Into the fishbowl we jump

Henning Kaiser photo

On the one hand,

The Department of Homeland Security is funneling millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a "surveillance society" in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost, privacy rights advocates warn. ...

Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke said that it is difficult to say how much money has been spent on surveillance cameras because many grants awarded to states or cities contained money for cameras and other equipment. Knocke defended the funding of video networks as a valuable tool for protecting the nation. "We will encourage their use in the future," he added.

Boston Globe,
August 12, 2007

Meanwhile,

S.F. public housing cameras no help in homicide arrests

The 178 video cameras that keep watch on San Francisco public housing developments have never helped police officers arrest a homicide suspect even though about a quarter of the city's homicides occur on or near public housing property, city officials say....

Though the Housing Authority doesn't keep a record of how often its cameras' footage is used in making arrests in crimes, a housing authority official and a police lieutenant told the committee they are unaware of the footage ever being used to arrest a homicide suspect.

The city has its own security camera program with 70 cameras in 25 high-crime locations. None of them is on federal housing authority property, but many of them are positioned at street corners right outside them. ...

Four homicides have occurred in the past 12 months at the intersection of Laguna and Eddy streets -- at the corner of the Plaza East public housing development - including the daytime killing of a 19-year-old in May. A security camera is trained on that corner but so far has not proven useful in making any arrests...

San Francisco Chronicle,
August 14, 2007

I draw two possible lessons from these two articles:

• Police and federal spooks want to get their budgets raised so someone can monitor the cameras at all times.

• Very likely some Republican crony is making a killing on all those cameras paid for by Homeland Security.

The Brits are way ahead of us on this: it is estimated that there is one camera, public or private, for every 14 people in the U.K. The cameras don't make people safer:

One effect that has been noticed is that initially crime moves away from the cameras which is why they are often touted as a success. However within a short period of time the crime returns. Usually the criminals have baseball caps and hooded tops etc to hide their identity, and "do the job" very quickly.

The criminals obviously know that a camera like a burglar alarm only represents a threat when you don't know how to allow for it in terms of time, identification hiding etc.

As for the privacy implications of these cameras, it looks like we're on the way to much more effective, near universal surveillance.

... technicians are developing ways to use computers to process real-time and stored digital video, including license-plate readers, face-recognition scanners, and software that detects "anomalous behavior." Although still primitive, these technologies are improving, some with help from research grants by the Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate.

"Being able to collect this much data on people is going to be very powerful, and it opens people up for abuses of power," said Jennifer King, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies privacy and technology. "The problem with explaining this scenario is that today it's a little futuristic. [A major loss of privacy] is a low risk today, but five years from now it will present a higher risk."

As this technological capacity evolves, it will be far easier for individuals to attract police suspicion simply for acting differently and far easier for police to track that person's movement closely, including retracing their steps backwards in time. It will also create a greater risk that the officials who control the cameras could use them for personal or political gain, specialists said.

Boston Globe,
August 12, 2007

Rights activists not allowed to leave Philippines

Gemma Mirkinson holds a bullhorn while Ona Mirkinson reads a statement from the three women advocates for human and women's rights apparently placed on a "hold list" by the Filipino government of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The two are daughters of one of the women not allowed to leave the Philippines.


UPDATE: 8:58 am Tuesday, August 14: a friend of the women writes: "all three of them are on a plane to the US right now - hurray!" Good work by all who contacted the Philippine government.

Monday evening a small but spirited group rallied outside the Philippine Center on Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco. According to the Filipino publication Bulatlat,

Dr. Annalisa Vicente Enrile was on her way back to the U.S. on Aug. 5 after a month’s stay in the Philippines. However, as she proceeded to the Immigration booth to have her passport exit-stamped, she was told that she could not get on the plane because she was on the “watchlist.”

Enrile is the chairperson of GABRIELA Network USA (GABNet), a U.S.-based women’s group affiliated with the militant [Filipino] women’s group GABRIELA .... Enrile said she believes she is being held because of her involvement with GABRIELA and for being part of a team that went to the country to probe the human rights record of the Macapagal-Arroyo administration.

