in the names and even the curricula on campus. It has taken whole departments, such as the Criminology Department, and erased them. It has taken the Public Health Library, among others, and put it completely out of reach on distant campuses. It favors and often partners with special Business Improvement Districts which shortchange all voices except those that own property.
People's Park was a garden, an anti-war statement, but also a revolt against the UC expansion which primarily targeted low-income housing it now proclaims it embraces as a goal. Even in the past year it has destroyed rent-controlled housing which was a city landmark. UC revolted against its own agreements to enrollment caps, creating homelessness and a housing shortage it now uses to destroy People's Park's critical cultural contributions and silence the communities which consistently gather at the park to expand collective thinking about respecting the earth and each other.
The survey's focus on building housing is a red herring in a town where we consistently have approximately 1,000 unhoused people and consistently over 3,000 empty housing units, some over ten years empty. We don't need to build a thing. We just need to hand out keys to what we have. We need a mayor and council that works for us, not for developers. Refurbishing existing housing, and stopping unnecessary, punitive evictions, is the greenest, cheapest, most sensible approach to making more housing available for everyone, not just students, many of whom can't afford the luxury student projects that typify what's now littering college towns nationwide and lining the pockets of out-of-state LLCs with no connection to our town except the money they pour into influential pockets. It's also the best way to preserve our landmarks for future generations.
The survey's creators probably meant well. To them it probably looks neutral or academically pure to omit the context, the history, the trajectory of previous efforts to destroy People's Park and the provocative cultural, political questions it represents about race, class, historical landmarks, and war. But having taken the survey I can't help but imagine that the results regarding the intersection of attitudes and activism would be as well represented if the questions had included the facts of land and housing development options being plentiful, instead of riding the tired horse of land scarcity on behalf of the largest landowner in California.
Academics have an obligation, in my view, to avoid that tilted landscape if they wish to learn, to analyze, and to teach. It is no small irony that my most solid lessons in this came from the former Criminology Department which, sadly, is now history.
Carol Denney is a musician, a cartoonist, and co-founder of the People's Park Historic District Advocacy Group.
[1] The ten acre Smyth-Fernwald campus and the approximately 50 acre Clark-Kerr campus are closer to campus than People's Park, already zoned for housing, and are only the beginning of UC-owned properties which are more appropriate for housing than a very small (2.8 acres) landmarked, and much-needed public park.
Moni T. Law, J.D. Chair, Berkeley Community Safety Coalition
Tuesday December 27, 2022 - 05:55:00 PM
Sadly, there are approximately 1,000 people unhoused in Berkeley who are facing cold nights sleeping outdoors. Many people have disabilities and advancing age and failing health. Can we confirm that an emergency shelter will be open tonight and all week with the upcoming heavy rains? Last night, a blind 59 year old homeless man who grew up In Berkeley was in his wheelchair outside the North Berkeley Senior Center (has excruciating neuropathy in feet). I believe he slept outside because the center initially said they were opening for the Warming Center, but then posted it was closed.
If it is a staffing shortage, can you declare an emergency and request Governor’s support from National Guard to staff a large heated tent with portable bathrooms set in a large parking lot - and/or request Red Cross to set up volunteer staffed shelters during these horrific, cold, wet, life threatening nights?
Thank you In advance for a reply. We would like to have news to give our unhoused neighbors on where they can take shelter from the cold. Community members are trying to fill some gaps but we don’t have sustainable resources. Thank you for considering this urgent plea.
The word "dialogic" refers to the logic of dialogue. Dialogue is more than just two people talking "at" each other – you know, throwing opinions around like candy. "Dialogue" refers to an exchange of ideas. Opinions just come and go. But in dialogue, ideas address each other. Underlying each statement in a dialogue is the (often unspoken) question, "why do you think what you just said is so, or even meaningful, to either of us?" It is the fact that participants can answer that question as their exchange proceeds that drives each dialogue to new and more insightful ideas (about whatever they are talking about). The ethics of that question provide inclusion in mutual reasoning and the building of thought; it enables each participant to reach into the universe of the other, which makes both bigger. It brings people together. The luxury of throwing around opinion-candy leaves one isolated in what just tastes good personally.
Crime is not an opinion. And neither is police brutality. Both are forms of social violence for which the gnawing question silently lurks: “why are you doing this?” Though it asks for reasons, the act of violence never goes beyond its raw existence. It simply violates. Period. Whatever the robber is responding to in his past, or in his situation, the meaning of the theft is performative, nothing else. When a cop gives a command, and responds to disobedience with violence, its performativity is its reality. It simply exists. Indeed, if the cop had a warrant, he would simply serve it. But when the cop shoots a person, he is by-passing that “detail.” No warrants are served, and no messages are given. The relevance of any message (such as for justice) would have already died under the force of that violence. When somebody dies, it is too late to make a "message" relevant to them. Only the “fear component” of law enforcement is left, lying around on the ground for others to see.
Relevance is at the core of dialogue. The “logic of dialogue” has three dimensions: a response, a responsiveness, and a responsibility. A response is what one gives to another who has spoken or done "something." Responsiveness pertains to the character of one’s response. It implies a recognition of the other’s thought, a respect for its substance without necessarily implying "agreement." The other is granted their autonomy in the exchange by one’s responsiveness. It is a way of taking responsibility for that recognition, and for one’s own autonomy and relevance in responding. In the mutuality of respect, each speaker takes responsibility not only for relevance, but also for leaving space for the other’s response in turn. The exchange of thoughts can thus generate ideas that go beyond what each participant brings to it. The logic of dialogue is the common conceiving and giving birth to new thought. This is not complicated; we do it every day.
If social violence is not an opinion, then it contains a dialogical component. There is "something" to which the social violence is a response. But how is one to articulate that, given the existentiality of the violence, its termination of all mutual respect? After all, violence is an act of violating the autonomy of another person. To rob someone is to violate their personal environment, disrupting their sovereignty in it. To assault someone is to use their body against them, to imprison them in subordination to one’s attack. It creates a situation in which the other loses all autonomy as an unforgettable experience.
Violence and violation have the same root as words. To violate a person is to do violence to their identity, and to their autonomy. To do violence to a person is also to violate their autonomy and their identity. Whether by a cop or a civilian, violence is a violation of person’s being (for which torture is an archetype). Those who feel their autonomy thus violated are thrust into a subordination of life from which rebellion and reconstruction become necessary, in order to return to oneself.
The spectrum of violence runs from forceful captivity and pain through rape, handcuffing, robbery, arrest, kidnapping, censorship, segregation, isolation, and ostracism, all accompanied by emotional trauma, a wounding of the spirit. The common element is to separate a person’s body from their integrity as an individual who lives that body. Imprisonment is the role model. Endless solitary confinement represents the juridical attempt (tragically lawful, these days) to strip away a person’s identity.
To what is social violence a response? From where in one’s past might the responsiveness of violence have come? Might it be something ever-present in one’s world (like racial discrimination)? Might it be the trauma one carries of having had a brutal or abusive father? Whatever it was, did it lurk on one’s social horizon? Did it erase itself in order to be a hidden "reason" for an assault? When a cop shoots a person because they became "uncooperative," to what is that cop responding? Commands terminate dialogue by demanding a pre-established response, thus ending the other’s autonomy. To what is the cop responding in thus violating another person’s autonomy? Indeed, in demanding obedience, the cop is creating the situation in order to do precisely that. He is not expressing an "opinion," nor responding to a provocation. But he is ending all possibility of a dialogue. The punishment for disobedience is thus premeditated. It is premeditated social violence.
Social violence has become a fact of life in US cities. It is part of a larger crushing reality. The job of sustaining life for those without big salaries or property assets held in reserve becomes complicated. Unemployment, rent gouging, police brutality, racial discrimination, job insecurity, inflation, etc. all make the sustaining of social life somewhat precarious. If one depends on a small wage, and watches it get eaten up by rent, then one has to do something extraordinary to put food on the table for one’s family. Sometimes, social violence becomes the means of buying shoes for one’s kids, or for helping one’s mother pay the bills. Sometimes it even represents an attempt to keep up with the life one sees in TV advertisement images. Meanwhile, the number of homeless doubles every couple of years. And those with substantial salaries begin to suspect that a mortgage default could put them out on the street as well. Everyone becomes defensive.