“I’m being held hostage,” Enrile told the media. “I cannot go back to my work and my family.”

The U.S.C. professor was given the run around when she tried to get cleared to return to the States. Activist Judith Mirkinson and American Book Award winning novelist Ninotchka Rosca are also believed to be on the "hold list" and so far are unable to leave the Philippines.

These events occur against a background of growing repression carried out by the Filipino government, the legitimacy of whose election is contested by many popular movements. Many believe that the Macapagal-Arroyo administration is trying to return to the martial law system under which dictator Ferdinand Marcos governed the country from 1965 to 1986 -- without using the dread words "martial law.

• In June, Human Rights Watch issued at report on the regime, Scared Silent: Impunity for Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines. It does not mince words:

  It’s a complete breakdown of the rule of law. Civilian rule has been replaced by military rule. The courts don’t function. The prosecutors don’t function. The investigative agencies don’t function. Lawyers are threatened.
  

  Romy Capulong,
  human rights lawyer,
  Manila,
  September, 2006

• The Philippines is also a dangerous place for religious leaders who stand up for the poor and oppressed.

  Bishop Alberto Ramento of Tarlac in the Philippines, former Prime Bishop of the Philippine Independent Church, or Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI), was found stabbed to death at his rectory on the morning of October 3, 2006. .... Ramento's death is the latest in a string of killings of Christian leaders in the Philippines. On June 17, Tito Marata, provincial officer of the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines and a member of the Farmers for Agrarian Reform Movement, was gunned down by passing motorcyclists, taking the death toll of Christian activists to 17 in less than two years.

  Episcopal News Service

• In July, the government brought a new "Human Security Act" into effect. ... The UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism has called for the law to be repealed or for its implementation to be delayed.

• The Committee for the Protection of Journalists names the Philippines as a major violator of reporter's rights.

  CPJ’s research shows that 32 journalists have been killed in direct relation to their work in the Philippines since 1992, making it the world’s fifth deadliest nation for journalists during that time period. The impunity rate in these cases is well over 90 percent, CPJ research shows.

Security "needs"

Musing on California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen's effort to decide whether electronic voting machines are "secure," Bruce Schneier argues that giving the machines to computer experts to see whether they can break into them, then ordering particular fixes of the holes revealed by the test, is "completely backward." Better to demand from the get-go that companies convince those experts and hackers that their machines are designed for security. However profit concerns will always mean that companies prefer to skimp on the front end and scramble to fix on the back end. If they get away with it, this is cheaper than engineering in security against potential attacks.

Schneier then offers criteria that might lead to "assurance" -- the best we can do in a real world of determined human beings with imaginations -- to provide security when we need it. He follows with this interesting observation:

Assurance is expensive, in terms of money and time for both the process and the documentation. But the NSA needs assurance for critical military systems; Boeing needs it for its avionics. And the government needs it more and more: for voting machines, for databases entrusted with our personal information, for electronic passports, for communications systems, for the computers and systems controlling our critical infrastructure.

It seems to me that what we need is not only "assurance" but also a deep, society-wide conversation to discern what needs to be "secure," what needs to be "private," what needs to be "safe." Our technological capacities have outrun our understanding of those issues. We don't want to leave the shape of the future to markets, smart nerds, the occasional aspiring dictator, and chance.

That's news?

ABC7 photo

The metro section of the San Francisco Chronicle is the first, and often the only, section of the paper I read. It's where all the juicy local morsels that aren't quite worthy of front page coverage land. On Saturday, I was a little surprised to see bold black letters spread across the top of the page: "Dellums' difficult dealings with the media". That's news?

"Dellums" refers to the present mayor of the city of Oakland, former Congressman Ron Dellums. Christopher Heredia's article begins:

Ron Dellums' relations with the media, which have been strained over the years, hit a low point this week, when the Oakland mayor told reporters they were "cynical" for asking him to detail his plans to fight crime in the city.

The Thursday news conference at City Hall -- where the mayor was to announce his new anti-crime initiative -- had the appearance of a pep rally, with city staffers outnumbering journalists. Dellums allowed reporters only five or six questions after giving what sounded like a sermon about crime and violence at the national level and the need for journalists to not fan violence with sensational reporting.

Dellums told reporters they need "to move beyond 'if it bleeds, it leads.' "

The reporter then quotes three reporters and a journalism professor on the deficiencies of Dellums' media relations. Nothing in the article explains the context in which Dellums was speaking: his very African-American city is traumatized by the broad daylight, execution-style murder of a prominent African-American reporter who was investigating a corrupt, but well-known, African-American community institution. Here's a thoughtful and vivid account of how that trauma is felt by one Oakland resident.

Okay -- I'm willing to believe Heredia and the other reporters that Dellums is hard to get a statement from. He wasn’t very accessible to constituent opinions when in Congress -- I wouldn’t be surprised if he resents the cacaphony of citizen demands now that he is mayor. He should make sure he has an efficient, responsive press office. But at least he's speaking to the real mood of his city, not writing myopic, self-centered commentary.

I am sorry if the press don't like being reminded of it, but their outlets do thrive on stories and images of mayhem and murder. And it is not unfair to point out that those accounts fit neatly into dispiriting racial stereotyping of the Bay Area's largest Black enclave. No wonder Dellums gets pissy with the media -- the pervasive frame in which Oakland events are pigeon-holed makes his task harder.

Here's what Dellums wanted to get across in the offending press conference -- these points were the last paragraphs of Heredia's article:

The mayor said he is trying to educate the media about the impact reporters have with what they write and put on television and radio.

Constant images of violence hurt the community, Dellums said, and he wants reporters to realize that.

"This is life-and-death stuff," Dellums said. "Journalists need to be part of the solution."

"My point is cynicism breeds apathy and hopelessness at a time when we don't need that," the mayor said. "It's the enemy of people being activated and mobilized. ... I'm not anti- the press. I'm trying to be a thoughtful person. I'm trying to challenge people to think beyond boilerplate responses."

I don't think those are unreasonable thoughts to put to an audience of media workers.

*** I get a preponderance of my news from the internet and national newspapers. A recent study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press presents a quantitative finding that people who use these sources are the persons most likely to be critical of media bias. Interesting stuff.

Blogging ethics

Every week I get an email update from Media Matters discussing some aspect of the journalistic landscape. The one that arrived yesterday covered two areas of journalistic practice and malpractice: the use of anecdotes and media outlets' willingness to correct errors promptly.

Human interest anecdotes, true stories of people, can serve as an enticing lead to many stories. But Jamison Foser did a great job of explaining how journalists can misuse illustrative anecdotes to create lasting negative impressions about people toward whom they harbor hostility. For example, Democratic politicians, who for whatever reason, rub them the wrong way:

These "illustrative anecdotes," ... John Kerry windsurfing or ordering cheesesteak, John Edwards' big house and expensive haircuts, etc., etc. -- aren't inherently illustrative. Journalists use them to illustrate not only things they know about the candidates, but things they think about the candidates as well; to dress up their guesses and hunches as factual observations.

President Bush has been widely mocked for saying upon his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, "I looked the man in the eye. ... I was able to get a sense of his soul."

But that's essentially what journalists do when they claim these "telling anecdotes" illustrate something completely subjective about the candidates. They don't really know Al Gore is a phony; they're guessing at what is in his soul, then finding anecdotes that can seem to support their guess.

Moreover, because a good story is a good story, these things tend to hang around -- even if they turn out to be false. It's been shown many times that Al Gore didn't say he'd "invented the internet," but the phony story just keeps coming back around, even in publications that have debunked it.

Foser proposes four criteria for using anecdotes in reporting political campaigns:

1) Is the anecdote verifiably true?
2) Is the anecdote illustrative rather than anomalous?
3) Does the anecdote illustrate something that is verifiably true, or is it merely a convenient vehicle for suggesting something the reporter believes but cannot prove?
4) Does the anecdote illustrate something that is not only verifiably true, but is also important to understanding how the candidate would govern or how the issue would affect people? Or is it just pointless snark?

These seem like good questions to me.