People approach city government for stability. Those with property become fearful of the homeless. They know the homeless are excluded from participating in policy-making about the homeless situation; yet when they try, they find their own inclusion similarly marginalized. The people of a city are told that they have "input," but that merely reduces to writing letters that no one reads, or a mere couple of minutes to describe one’s situation or express one’s desperation in a city council meeting. Neighborhood associations try to bring people together. But if it is only to lobby the councilmembers who say “we are already doing everything we can,” what good is it? Meanwhile, the cops harass the homeless encampments, or assault the groups of teenagers hanging out on the street, or steal some time from people who are “driving while black.” People lose their jobs because they refuse a booster shot, remembering how they didn’t feel quite right after the last one.
The stress becomes unbearable. People shoot the people they love; teenagers get guns and use them to prove they have “come of age.” People fight at the slightest disrespect or disparagement. And sometimes, one succumbs to the need to just hit back at a society that squelches responses by giving endless commands and mandates. Some of them become mass murderers, picking up an assault rifle and spraying death on a group or a crowd (the US version of a suicide bomber, since most figure they will die during the event). Most if not all are white, and probably angry at not living in the society of white purity that their white bigot mentors promised them.
But when the response by government is to arm the cops with assault rifles or other military equipment, it becomes impossible to tell the difference between stress-related social violence and an explosive rebuke against a government that disdains its own people. An angry response to social stress will probably look insurrectionary when seen from behind those rifles by an eye that just yearns to pull that trigger. The police adoption or demand for military equipment only hides the fact that what they both represent and constitute is a government that kills its own people. Travesty breeds atrocity.
The cops shrug from behind their guns and affirm that they always give a command first before shooting. Even the state sees through that. Sacramento has passed a law (AB 481) that gives City Councils the power to use public sentiment and opposition to such weapons to refuse them to city police. Yet still, the police commands come at gun-point despite that bill. And they carry with them the deprivation of all autonomy. Both dialogue and autonomy become impossible as soon as one can no longer respond with "no." Without autonomy, one is already in prison, a non-person.
Civilian social violence becomes the substitute for the absence of dialogue in everyday life; it is a desperate response to something that isn’t there. And police power to command is at the core of that social violence as its role model.
Is there any defense against social violence?
The police claim they need their assault rifles because of all the guns on the street. [cf. Part 1, for how many of those guns got there.] But they address people in crisis, people needing help, with guns drawn. People get guns, and keep them in their houses, as a means of self-defense. But are they not also there for self-defense against the police? Are they not responding to the fact that the cops shoot people for disobedience?
In 2012, a black person was shot by police every 28 hours in the US. In 2015, the total casualty list of police killings was over 1000 – more than three a day. Is self-defense a response to police militarization? If not, then what will provide the people with a defense against it? Are police assault rifles a response to the people’s assault rifles or are the people’s assault rifles a response to police assault rifles? Which is the egg and which is the chicken?
The people aren’t chicken when they have to confront a government that kills its own people. And the people aren’t the egg when they laugh at the thought of the police asking them for trust. How is it possible to trust someone who can destroy your autonomy whenever they like, someone who can reduce you to absolute subordination on a whim? If one can violate another’s autonomy at will, trust becomes a joke (a "joke" that rehearses the historical condition of enslavement).
But still, there is social violence. Sometimes, it is directed at specific persons. One decides to rob a specific person, or assault them for some reason. It has a component of revenge in it. Vengeance resides at the very core of this entire culture. All judicial thinking revolves around imprisonment and monetary fines, punishments that are nothing but vengeance. The system reduces justice to numbers -- days or years or dollars. But those numbers only quantify vengeance. They turn the violence into data.
Social violence is not data; it is the pigment with which the urban political landscape is painted. Police violence hides behind the idea that the police are civil society’s main defense against social violence. It is a response to irresponsibility without any pretense to responsiveness. The police accept military grade weaponry under the pretense of stopping social violence; it is a pretense because they pretend that a militarized act of stopping social violence is not an act of social violence.
In other words, at the core of this entire social issue, those who commit the violence, those who act to reduce other’s autonomy, to deconstruct their identity and self-determination, don’t care who the other person might be. The bank robber robs banks not only because “that’s where the money is,” (John Dellinger) but also because the bank is an impersonal institution. For the cops, the person who refuses to be handcuffed is only an opportunity to reach for his weapon. One might care "what" the person one attacks is (rich, black, female, etc.), but not who. That’s why the question of what or who an assailant is responding to seems like such an empty exercise. They are responding to something else, something in their past, something seen on TV, or merely to being fed up. In such a case, the violence is only aggression. It reduces its victim to a language of hunger, a morsel fed into the jaws of austerity, as a way of owning the TV’s twisted images of wealth. The military weaponry that the government gives the police has no story to tell, only the invention of a war zone in which the people on the street become the enemy.
If the power to command is the real core of police militarization, then that militarization has already occurred, long before the grenades and drones were offered as gifts. There is no real defense against it. Militarization has already neutralized the autonomy that could conceive of self-defense. And it neutralizes any reason the police might have had to care who a person is. Their response to disobedience is a response to a non-response to a command, by someone who is already a non-person to the cop. The bank robber might be responding to something social, but the cop is not. He is enacting a war against an invented enemy. His commands simply set up the situation enabling an act of violence – either arrest for disobedience, or murder, or some such.
If police violence cancels the other’s personhood, leaving them without autonomy, then there is already no "other" to whom the cop is responding. This renders policing non-dialogical, leaving it to be simply opinion. But opinion with a gun in its hand is nothing but a form of social control, and social domination.
We have not been talking about organized crime, here. To do that, we would have to speak about capitalism, or the corporate structure, its organized, valorized, and globalized domination, its exploitation of people and the planet in new and horrendous ways. Corporate globalization has blurred the boundary between corporate crime and its mere capitalistic forms. The confluence of sex-slavery and pedophilia that have conjoined political power with blackmail (Cf. the revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s career) exemplify just such a blurring of boundaries. The rich obey a different kind of law, a more highly developed paranoia with a different dialogic sense of vengeance, than ordinary people. Paranoia is a psychological state in which enemies are endlessly invented in order to be able to take vengeance against them.
But we are not speaking about “organized crime.” In fact, we have tried not to use the term "crime" at all for the social violence we are examining, since that would automatically imply a radical distinction between police violence and the social violence for which it is the role model (opinion with a gun in its hand).
But social control is never simple. Whether done by cops or by civilians, there is always another dynamic lurking behind it, a history that hides over that horizon of the past. It has emerged here and there in this essay. It is the dynamic structure of racialization. Police brutality and killing has always had a racial focus. And the social control constructed through police violence and civilian violence also has a racial focus. We shall deal with that in the next article in this series.
Fired Tesla and Twitter workers joined musicians, poets, and labor organizers on Sunday, December 18, 2022, calling for Twitter CEO Elon Musk's removal by painting a huge "Oligarchy" sign with the Twitter logo on 10th Street in San Francisco in front of Twitter's flagship headquarters. Bystanders and passing traffic joined in the painting and songs, which included "Fly Him Past the Moon" and "Sleeping in my Tesla" by local folksingers Hali Hammer and Carol Denney. The protest was sponsored by Laborfest, Code Pink, and the Climate Action Justice Project, and was covered by local news KRON 4.
It’s That Time of Year—or actually it’s the trailing edge of the year, the remains of another year which has come and gone, seemingly in the twinkle of an eye.
For the politically minded, the good news at the national level is that the infamous Red Wave turned out to be a mirage. The bad news is that the Red Menace will be kinda sorta running the House of Representatives for a couple of years, and they could do a fair bit of harm in that time.
(For those of us well past a certain age, it’s beyond ironic that The Repugs have morphed into The Reds, a title formerly owned by lefties of all stripes.)
And of course, 2022 started with a bang with the investigation into the Republican Riot in the previous year. The best you could say about that event is that the hearings about it made for some great TV.
For the politically minded, local chapter, the bad news is the relentless progress of the neo-liberal version of urban renewal, Sacramento style, spearheaded by the likes of Scott Wiener, Nancy Skinner and Buffy Wicks. Evidently the message about what’s happening in downtown San Francisco hasn’t reached Sacto, let alone Berkeley.
It turns out that Manhattanization is still not a good brand. Who knew?
Those Big Ugly Boxes, both the expensive tiny apartments for techniks and their empty former offices, are now a drug on the market, if you believe the aghast stories in the shrinking SF Chronicle.
And along with the annoying things that this gang and their allies are doing, what they aren’tdoing is even worse.
Unhoused people are camping everywhere. Citizens of Everywhere believe that’s because the Everywhere City Council has created munificent incentives for Those People to pitch their tents on Everywhere’s streets.
The usual simple questions still have the obvious answers.
To wit: Why are Those People still poor? Because they don’t have enough money.
Why do some of Them act crazy? Because they’re mentally ill and can’t get help.
Why are they so dirty? Because they don’t have showers.
Why do they sleep in tents? Because they don’t have houses
Etc., etc. etc.
So-called Democratic legislators, who enjoy a super-majority in the state legislature, persist in pushing market-based neo-liberal solutions worthy of my father’s generation of old-timey moderate Republicans: Build a whole bunch of any kind of units and the market will decide what’s needed.
Well, it looks like the market has decided that Those People can damn well sleep in tents on city sidewalks. And it’s evidently not a city’s job to help them move inside, except in dribs and drabs to create photo ops.
No one’s offering cash, treatment, sanitation or shelter in quantities close to matching the number of people who need these obvious solutions, But BTW, let’s get rid of those tedious CEQA regulations to make speculative development easier, okay?
What seemed not to work in the 1970s still doesn’t work now, so maybe it’s time to give up inveighing against it. The Manhattanization of San Francisco (and now Berkeley) is just as dark and dreary as Bruce Brugmann in the seventies SF Bay Guardian warned us it would be. As he (and I) predicted, people don’t like working there anymore—even the techniks I know prefer to work at home in the ‘burbs. The office space vacancy rate in San Francisco is now 27%. (And also as predicted, PG&E is still thuggish, up to no good, as it always was.)
The international situation is no more logical. Loony autocrats rule major nations, perseverating in ancient conflicts.
Hey guys, let’s revive the Russian Empire: It was so much fun the last couple of times, says President Putin.
Let’s just re-think Israel’s tired old democracy into a religion-ruled Utopia, suggests Prime Minister Netanyahu.
At the end of the year, those of us who write about politics among other topics are sometimes expected or at least permitted to make recommendations regarding the perennial question of What is to be Done? Что дѣлать?, a title Lenin lifted from an earlier radical, Nikolay Chernyshevsky.
It's a good question, and as yet no one has really come up with much of an answer. Liberal democracy with free and fair elections seems like a good idea, as do various flavors of socialism. Just how many organizational principles call themselves socialist can be guessed at from the lengthy and dense Wikipedia entry for “democratic socialism”, a rabbit hole down which we will not go today. But it’s discouraging to reflect on how many chief executives at all levels have taken office espousing the highest democratic principles and then gravitated toward autocracy—in recent memory, all the way from people like President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua down to mayors of towns like Berkeley who are in thrall to developers.
I’ve been writing about this for about fifty years, and my ultimate conclusion is the French maxim: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose—“the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing”.
I am reminded of what my girlhood idol, Tom Lehrer, is reputed to have said, that he gave up writing satiric songs when Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize. After fifty years of watching people make the same mistakes over and over, it might just be time for me to give up generating admonitory verbiage.
As another hero of my youth, Pete Seeger, sang, When will they ever learn? They pay no attention, and suffer the consequences.
The really good news is that Tom Lehrer has put all of his songs in the public domain, accessible and downloadable at https://tomlehrersongs.com/. Thanks to Richard Brenneman for letting us know about this.
Meanwhile. Happy New Year to all, with a hope that 2023 will shape up.
On Monday, December 12, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, the city conducted a “virtual community meeting” about the possible installation of protected bike lanes on Hopkins below Gilman. Along with nearly two hundred other members of the public, I attended the Zoomed event.
For some reason, the city chose to post the meeting via Eventbrite, which meant that to access it, you had to go through Eventbrite, supplying a password to that program—a requirement that flummoxed some would-be participants. I also heard that people couldn’t get in because Eventbrite said it had “closed” the “sales.” Why the Eventbrite gatekeeper?
As with prior virtual community meetings/workshops about installing bike lanes on Hopkins, the city failed to post relevant materials online before the meeting, so members of the public had no opportunity to form a pondered opinion about the options that were presented.
And as with prior virtual Hopkins meetings, this one began with the ritual invocation of the city-approved plans—the Bicycle Plan, the Vision Zero Plan, the Climate Change Plan—plus Councilmember Sophie Hahn’s 2018 referral, that staff and the bike lobby use to legitimate putting bike lanes on Hopkins. As I’ve explained in detail, those documents are problematic.
Add to that the Zoom format—in this case, one in which the hosts—the city, represented by Deputy Director of Public Works for Transportation and Engineering Farid Javandel; and Parisi Consultants—had decided to prevent the members of the public from making themselves visible to each other. I discovered that when I tried in vain to “start” the video. By contrast, Big Brother-like, the hosts allowed their own live images to be fully visible.
We were shown three options for extending two-way, protected bike lanes down Hopkins west of Gilman—as I understood it, the first from Gilman to Acton (a single block), the second from Gilman to Peralta, and the third from Gilman to Kains. Depending on the location of the bike lanes and the width of the street, which changes, bike lane installation would require the removal of parking on one side or both sides of the street. I took a photo of the chart showing the number of parking spaces on the street. I didn’t see a chart listing the number that would have to be removed, but perhaps I missed it.
Next, attendees were asked to vote a preference. The first surprise here was that there was a fourth option: “None of the above.” The second surprise was that the fourth option was chosen by fifty-two percent of the respondents. Javandel went to say that the poll results would not be taken seriously, since they were “not representative.” I can’t help wondering if he would have said that if the majority had voted for one of the three bike lane options or cumulatively for all three.
Then on to the bulk of the meeting: the too-familiar exercise in which city staff and the consultant answer selected questions that have been posed in Chat or by people who’ve raised a virtual hand. Questioners were tightly held to a thirty-second time limit; you could see the seconds ticking down online. Not so, Javandel and Parisi. As usual, there was no follow-up to their answers—and hence no dialogue and certainly no debate.
What distinguished this meeting was that unlike the one over which Councilmember Hahn presided last May, Chat had been activated. And there, lively, not to say, furious debates unfolded. Indeed, the most striking aspect of the two-hour event was the stark contrast between the crowd-controlled dullness of the exchanges between the hosts and members of the public, and the intensity of the exchanges among the members of the public themselves. Since the hosts had formatted Chat so that people could only reply to Everyone or to the hosts, you saw everyone’s messages. There must have been several hundred messages posted. I couldn’t keep up.
Unfortunately, when, at the start of the meeting, members of the public repeatedly asked in Chat for the closed caption option to be activated, they were told by the hosts that it wasn’t technically possible, and that a recording may be posted. As of Wednesday evening, I couldn’t find it on the city’s website. And if and when a recording is posted, it ought to be accompanied by the transcript of the Chat conversations.
So I want to recount one of the Chat dialogues that I found memorable, one in which I was involved. Another community member had written that Walk Bike Berkeley had received $10K from the city. WBB members adamantly denied it.
Citing my Planet article “The Bike Lobby Rules,” I posted a message stating that the city had given Bike East Bay more than $100K since 2015, and that BEB had funneled money to WBB.
Again, denials from WBB: we’re volunteers, we don’t get any financial support from BEB.
That’s true, and I posted a correction: As a volunteer organization, WBB can’t get any money from the city or indeed from BEB. The latter, a nonprofit, can get grants. That said, the two organizations work closely together and tightly coordinate their activities.
WBB member Liza Lutzker, a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, wrote back that they’ve only had a few meetings with Bike East Bay.
My response: I don't believe it. What about the appeals you jointly issued in the run-up to the council’s May 10 meeting, the one at which the bike lanes from Gilman east were approved? I could have added that BEB provides WBB with logistical support, swag, and publicity. Also that when you’re already in a collegial relationship, you don’t have to meet formally to work in tandem.
To my knowledge—as I said, I couldn’t keep up—nobody from WBB responded. After the meeting, I looked at WBB’s Twitter page, and saw that BEB had retweeted WBB’s tweeted appeal for its members to attend the December 12 virtual community event.
Why is Walk Bike Berkeley so defensive about its collegial relationship with Bike East Bay?
A final note: When I discussed the Chat activation issue with Hahn last spring, she said that she finds that conversations in Chat distract from the formal meeting. I disagreed. Based on Monday night’s experience, I see her point. I pretty much ignored the left side of my computer screen, where Javendel and Parisi were responding after a fashion to questions, and instead focused on the Chat conversations.
The lesson isn’t to suppress Chat in future community meetings. Rather, it’s that the city needs to conduct public meetings, especially meetings about controversial issues, in ways that allow for genuine dialogue and debate.
The arguments people were having in Chat on Monday evening were the ones that Javandel, his colleagues, and their consultants, have suppressed—disagreements over whether bike lanes would make Hopkins more or less safe; hurt or help the shops; and discriminate against those who, due to age, ability, or taste, can’t or won’t bike. And whether the city is using sound data to promote bike lanes on Hopkins and elsewhere in Berkeley.