And Foser's further insists that news organizations need to promptly admit and, where possible, fix their errors:

Nobody expects reporters to be perfect. Nobody demands that news organizations never get anything wrong. But until news organizations adopt as one of their core values the notion that errors must be promptly and thoroughly corrected, they will continue to lose the trust of the American people.

And they will deserve to lose it.

Again, well said.

***So okay, I read this missive and concurred heartily -- and then I thought about the last two posts on this blog. Can I apply Foser's standard to my own work?

In my post Talk about blood sucking.... pretty much the whole text is an anecdote, the linked story of a Mexican woman who made more from selling blood plasma to a company in the U.S. than she made in a week's work at a factory on her side of the border. It gives a human face to the fact that blood products, the stuff of life, are extracted from the poor for the rich -- my real point. The article from which it is drawn is a more complicated (and in some ways even more condemnatory) discussion of the practice of blood sales, so there is more there for anyone who follows the link -- but I just wanted to highlight the shocking reality. In reaction to Foser's criteria: I believe the story is true; I am certain it is not anomalous; I think the truth it illustrates is important.

What using the anecdote the way I did leaves out is why I think it is both true and important. There is a back story of my familiarity with blood collection practices that I could have written: about supporting a picket line by homeless plasma vendors on Los Angeles skid row in 1973; living through the revolution in blood screening in the 1980s here are at the West Coast epicenter of the AIDS epidemic; and recently learning that only 37 percent of people in the U.S. are eligible to donate blood. But all that information detracts from the clarity of the point I wanted to make. I think, for a blogger, it probably ethical to use a simple, gripping anecdote to spot light a larger point, so long as you are convinced of its truth through some, not necessarily stated, knowledge of the context. It might well be unethical, if I had merely grabbed that little story out of thin air, without knowing anything of the back story.

***Then there is the issue of corrections. In Nancy Pelosi: "Peter Principle" at Work? I spun a long story of how Pelosi came to be San Francisco's congressperson, going back to the time of the legendary Phil Burton (d. 1983). Right away I heard from a friend that I had gotten one detail factually wrong: Phil did not actively bequeath this seat to his widow, because he wasn't the sort of person who planned for his own death. I added a correction line at the end of the narrative quoting this information.

Yet from my point of view, and, I think, from the point of view of the voters, this is a distinction that doesn't make much difference to the overall narrative. The congressional seat was a Burton fiefdom; it was passed on within "the machine" (eventually to Pelosi.) So I didn't make the correction in the main text, but appended it. In doing so, I made a decision that may skirt an ethical edge. I'm happy with it -- but should I have corrected in the body? I'm still not sure.

***What I am sure of this that political blogging is the better for our holding ourselves to the kind of ethical standards we want from the mainstream media, within the constraints of our miniscule comparative resources.

Talk about blood sucking...

MCALLEN, Texas – Olga García, 33, is one of hundreds of Mexicans who cross the border into the United States to donate their blood in exchange for a few dollars.

Working eight hour days in the textile factories of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, García earns 620 pesos per week, the equivalent of $56.

But as a plasma donor she gets $70 weekly. For a year, García went twice each week to the BioLife Plasma Services laboratories, located some two miles from the international Eagle Pass Bridge, and sold 1.76 liters of her blood. With that money, García paid the mortgage on her house, as well as electricity and phone bills.

Read it all here.

In the past, blood vendors bought much of the U.S. plasma supply from the veins of skid row drunks -- but the AIDS epidemic ended that. So now we import much of our lifeblood.

At least these people aren't being enlisted for human organ farms. Not yet.

Nancy Pelosi: "Peter Principle" at Work?

The blogosphere, and everyone who gives a damn about the U.S Constitution, is buzzing this week about Democratic legislators' craven capitulation on the Bush administration's new FISA law that has immunized invasions of our private communications by their "national security surveillance" spooks. Yes, that is what the law effectively does; see this. The Bushies yelped "terror, terror"; the Dems caved -- again. Pissing on the people seems to come too easily to elected Dems ...

The more folks look at the debacle, the more comes out about the tactical blunders (or possible perfidy) of the Democratic leadership, especially Majority Leader Harry Reid in the Senate and Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House.