People were using Chat because they’re not being heard in the forma processes the city has established for public engagement. That needs to change. It means abandoning Zoom. It doesn’t mean “small groups” shepherded by city staff and/or consultants.
Until the city comes up with a viable alternative, and as long as it uses Zoom, let us Chat.
On Monday evening, Dec. 12, there was another Berkeley community meeting on the topic of the Hopkins Corridor. This time it was about lower Hopkins, from the Gilman split to San Pablo. But it was actually the same community meeting that we have been subjected to over and over: staff lets us know what it has decided to do, then pretends to want to hear what we think of it. Well, this time we told them, in no uncertain terms.
The background to this issue is long and a bit complicated. But suffice it to say, it is about taking an area that has been called charming and a treasured jewel of the city by just about every fawning politician, and turning it into the nightmare that is Milvia or Telegraph Ave. It would place a two-way cycle track on Hopkins, from near its top to near its bottom, through that treasured jewel of a commercial area just east of Sacramento St., where Monterey Market, Berkeley Hort, Magnani’s, and a host of other shops are located, down to another popular area at San Pablo, where Acme Bread, Kermit Lynch Wines, and Animal Farm pet store are trying to run their businesses.
And in the process, it removes almost all of the parking that currently serves those businesses, the local residents, and the vast number of people who bring their money from other cities to spend it in Berkeley.
At the meeting, Farid Javandel, Berkeley’s Transportation Director, presented three possible scenarios for Hopkins below Gilman, which would require removal of anywhere from 13 parking spots (for a one block extension of the cycle track) to 155 spots (if it were extended almost all the way to San Pablo Ave.). He then took a survey and found that 52% of the people voting preferred a fourth option: No Change. And this was despite the fact that Walk/Bike Berkeley, the force behind the bike plan, had turned out large numbers of its members.
(It’s pretty easy to tell who the Walk/Bike Berkeley people are. They like to say that everything about plans they favor are no brainers. We watched Javandel’s face fall when the results of the survey were announced. He looked deflated.)
After the initial presentation, Javandel started taking questions/comments from the participants. There was one about the volume of traffic on Hopkins, which he said was about 4500 cars/day, well within the capacity of the street. The implication was that Lower Hopkins is not an overburdened street. He then made a perplexing comment, saying that this proposal was not about quantity, it was about quality. Not about the quantity of the cars, but about the quality of the bike ride? Who knows, but certainly local residents didn’t see it that way.
Someone asked if it would be possible to put in temporary bike lanes to test out how they would actually affect traffic and parking in the area. One had to wonder why the city didn’t think of that. Javandel said it would be possible, but he didn’t seem very enthusiastic about it.
There was a lot of discussion about how many things were yet to be considered, but the timeline for review Javandel outlined was for only one more meeting (with the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission on January 19) before the matter would be referred to the city council as an action item for a vote on January 31.
There were some humorous moments, too, like when Javandel said that the survey results from the beginning of the meeting weren't really meaningful (they were just advisory about issues); that e-bikes would be allowed in the cycle track, with a speed limit of 20 mph, which might be lowered to 10 mph; and that the city has been in discussions with the fire department about the effect on Hopkins - a designated evacuation route in the city - but hasn't received a final sign-off on the plan yet.
But to me, the most tickling moments came when Cal students announced that they were taking time out from their finals to participate because it was just too scary and dangerous to ride on lower Hopkins. I found it humorous because we have septua- and octogenarians in our group who ride there regularly with no problem at all. I got another good chuckle when the students said that, if only there were good bike lanes, they'd travel all the way over to Hopkins to shop (as opposed to going to the many great coffee and other shops around campus, to Berkeley Bowl, or to any grocery store that sells Acme bread, etc.). These are some of the same people Javandel had told us earlier were not likely to use bike lanes because they slow them down.
So what was the takeaway? That this issue is as controversial today as it was when it started on upper Hopkins more than two years ago. With the enormous amount of opposition expressed - not whining opposition, but fact-based opposition coming from the elderly, the disabled, the merchants, avid cyclists, recreational cyclists, shoppers, people who have studied these issues, people who have served on relevant city commissions, people who have no alternative but to drive to the area, residents who have no alternative to parking in the area - it will be clear what disdain the city has for its residents if it doesn't hit the pause button on these 'improvements' until it seriously evaluates the many objections that have been raised and alternatives that have been suggested. The city will claim that alternatives aren't possible because of cost, all while throwing away $100K for the parking confirmation bias study that just occurred on upper Hopkins.
Walk/Bike Berkeley has made this an ideological fight, and it has waged a single-minded war against cars. I do not fault it for that. It is an advocacy/lobbying group, and that's what lobbyists do. But the council should recognize that and acknowledge that this is also a quality-of-life fight. It can't be that our aim is to save cyclists and biking children exclusively, while throwing other, legally protected, groups that also make up our citizenry under the cycle track. We need to strike a balance. Give the idea of a bypass around the eastern commercial district an honest consideration, even if it means elimination of the two-way cycle track so desperately wanted by the bike lobby.
With or without bike lanes, Hopkins Street needs to be repaved. There is a case to be made for splitting the repaving work from the biking infrastructure work. There has been no input from the Commissions on Aging, Disabilities, or Economic Development, for starters. Javandel has admitted that the timing of the studies that were undertaken in late November and early December were not ideal, and we have evidence that they were so poorly designed as to be useless anyway. All this hurry up is to meet a deadline for repaving. The risk of a bad plan is, at best, that it doesn't accomplish its stated purpose, and at worst, that it makes things worse than before. Our transportation department has ample evidence of this in the number of redo's that have been necessary in the last few years. It's expensive and it's dangerous to get it wrong. And there is plenty to point to in this plan that is likely to turn out wrong.
So where do residents go from here? We go on the offensive and show the city that we mean business. We have formed a group, the Friends of Hopkins Street, and its website (FriendsofHopkins.org) is close to going active.
We consulted with a lawyer, not for litigation purposes, but to get guidance on our legal position. She will be able to keep us focused on the most important aspects of our arguments and potentially intervene on our behalf, if needed.
Our publicity campaign is gearing up, and we are preparing to set an example for any other small neighborhood in the city that feels it is being ramrodded by ideologues. We’d much rather be spending our time working with the city and Walk/Bike Berkeley to accomplish the goals of equity, safer streets for everyone, and better passageways for cyclists, but we have never been offered a seat at the table. You can be assured that we’re not going to be pushed out of the way, as if our concerns are of no consequence. We want to protect our small area from turning into Milvia (which some cyclists say they love, many say they hate, and is reviled by everyone else) or any one of the other streets that are no longer inviting or navigable, much less charming, treasured jewels.
Aren't we all "mentally ill" in one way or another?
I can't claim that I am unique for having psychiatric and/or psychological issues. Essentially, all people are walking around with various mental flaws and defects of one kind or another, and don't get treatment for it, or they might deal it in inappropriate ways. I haven't met anyone who is completely healthy in their consciousness. Mental flaws are an integral part of the "human condition." They are part of what gives us personhood. If people were perfect, then what would be the point?
Part of it depends on how the observer defines "mental defect." Making war when your country isn't in jeopardy is certainly not a safe or sane thing to do. Pacifists believe any violence, even in self-defense, is unjustifiable. Some would call pacifism a mental defect, and pacifists would cite that getting violent back toward a violent person doesn't address the problem of violence.
Psychiatrists are often here to deal with those of us whose brain doesn't work adequately without intervention. And yet, what we call a normal mind or brain has severe issues, due to how homo sapiens have evolved or failed to evolve.
My condition has been bad enough that I require the help of mental health professionals and I need to be medicated. In my past, I needed hospitalization for severe psychosis. I rely on antipsychotics to prevent a repeat of that. I was noncompliant about three times in my past, and this resulted in relapses each time.
People considered "mentally ill" have nothing to be ashamed of. Our problem may make it impossible to survive without help from treatment practitioners and from the social services systems. That doesn't mean anything negative about who we are or what we are. Mental illness is a separate issue from character.
People with mental illness are "real people" too. We need to give ourselves the self-affinity that comes with perceiving ourselves as enough. When we see ourselves as good enough, it is the hallmark of genuine success. People with a psychiatric "disorder" aren't defective. Everyone has problems.
If there is some symbol of success in the world, most commonly it is our ability to earn money. Yet, there are other things. And as a last resort, if it is too hard for us to like ourselves, maybe getting our minds off the subject will do the trick--if we need to feel better. The content of consciousness can be shifted. We can shift our consciousness away from the issue of "am I good enough to like myself?" to "what things can I do today that are necessary or that will contribute to my existence?" Success is only a perception, after all. And we can replace supposed success or the lack of it with other perceptions.
1966, Star Trek, "Mudd's Women": a narcotic that turned women perceived as unattractive into women perceived as beautiful turns out to be a placebo. Captain Kirk's line is: "Either you believe in yourself, or you don't." Although the episode was highly sexist, as it came from the nineteen sixties when sexism wasn't acknowledged by the mass media, the basic idea holds.
When I was age thirty and seemed to have nothing going for me, there were a few people in my life who saw something in me that I didn't see. And they were right about me.
If we can learn to value ourselves, it becomes possible to compete in the world. The greatest "great equalizer" is attitude. If we have the attitude that we are good enough to compete, and maybe even "win" in some arena, then we have already achieved greatness, even if no one else realizes it yet. But at some point, they will.
Jack Bragen is a writer who lives in Martinez, California.
A surge in cases of COVID, the flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is sickening Americans, overwhelming emergency rooms. This triple threat has been called a “tripledemic” by some heath experts. And new, even more contagious transmissible omicron sub variants called called BQ.1, BQ.1.1.and XBB that are especially adept at infecting people — even if they've been vaccinated or previously infected — are taking over. These subvariants are more capable of avoiding the immunity from current vaccinations or prior infection. And the higher chance of infection increases the possibility of of long COVID.
I am fully vaccinated and boosted. It is now discouraging to learn that my vaccinations/boosters are “barely susceptible to neutralization” for the subvariants, including the new omicron boosters. COVID always seems to be one step ahead of the scientists.
The pandemic could have been over or under control by now if only more Americans had gotten their vaccinations and boosters as soon as they were available and taken the precautions recommended by the experts to protect themselves against the virus. As of August 2022, only 33% of the population have received a booster dose.
I blame Trump and the Trumpified GOP for bungling our pandemic response then publicly minimizing its seriousness and failing to follow the scientists' lead. And social media platforms along with right-wing media share the blame for sowing mistrust of the vaccines and the efforts to protect Americans from catching the virus. Now we are dealing with unnecessary infections, hospitalizations, possible deaths and a never-ending series of new, more deadly subvariants.
While the scientists try to catch up to the newest subvariants, it behooves us to mask up, keep social distancing, testing, get the vaccinated and boostered and ignore the misinformation, disinformation that will certainly continue.
As I understand economics, prices inflate because the demand for things exceeds the supply. So, how to increase the supply of goods? Get investors to invest in more production, and hire more workers. How to incentivize investors? Lower interest rates so they can borrow affordably.
Why is the Federal Reserve raising interest rates? Aren't they doing the exact opposite to cure inflation? Some believe that lowering interest rates enables consumers to buy more stuff which increases demand over supply. So, lowering interest rates must be targeted exclusively to increasing production, not increasing consumption. Banks can do that, if they get directed to from the Federal Reserve. The Fed must tie lower interest rates to investments in farms, factories, and businesses.
If the Fed can't do that, then Congress must step in. The interest rate hikes are leading us toward recession.
Winter Solstice is here (across the Northern Hemisphere). The days are short, the weather colder, fuel and energy needs increase. These challenges strike me right now as symbolic, matching the major challenge of this historical moment: the chance we have to turn toward the light represented by solar and other renewable energy sources.
As our technology has become increasingly powerful since the industrial revolution, the impact of our choices in technology development has become cumulative, stretching not just through each year’s harvest, but for generations. Now, advances in renewable energy offer us an opportunity to choose development that will benefit future generations. If we make the right choices, history will see this time as the turning point, away from the environmental degradation of the fossil fuel era, giving generations to come an increasingly balanced natural environment.
From Burning Stuff to Star Power
Humanity has benefitted enormously from the technology of setting things on fire. There is a good case made that the act of repeatedly gathering around a fire fostered development of community and cooperation. From that, knowledge sharing enabled advancement of technologies, which initially focused on agriculture but expanded in all directions, eventually.
Over time, technology advances increasingly focused on harnessing and using energy, but until very recently all energy projects were based on burning fuel. From sticks in a campfire, to extreme techniques of extracting, transporting, and processing substances into more efficient fuel, the ultimate generation of usable energy came with the ignition of the fuel. However, over time we came to see that the combustion of materials has consequences. The lessons of the harm from igniting fuel over generations are clear now—we have created threats to the very environment we depend on to live.
Only relatively recently have we seen the possibility of another way. Efficiency advancements have been increasing dramatically on the renewable side over the last 20 years, whereas the significant efficiency advances in fossil fuel extraction, refinement, and delivery have now long since passed. Once we factor in the documented risk to future generations from continuing in combustion-based energy dependence, the cost balance tips obviously in favor of renewable energy. The graphic here is impressive, but its measurement is actually skewed in favor of the fossil fuel model, by using as a common measurement the price of new power plants. Power plants were the product of the last technological revolution; solar energy is far more efficient when it is installed as close to its point of use as possible (for example, on rooftops). When you consider that added efficiency, the comparison is even more impressive.
Seizing Opportunities
The monumental shift to renewable technology now requires proving that the new infrastructure works. A critical key to success lies in the demonstration of economic advantages. One major issue that impedes progress is the financing model. Right now, every property owner has to make a go/no-go decision on solar, each facing the up-front costs individually. And every solar installation company has to pursue installations one property at a time—a very costly problem for the installers. This means (1) no renter can benefit from the lower cost of electricity that solar sourcing brings without an independent decision from the landlord, and (2) only property owners who can afford a long-term return on investment can consider going forward. Although the benefits (emissions reduction for all, cost reduction for bill-paying users) are largely public, the costs must be fully absorbed by private interests. This needs to be turned on its head, to where the public sector makes it attractive to move ahead with these transitions. For instance, if local municipal agencies could create pools (such as a city block) of residences for an installer’s bid, it could reduce the price of the installations for all by concentrating efficiency of effort in sales (bidding on a block of work instead of each individual property in that block), as well as the installation by bringing whatever scale could come with many installations in a small area.
Ticking Clock
The scientists have told us that if we want to keep on track to the targets set in the Paris Accord seven years ago, we must halve emissions by 2030. The renowned renewable energy advocate Bill McKibben wrote a piece several years ago stating that the effort needed to combat climate change would be comparable to the effort it took to win World War II. While others have pointed out enough faults in that analogy that even he uses a bit softer language now, there is no question that it will take a massive effort to prioritize this transition. Leaving all decisions to individual consumers would almost certainly come up short; large-scale programs will be necessary to make this transition.
Removing Obstacles
As individuals, we need to pressure leaders at every level, local, state, and national, to step up to fight for prioritizing the transition away from fossil fuel dependence. Some of the biggest obstacles to this transition lie in the immediate, and often local, mechanisms that make it difficult to install solar. Disabling spurious challenges to renewable energy conversion is crucial. It is high time we recognize, at an institutional level, that the disinformation-and-delay army of the fossil fuel industry is at work, using every means available to delay conversion away from dependence on their product (and their profits), often invoking the cause of “local control” and even, ironically, by demanding environmental impact reviews.
Clearing the Path
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 contained by far the biggest incentives to the renewable technology development and deployment in history. Those incentives are perhaps more patchwork than perfect, but nevertheless, businesses across the country are scrambling to take best advantage of these incentives. Intelligent choices by local government to align with these incentives will determine where the success stories appear.
Speaking with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, Bill McKibben said, “My guess is that the limiting factors are going to be, A, whether we can overcome the fossil fuel industry’s meddling, and, B, whether we can build out, above all, the human capital that we need. I mean, the best estimate is it’s going to take at least a million more electricians in the U.S. If you know a young person who wants to do something that’s going to help the world and wants to make a good living at the same time, tell them to go become an electrician.”
Meddling from the fossil fuel industry is a significant force. It is well documented that the industry invested heavily in seeding doubt across the public as to the viability of renewables, redeploying tactics (and even the same consultants) the tobacco industry used to fight the demise of that harm-based business in the face of overwhelming evidence of the impact of their products. Doubt can be powerful; foreign (and some domestic) interests have been cultivating mistrust in all politics to try to influence elections in the US, and beyond, for some time.