As a long time Pelosi constituent, I'd like to explore the terrible possibility that this episode shows that my congresscritter has, in being elected Speaker, demonstrated the truth of the Peter Principle.

What's the Peter Principle? Propounded by Laurence J. Peter in his 1968 book, this tidbit of pop sociological and business wisdom says:

"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

Or her incompetence. Simply put, I think Pelosi has worked very hard to rise very far in an insiders' system -- and truly mastered the art of such an ascent. Unfortunately, the very skills and instincts honed on the way to becoming the first ever woman to be Speaker of the House make her unable to lead effectively on contentious issues.

Where'd Pelosi come from, anyway?Pelosi's official bio is strong on her family background.

Pelosi hails from a strong family tradition of public service. Her father, Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., served as Mayor of Baltimore for 12 years, after representing the city for five terms in Congress. Her brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, also served as Mayor of Baltimore.

Pelosi graduated from Trinity College in Washington, D.C. in 1962. Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, a native of San Francisco, have five children: Nancy Corinne, Christine, Jacqueline, Paul and Alexandra, and six grandchildren.

But that doesn't tell much about how she climbed the ladder to her current status.

That story requires going back quite a long time. From 1964 to 1983, the Congressional seat Pelosi now occupies was held by Phil Burton. Burton was a kind of liberal we don't often see these days: a tough guy with principles. The National Park Service has put up a surprisingly good bio him as part of its site for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, one of his legacies:

Descriptions of Phil Burton reveal that he was a "good-doer" who had no patience for "do-gooders" who settled for glorious defeats. He loved to win, knew how to win, and expected to win.

Phil was a liberal in the truest sense of the word. He fought for workers' rights, the underprivileged, farmers and coal miners, the aged, and the "little guy." He knew how to forge coalitions of idealists and pragmatists, conservatives and liberals, amateurs and professionals. He was the consummate vote counter who always knew exactly where he stood and what it took to win.

Phil was the old-fashioned boss prowling the aisle, buttonholing colleagues in the cloakroom, hustling votes for his next worthy cause.

On the home front, in San Francisco, Burton built a political force usually referred to as "the machine." Up and down the ranks of officeholders, aspiring Democratic pols had to get right with Burton. And lots of the better people in San Francisco politics over the last forty years came out of that axis.

When Phil Burton died, in office, he had no trouble bequeathing his seat to his wife, Sala. The new Burton won two elections herself, but died two months into her second term. On her death bed, in 1987, she designated Nancy Pelosi as her successor.

San Francisco leftists by that time had come to feel that perhaps the Congressional seat wasn't merely the property of a Burton to give away. Maybe the voters should have a say. As well, new forces were maturing in the city -- in particular, gay folks were contesting for "liberal" leadership, often to the discomfort of the former Irish- and Italian-American elites. Harry Britt, a gay former Methodist minister and city Supervisor, became their standard bearer.

Pelosi was not well known to the Democratic electorate in the city. Her Democratic credentials were as a party fundraiser, a party insider -- not a resume that gives a person a wide public following. We didn’t really know what she stood for.

The primary election triggered by Sala Burton's death was one hell of a campaign. I remember it as the time when a generation of political consultants who come out of 1970s radicalism, often with the United Farm Workers Union, jumped to the side where the money was -- Pelosi's side. Meanwhile, a younger generation of budding progressive consultants and pols cut their teeth working for Britt. It is hard at this distance in time to understand what a radical thing it was to have a openly gay man running for Congress -- one way to gauge it is to realize that two years later, in 1989, San Francisco defeated a domestic partnership referendum.

Pelosi barely squeaked through the primary, defeating Britt by a 36-32 percent margin. And ever since, she's had clear electoral sailing. The only question in our biennial elections is whether a token leftist opposition candidate will out poll the token Republican sacrifice.

So who has Pelosi been in office?She has voted as a pretty darn good liberal. According to Wikipedia, she has "a lifetime rating of 3 from the right-leaning American Conservative Union." That's just fine with her constituents. She's mended any broken fences with the gay community and been a champion for women. She makes sure to stay friends with the Israel Lobby, despite voting against the Iraq war resolution -- but all major Washington Dems have those ties.