We can now see hope in signs of a sea change in public attitudes, making these tactics less and less effective over time. Starting in 2020, voters have, overall, moved toward supporting candidates who offer demonstrable competence over those cultivating grievance and malice toward government in general. The stronger-than-predicted overall showing for Democrats in the 2022 elections suggest that the public as a whole is responding positively to programs designed to spread opportunity. If in the short term, people see renewable installations that deliver on the economic and efficiency promises that have been made (but mostly not yet demonstrated) for years, and offer work opportunities, politicians will simply have to get on the train that is moving forward.
Individual choices certainly play a role. McKibben’s exhortation that becoming an electrician is environmentally helpful and a viable career path is one good example for those who are considering career choices. Relegating environmental protection to individual consumer choices (do I buy an electric car? How high do I set my home thermostat?) is a tactic the fossil fuel has propagated, distracting from their flood of marketing that promotes powerful (fuel-guzzling) vehicles and absolute comfort for everyone, at every turn. Exerting pressure on representatives in office, to instill institutional awareness of the urgency of this transition, is a choice available to each of us.
The Chicken and Egg Working Together
Traditionally, the chicken-and-egg analogy is presented to illustrate an intractable problem. In this instance, and at this moment, the chicken and egg are economics and politics, and there is a real chance to bring them in alignment. As it becomes more obvious with each catastrophic flood, wildfire, that climate threat is here, now, the general understanding grows that action is needed, now. With that widespread recognition growing across our population, politicians respond by backing plans that will make a difference. Those plans are enabling economic opportunities that can show benefits to voters across the political spectrum. When the economic factors start to align with environmental advantage, and those benefits build upon one another in public perception, the momentum forward could extinguish the fossil fuel industry’s doubt machine. Ending the era of burning fuel on Earth as the source of progress, transitioning to using a far mightier source of ignition, a safe 93 million miles away, is possible. The time to turn toward the light is now.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, commonly known in Iran as the Pasdaran, was created in 1979 by the Islamic Republic’s founding leader, Ayatollah Rouhalla Khomeini, who wanted it to function as a separate armed force from the Iranian military, which was then suspected of loyalty to the deposed Shah. As such, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, was charged with defending, both internally and externally, the Islamic principles of the theocratic regime of the mullahs.
During the so-called Green Revolution of 2009, when protesters demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands in favour of reformist presidential candidates Moussavi and Karroubi, the Revolutionary Guard worked behind the scenes to assure, most likely by tampering with election results, that the hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner and assumed Iran’s presidency. During Ahmadinejad’s term of office, the IRGC significantly increased its hold on political and economic power in Iran. Indeed, so strong is the IRGC’s influence on political power today in Iran that according to Abbas Milani, Director of Stanford University’s Iranian Studies Program, the Iranian regime “clearly…believed ({n 2009){ it was going to lose control, and the IRGC and the Basij saved the day. The result is that the IRGC now has the upper hand. Khamenei, {the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader} knows that without the IRGC he’d be out of power in twenty-four hours.”
Given how much power now resides in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, it is important to consider what role they may play in the current popular protests against the regime of the Islamic mullahs. On one hand, they are the creation of the regime’s founder. On the other hand, they have evolved over recent years as a political and economic force that is somewhat separate from the strict Islamic clerical regime. If at some point in the present situation the IRGC determined that the Islamic mullahs had definitively lost the support of the overwhelming population of Iranian citizens, what would it mean if the IRGC came out in favour of abolition of the Islamic Republic? How would the IRGC, designated by the US as a terrorist organization, position itself as supporters of the aspiration for democracy of the rebellious Iranian population? And how would the Iranian population, now totally disabused of more than forty years of rule under the Islamic Republic, react to any attempt by the IRGC to assume political preeminence in post-revolutionary Iran? These are the questions that confront Iranians — and anyone who cares about the situation in Iran — as we enter the fourth month of nationwide political protests in Iran against the current regime.
I’ve been attending the Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) meetings for months and following the Turtle Island Monument Project story. Looking over the history of the Turtle Island Monument, sketchy as it is, and the current situation, it looks ever so much like Lucy pulling the football once again, with unstated plans to spend close to a million dollars elsewhere.
I wasted what felt like a day trying to find the documents in the city archives, “records online” to see for myself the original approval process. I had heard the Turtle Island Monument had been discussed for years, but finding documents in records online is like crawling into a deep computer rabbit hole for hours and coming up with little to nothing. I could not find artist submissions or the selection process or the meeting agendas and minutes I was seeking. I did find contracts with Scott K. Parsons and expenditure statements from 2006 and a few other reports. The rest comes from documents supplied to the Landmarks Preservation Commission meeting on December 1, 2022.
The dedication of Indigenous Peoples Day was declared in 1992, and the idea of turning the defunct Berkeley Civic Center fountain into the Turtle Island Monument evolved shortly after. In 1996, $900,000 was dedicated from Measure S to the Civic Center Park. The Turtle Island Monument was to be paid for out of those funds. Obviously that money went somewhere other than the Turtle Island Monument.
The Turtle Island Project came back again in 2005 and the Berkeley City Council approved a scaled back version with four bronze Loggerhead Sea Turtles and eight medallions 3 feet in diameter commemorating Native People. A contract was signed with Scott K. Parson from Sioux Falls, South Dakota on June 16, 2006. Parsons fulfilled his commitment and finished the eight medallions and four bronze life size Loggerhead Sea Turtles. None of these artworks ever made it to placement in the fountain.
In 2018, the Turtle Island Monument Project was resurrected, again incorporating the turtles sculpted and cast by Scott Parsons and the eight medallions. The proposal using native plants and creating a new seating ledge worked within the restriction of keeping the fountain intact. This design was approved by the T1 Committee in 2020. https://turtleislandfountain.org/
PGAdesign was hired by the City to implement the project and the T1 committee-approved design. The T1 approved design was discarded in 2022 in meetings which were not public. A new design, credited to Lee Sprague and Marlene Watson for the Turtle Island Monument and presented to the public at the Landmarks Preservation Commission on December 1, 2022, consists of removing the top of the fountain, then placing on top of what is left of the fountain a piece of black granite 15 feet in diameter and 4 feet 3 inches thick (estimated weight 18 tons) with a 12 foot bronze snapping turtle on top. There are four openings in the base of fountain with a blue glass mosaic representing water in two of the openings. The eight tribal medallions are to be embedded in boulders and six more blank medallions representing tribes lost to colonialism are to be placed in the renovated flagstone. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-12-01_LPC_Item%205_Turtle%20Island.pdf
Sprague has been very insistent in placing a snapping turtle on top of the granite as the symbol of the indigenous peoples’ creation story. The hard shell back of the turtle is the emblem of land and life emerging from the sea to land.
The deadlines to spend the funds financing the project are June 30, 2024 for the $591,666 from the Clean California Local Grant Program and December 2025 for the $300,000 from the T1 funds. These spending deadlines may seem like a long way off, but a circular piece of black granite 15 feet in diameter and 51 inches thick is not like going over to your local kitchen and bath remodeling store to buy a black granite counter.
The Civic Arts Commission did review the project on December 7, 2022 and voted to approve the new conceptual design. This time quite a number of local tribal members did show up to support the project and others who had not previously identified as having indigenous heritage also spoke.
Lisa Bullwinkel, as promised to CCCC, asked about budget/cost of the project. Jennifer Lovvorn, City of Berkeley staff, dismissed Bullwinkel’s question and insisted the cost was unimportant. Bullwinkel then moved to support the design and it was passed unanimously by the Arts Commission.
The Turtle Island Monument Project was expected to be on the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission (PRW) agenda on December 14, but it was pushed down to an information item containing a letter from John Caner for CCCC. The worry from CCCC is that the Turtle Island Monument project will not be completed within the funding grant deadlines and the funds diverted elsewhere. Gordon Wozniak, PRW commission chair said that the city manager asked to have discussion postponed until January when the City will give a presentation.
Scott Parson’s public art can be seen in Colorado, Ohio, Canada, Florida, Minnesota, Arizona and Wisconsin, but in Berkeley Parsons’ artwork for the Turtle Island Monument sits in storage and at 2180 Milvia. https://damnfineart.com/our-projects/page/2/
The artwork I found for Marlene Watson are paintings and posters. I can’t find any public art for Lee Sprague. This isn’t to say Watson and Sprague can’t have impressive wonderful concepts and the latest design is quite exciting, but it does lead to questions about whether they have the experience to maneuver a project like this one in a city that has a long history of what, once again, looks more like Lucy pulling the football. It seems like there are other plans for where and how to spend the money with statements like “project cost is unimportant.”
Bait-and-switch is a well-worn tactic in Berkeley when it comes to how money is spent. It happened again at the Council 5 pm special meeting on December 13 and was the topic of discussion at the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission on December 14.