The most memorable public actions I remember my congressperson taking have been condemnations of China's human rights record. In 1991, she got into a fracas with Chinese police while trying to visit Tiananmen Square. Whether her activism on these issues has been a nod to hard-line anti-Communist Chinese-Americans in San Francisco, or signs of authentic commitment to human rights, these are the only occasions on which I remember her standing out from the generality of quietly liberal Dems. (Sara at Next Hurrah initiated a fascinating conversation about where Pelosi learned her values that might bear on this question.)

Closer to home, Pelosi has not always been a liberal force. She can be counted on to endorse status quo, business-friendly Dems against populist pols. She negotiated the conversion of the Presidio Army base into a "public-private partnership" that must pay its own way, instead its becoming a National Park -- this particularly rankles as the site is in the middle of Phil Burton's magnificent Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

But on balance, Pelosi hasn't been a terrible Congressperson. Unlike that other San Francisco product, the execrably authoritarian Diane Feinstein, there have been years when this leftist could vote for her.

Ascent to the Speaker's chairIt now seems clear that during all those years when Pelosi was an acceptable, if mostly invisible, Washington fixture, what she was really doing was climbing the internal Democratic Party House hierarchy. She accumulated seniority. She kept on raising money, tons of it, for Dems in need. She worked her colleagues. However she did it, she reassured many of them that she wasn't some fire-breathing liberal they should fear.

And she rose up the ranks -- ranks of what during her tenure was mostly a minority caucus, so some of these positions probably had less cachet than they might have if Democrats had been the majority. She served on the Appropriations and Intelligence committees, the latter as the ranking minority member. In 2001, she became Minority Whip, defeating Rep. Steny Hoyer; in 2002, she rose to Majority Leader of the battered, somewhat cowed, minority Democratic caucus. In both positions she was "first" woman.

And so, after the Democrats took a majority in the House in 2006, Pelosi became Speaker. She supported Rep. John Murtha for Majority Whip -- but Murtha lost out to Rep. Steny Hoyer. Pelosi and Hoyer are the House Democratic leadership today.

Now that is clearly a tale of insider intrigue. Pelosi's rise wasn't a triumph of parliamentary proficiency (under the Republicans, no Democratic maneuvering was possible) or a mark of command on policy issues. Pelosi got to the top though some combination of cajoling, flattering, funding and soothing some 200 plus, mostly male, mostly egocentric, peers. And obviously, she learned and practiced the right mix of skills to do this very competently. It is no small accomplishment to become the first woman Speaker. She should be admired for it.

And the Peter Principle?It doesn't seem to me that the skills Pelosi has honed so well have much to do with leading a fractious, fearful caucus against an aggressive, vicious, authoritarian political enemy. Bush isn't playing by insider rules -- he lies and cheats and bulldozes his way through enemies. Frankly, I doubt that Pelosi is personally at all cowed by him; she had five brothers and she has proved she can face down male bullshit.

But her caucus is cowed. When I was part of a delegation to her San Francisco office in May, her aide pretty much admitted that Pelosi was concerned that some of her own members would rebel if she didn't let a Bush-friendly Iraq funding bill come to the floor. As Speaker she could block it, but she wouldn't because her own members would turn on her. That is, Pelosi's status as Speaker is hostage to letting Bush get his way. And there we have the FISA collapse in a nutshell.

I fear Pelosi has risen to her "level of incompetence" -- she excelled at becoming Speaker, but seems unable to be the Speaker. Bush (or Karl Rove, or Dick Cheney) is setting the House agenda and Pelosi doesn't seem able to change this.

CORRECTION in the interest of historical accuracy: A friend writes: "I was present at the decision to anoint Sala. -- Phil had nothing to do with it. Like so many hard drinking hard smoking men he made no provision for his early death."

1,000,000 Iraqi deaths

The counter of excess Iraqi deaths resulting of the U.S. war and occupation on the side bar of this blog just topped one million. I have no idea what that means.