In the City Council’s letter to Nancy Skinner, Chair of the State Senate Budget Committee and to Phil Ting, Chair of the State Assembly Budget Committee, the City Council lined out how they would spend the $15 million requested for the Berkeley Marina. Once the money was granted, when it came around to approving the expenditures on December 13, $2,961,000 of the all-important dock and piling replacement funds turned into paying for the environmental review and design of the pier/ferry project.
Parks Director Scott Ferris and crew swear that WETA (Water Emergency Transportation Authority) is going pay the city back when and if the lawsuit for Regional Measure 3 funds is settled in favor of the Bay Area Toll Authority and WETA gets a cut of the Measure 3 bridge tolls.
Ferris put forward the argument that completing an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and design is only a study and not a commitment. EIRs are completed to meet CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) requirements and not undertaken unless there are plans to move forward, meaning “study and not a commitment” falls into pure B.S.
The entire pier/ferry plan, with the promise that WETA is going to pay for it, makes me think of Trump’s border wall: “Mexico is going to pay for it.”
Commissioner Kerry Birnbach said her friends were anxious for a ferry ride in Berkeley. In my public comment, I asked if they would feel the same if they paid a full fare of around $28. I received a text that some believe that the true per-person cost of ferrying people across the bay when all costs are included may be as high as $100 per rider.
After going through the WETA year to date revenue and expenditures, that average fare cost of around $5.53 is subsidized with bridge tolls, Contra Costa Measure J and federal funds to the tune of $27.74, with an actual cost of $33.27 per ferry ride. This subsidy calculation is low as it does not include all of the funding needed for terminal rehabilitation, infrastructure, new and replacement vessels.
The main point is that ferries do not exist on the Bay without substantial public financing through federal funds, state funds, bridge tolls and sales taxes. The people who use the ferries are disproportionally high income households with 35% of weekday commuter survey respondents reporting household incomes of greater than $200,000. People from low income households earning less than $50,000 make up 7% of riders overall with their utilization primarily on the weekends.
Over the weekend I had the opportunity to ask Tom Rubin, who described himself as having over five decades of experience in transportation, what he thought about road diets. He was quite blunt in his answer, after first differentiating that “streets” are for local traffic and “roads” are to get from one place to another. Putting roads on a diet, meaning decreasing the lanes of traffic, pushes drivers on narrowed principal roads onto neighborhood streets not designed for through traffic, creating a “stroad” problem.
Another problem Rubin noted with road diets and redesigns is that once the changes are made it is near impossible to undo the damage. That should be a warning to us, not to let up on the pressure to save Hopkins and the businesses we love there.
He added that road diets create major public safety problems. Every minute of delay for an emergency vehicle means substantial increase in a fatal incident or permanent injury. Pedestrian deaths increased after road diets in Southern California, the opposite of the claim that road diets make streets safer. Rubin ended with, “fire chiefs are under great pressure to keep their mouths shut if they want to keep their jobs.”
The consultants for the Civic Center, Siegal & Strain Architects, seem set on a road diet for MLK Jr. Way. They also have in their plans new offices for city council in the Maudelle Shirek building (Old City Hall), CCCC members have had their eyes on using a restored Maudelle Shirek Building for community non-profits and a historical museum. I’d like to see space for indigenous people.
In a cruise through the New York Times before settling in for the final edit of this Diary, I saw the article that a Statue of Henrietta Lacks will replace a monument to Robert E. Lee in Roanoke, Virginia as part of a local project to recognize Black history in community spaces.
Henrietta Lacks, a poor Black woman living not far from the Johns Hopkins Hospital, was treated for cervical cancer, but before diagnosis was made and treatment begun, a sample of her tumor was taken. For the first time, when all other attempts to culture cancerous cells, (grow cancerous cells in a lab) failed, the tumor cells from Henrietta Lacks grew and multiplied every 20 to 24 hours. The cell line was named HeLa.
I didn’t read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot when it was published in 2010. It wasn’t until 2014 when it really sunk in how much I was missing by not reading books. That is when I went looking for a book club that focused on nonfiction and politics and couldn’t find one. It was a conversation over coffee with Barbara Ruffner that lead to starting a group that reads nearly 100% nonfiction on politics, race, climate and the environment. Barbara was a vibrant 88 when we started, but failing health caught up.
Barbara always pulled our choices to Democratic Socialism, and it wasn’t long before we understood that we couldn’t read about politics without reading about race and racism. This review is dedicated to Barbara who passed away in October.
The book is the story of Henrietta, her family, descendants, the research, researchers and travels and the persistence of Rebecca Skloot to put it altogether.
Henrietta Lacks died at the young age of 31. The HeLa cells were used in the development of polio and COVID-19 vaccines, the study of leukemia, AIDS virus and cancer. HeLa cancer cells are the root of worldwide research studying the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses.
Honoring Henrietta Lacks is even more meaningful after reading the The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks if you haven’t picked it up already.
Film
Senator Warnock just won re-election by a healthy margin over Hershel Walker and much was made of voter turnout and questioning whether there really was voter suppression. The film “Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman” written by Greg Palast produced by Maria Florio with Executive Producers Martin Sheen, George DiCaprio and Stephen Nemeth lays bare the impact of Georgia’s SB 202 “Election Integrity Act of 2021” and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Georgia. Mail-in voting dropped by 81%.
After seeing Greg Palast in person at a KPFA event, I always think of him as a man full of himself. I found the film unexpectantly informative and good and definitely worth watching especially because Georgia’s SB 202 is a bill that is and will be imitated elsewhere.
My nomination for one of the world's worst inventions? The leaf-blower.
A few days ago, I saw an all-too-familiar sight: A stocky fellow lugging a loudly sputtering, gas-driven, smoke-spewing leaf-blower down a sidewalk strewn with leaves—in the middle of a windy day.
The leaves didn't disappear, of course, they just relocated to another patch of sidewalk. It looked like an arboreal game of Whack-a-mole.
What bothers me is that these bellowing blowers (unlike the brooms and rakes they are supposed to replace) are not just noisy and polluting, they are also ineffective (especially on windy days).
Hasn't it dawned on the makers and users of leaf-blowers that these infernal autumnal air-hoses should be replaced by a sensible alternative to rakes, brooms and leaf-buckets. How about replacing leaf-blowers with Leaf Suckers—i.e., rechargeable, battery-powered, leaf-capturing, vacuum gleaners.
Fashion Plates
Personalized license plates seen about town:
Grey BMW: SHUPNET ("Shup" is British slang for "shut up" but maybe the driver is Brian Shupnet, a local fellow known for running the Bay-to-Breakers footrace disguised as Barack Obama.)
Black Audi: MR Q N A (Mister Q&A has all the answers).
On a Volkswagon "bug": O UBUGME.
Dark grey Tesla: THX ELON (You're welcome, Mr. Bezos).
Bumper Snickers
"Honk if parts fall off"
"I brake for interesting cloud formations"
"Having weird parents builds character"
"You are unique. Just like everyone else"
Celebrating the Respect for Marriage Act—with Caveats
The new Respect for Marriage Act legalizes marriage between "two individuals." Race and gender are no longer admitted as a roadblock to married bliss. But perhaps the RMA should have read "two consenting human adults." (I don't think we are ready for a marriage law that allows nuptials for teens and tots.)
This latest law still discriminates because it is not extended to three or more individuals who might wish to commit to a polygamous marriage.
And, as Dorian Rhea Debussy, a Lecturer of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at Ohio State points out: "The act also provides an exemption for religious nonprofits. And finally, it does not fix a long-lasting problem that penalizes the marriages of people with disabilities—regardless of their sexuality."
"I Now Pronounce You Man and Donkey"
Also left out of the RMA: unions between humans and animals. Yes, that's still a thing—especially in two of our 48 US states. According to a Care2 Petitions Action Alert: "bestiality … is still legal in New Mexico and West Virginia." (Bestiality was still legal in Montana as of 2014.)
But maybe it's not bestiality if it's a marriage? Human-animal consummations have a long history in mythology and ancient literature. Remember "Leda and the Swan" (aka Zeus)? Chinese folklore includes tales of a King who married a horse and a Goddess who has a fling with a Silkworm.
In India, human-animal marriage rites are "held in many communities to honor the rain deity. This rite is largely observed in communities in Meghalaya, Assam, and Karnataka, where marriages of dogs, donkeys, and toads are held." (There may be more to the story of "The Princess and the Frog" than we realized.)
In 2014, what has been called the "first-ever state recognized human-animal marriage" was celebrated at San Francisco's Chapel of Our Lady when 35-year-old SF resident Paul Horner promised to love, honor and obey his faithful female dog Mac (36-years-old in dog years). The presiding priest, Father McHale, told the press: "This is the definition of true love, my friends. There is nothing more sacred than the bond between a man and his faithful dog."
But wait a minute! How do we know this was a union between two consenting adults? How did the groom and bride "exchange vows"? Did Father McHale accept "bow wows"?
If you're up for it, there's an 11-minute online video that lists "12 unbelievable people who married animals" but let's end this with this loopy video about the Seattle bride who married a 107-year-old building.
Free Speech Movement Memories On-air in Australia
Robby Cohen, professor of Social Studies at New York University and author of Freedom's Orator (a profile of Free Speech Movement activist Mario Savio) recently conducted a half-hour radio interview on the Free Speech Movement with the host of Australia's Nightlife show.
The publicity for the interview included a photo of Jackie Goldberg standing atop a police car that had been sent to the UC campus to arrest a campus activist—but wound up being nonviolently captured by a swarm of protesting students. The photo of Goldberg speaking from atop the cop-car-turned-lectern was an appropriate choice given the interviewer's focus on the role of women in the FSM.
On December 3, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke at the roll-out of the B-21 Raider, a nuclear-capable bomber set to become the Pentagon's newest Doomsday weapon. In most of the posted online versions of this Associated Press article, Austin’s comments were incomplete. Here are two paragraphs from the end of the article that did not appear in most posted versions of the story:
• The Defense Department has the largest discretionary budget of all the federal agencies, and it may receive up to $847 billion in the 2023 budget if Congress passes the current funding bill before this legislative session ends.
• Six Raiders are in production by Northrop Grumman Corp. The Air Force plans to build 100 that can deploy either nuclear weapons or conventional bombs and can be used with or without a human crew.
Those closing words require repeating: "with or without a human crew."
Barbara Lee vs. the Pentagon!
Across the US, families are struggling with high prices and low wages while the Pentagon's budget continues to swell with bounties worth billions.
The good news: Berkeley Rep. Barbara Lee has joined her Defense Spending Reduction Caucus Co-Chair, Rep. Mark Pocan, to introduced the People Over Pentagon Act of 2022. If POPA passes, it would chop $100 billion from the Pentagon’s budget and repurpose the windfall to help meet civilian needs in communities across the US.
"We've prioritized excessive military spending and waged endless wars for far too long," Lee's office states. But it's going to take some work to pass the POPA. The first step (and the easiest) is to sign Rep. Lee's pro-POPA petition by clicking this link.
"Making progress on the issues that matter most to American families will not be resolved by increasing military spending," Lee's staff writes. "We hope … to hold the Pentagon accountable and end unlimited spending."
Here's a thought: According to the Congressional Budget Office, about 25% of the Pentagon budget is spent on the military's "personnel costs such as salaries, health care and retirement accounts." What if one-forth of the non-defense portion of the Federal Budget was directed to the civilian sector of tax-paying Americans and dedicated to addressing civilian "salaries, health care and retirement accounts"?
Putting Ourselves in Perspective
The following stunning fact comes courtesy of the indefatigable Jim Hightower. Prepare to be humbled.
"Here’s an interesting fact: Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 165 million years—and they assumed they always would. "Which brings us to… well, us. We bipedal, far-ranging, Homo sapien primates have certainly established our dominance over modern-day Mother Earth. And even though our reign has only lasted about 200,000 years, we 21st Century humans grandly assume that we’re ordained by the gods to rule ad infinitum over our planet (and beyond)…. "But—oops!—unfortunately we’ve based our preeminence on the unsustainable consumption of our domain, rather than on stewardship for the ages. Under the global misguidance of corporate, political, religious, academic, and other Powers That Be, our large-brained species has ended up making an awful mess of the nest we inherited. Elite plunderers and profiteers have imposed an ethic of greed, inequality, and even inhumanity that is devouring everything from Earth’s climate to our basic human values of fairness and justice."
A Message for Biden: Amen for Yemen; Shake the Saudis
A coalition of peace groups is encouraging one-and-all to pressure the Senate to demand an end to US support for the devastating Saudi war in Yemen. Specifically by urging our senators to support S.J.Res.56, the Yemen War Powers Resolution introduced by Senators Leahy, Sanders, and Warren.
CODEPINK notes: "When the Pentagon responded to questions about continued US involvement in the war in Yemen last summer, the answers were shocking. Given President Biden’s announcement in February 2021 that the US would halt all offensive support for the Saudi coalition, we were upset to hear from the Pentagon that the US is still very much involved."
The bitter fact is that US contractors are continuing to provide spare parts and maintenance support to the Saudi Royal Air Force. According to the US Constitution, only Congress can authorize war. Biden's continued Saudi support constitutes an act of war and Congress has the right to end this support.
I've signed on to the campaign. I'm tired of seeing the US start wars (Vietnam, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq), join wars (Syria) and support wars (Ukraine). It's time the US started stopping wars."
In the meantime, it's just another reason I've given our MIC-mastered, war-addicted president a new nickname: Joe "Bomb Beijing for Boeing" Biden.
A Timely Note from Tarak Kauff and Veterans for Peace.
"These people (the Atlantic Council and others) belong in an insane asylum. I mean that literally. I have been asserting for years that the essence of the problem we face is insanity. Unfortunately, very few people understand that. I will state it again, people in positions of wealth and power are literally mad. The quest for and acquisition of money and power, the addiction, like a powerful drug drives people crazy. "The addiction always increases. There is never enough. When we are faced with the possible ending of life on the planet…, only lunatics promote nuclear weapons, war, all of that…. Insane people do not in general respond to reason. We in the left, (for the most part) believe in reason and think that presenting it to the powers-that-be will save the day, that somehow they will wake up, will get it, will realize where we are heading and what they are doing. "We might as well be pleading with a stone wall. The only solution is the wall must fall, all walls.
Re-tax the Corporate Robber Barons
An alert from Public Citizen warns: "Corporate lobbyists are in DC right now trying to convince Congress to lock in three Trump-era corporate tax giveaways that could cost America $600 billion.
• "In 2017, Trump signed a tax scam into law that gave corporations a 40% federal income tax cut that added nearly $2 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years. • "In 2021, corporations recorded annual profits of $2.8 trillion, up 25% from the year before. • "In 2022, they’re enjoying their highest profit margin in over 70 years.
"And now, Congress is considering doubling down on Trump’s tax scam by expanding major tax loopholes that benefit big business."
If corporations and megamillionaires prevail, they’ll evade hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes—money that could fund healthcare, build housing, and reduce child poverty.
Tell Congress: Corporations are enjoying record profits from inflated prices. And they are paying record low tax rates while price-gouging consumers. We don’t need more tax breaks that enrich wealthy shareholders while starving public services of critically needed funds.Do not extend Trump’s tax scam scheme by cutting corporate taxes—again.
The Web Is all a-Twitter: What Is that Musky Aroma?
There's a campaign calling on major corporations to stop doing business with Elon's Musk's revival of Twitter as an arena of vile bile and Tweet-heated hate.
In response, Color of Change is asking folks to petition Coca-Cola—one of Twitter's largest fiscal sponsors—to stop funding fearmongering and falsehoods. My tweet reads: "The return of hate talk to Twitter makes me choke on my Coke." And a related tweet to Proctor and Gamble (another major Twitter-backer) reads: "You don't need a lawyer to Proctor you not to take a Gamble on Musk."
The Dodo World
Has the daily din of appalling news got you feeling dreadful? Here's a possible antidote. "The Dodo" offers an online collection of video encounters that raise the question: "If animals—even presumed enemies—can form friendships, why can't humans?"
Here are a few for starters. (Viewer discretion: Once you've started watching these cross-critter alliances, it can be hard to stop.)
Turkey and Dog Best Friends are Inseparable
Rescued Sloth Becomes Best Friends With a Beagle
Dog Sees Tiny Lamb Crying And Decides To Adopt Her
A Daylighted Creek – Restore Strawberry Creek in Civic Center Park is a survey option
Strawberry Creek in Strawberry Creek Park used to flow underground in a concrete culvert. Removing the culvert and restoring the creek to its natural state above ground open to air and light is called daylighting. There is State of California grant money available for daylighting creeks through The Urban Creeks Restoration and Flood Control Act of 1984 and other grants.
If you would like to see Strawberry Creek daylighted in Civic Center Park please check that box in the MLK Jr. Civic Center Park survey section and let the project team know why you support daylighting Strawberry Creek in the comment boxes.