All those people were someone's child, someone's brother, someone's spouse. And they are dead because our maniac President took advantage of people's historical trust in his office, of people's post-9/11 anxiety, of the weaknesses in our political system, to empower oil corporations and determined imperialists. And they are dead, in part, because the people of the United States have not yet cared enough to restrain our government.

And even if we do eventually tire of afflicting Iraq, those people will still be dead -- and Iraq will almost certainly suffer further bloody rounds of death while it reorganizes itself.

The counter is based on an extrapolation from a 2006 survey by the British medical journal The Lancet. Click on the counter to find out more. Click on the picture of Faiza Alaraji lower on the sidebar to learn about a project by Iraqis for Iraqi refugees of our war.

A costly bag of groceries

I just want to remind readers (and myself): It's a hell of a lot of work to be poor.

Today I visited a friend who lives on disability. She said she needed help.

It seems that over a week ago my friend had gone with her health aide to a local market to buy groceries. It was late in the day; they were tired and hurried. They assembled enough food to fill one bag -- and remember being a little surprised at the check out when the tab came to over $40. But that's how it was ... my friend paid directly out of her bank account with her debit card. The aide carried the food to her home and put it away.

The next day, she couldn't find the receipt, nor could the aide. So my friend called her bank to find out exactly what she had spent. She was aghast to hear she had been charged $191 on the previous day by the grocery store.

Now lots of us in the middle class might not ever have noticed if this happened to us -- or at least not noticed for a while. But my friend lives on a precarious patchwork of Social Security Insurance and various "social service" programs, so she needs to know to the penny what cash she has. And she doesn't have hardly any. So this was a major emergency.

Right away, she gets on the phone to the store. They say they'll investigate; does she have the receipt? Well no, that's part of the problem. They still say they'll investigate.

That afternoon she goes over to ask in person. This is not easy. She needs a health aide to help her navigate her motorized wheelchair down an elevator and across a big street. Fortunately, the manager of the store has been there for over ten years and she has for shopped there over ten years. They recognize each other, though they are not friends. He says he'll investigate.

Same the next day. A phone call, a visit, and a promise to investigate. And so it goes for more than a week. More phone calls, visits, and promises to investigate. My friend was getting desperate. This is about having no money. Finally she asked me to go along with her to the store today. I doubt I'm going to be any help, but I've shopped there for over 30 (!) years -- I'll try.

Before we go through all the rigmarole of getting her into the wheelchair, she decides to make one more phone call. Finally, the manager says he's gotten approval from the management to give her $150 even though they are still investigating. He just needs a letter from her describing what happened. So we write one. Later, she and the aide make the trek and get the $150.

Everyone in this story behaved decently (aside from whatever computer glitch or human error led to the mistaken charge). My friend was patient and reasonable; the health aide stood by her employer; the store manager worked his own hierarchy to get her the money back. Nobody was being actively obstructionist or unkind.

All fine and dandy -- but still I figure that bag of groceries cost my friend about 8 hours of struggle to get the charge corrected and over a week of angst. It's a hell of a lot of work to be poor.

Creative resistance

Photo by way of Redes Ciudadanas de Jalisco

A friend writes from Mexico:

Gossip/News: Two days ago the two most famous lesbian political activists and artists in this country, Jesusa Rodriguez and Liliana Felipe, got married (well actually proclaimed their domestic partnership, sociedad de convivencia). Turning a very private affair into a political act, they walked out of Coyoacan's city hall chanting "La convivencia tambien es resistencia." "Partnership is also resistance!"

Rodriguez has been in charge of resistencia creativa in the aftermath of the rightwing theft of the Presidential election from the insurgent left movement led by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

As happens all over the world, advances in one arena of progressive politics can make space in other areas of struggle.

San Francisco updates

It looks like we are indeed going to be living in a gang injunction zone as I discussed awhile ago. D.A. Dennis Herrera has will argue for the injunction at a hearing on Sept. 18.

Thanks to the invaluable Real Cost of Prisons blog, I found this discussion of the injunctions written by San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi:

Will the injunctions reduce gangs and gang violence in San Francisco? According to a recent report issued by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, injunctions do not work. ...

I met with a dozen people who have been named in San Francisco's gang injunction. I learned that some have been crime-free for years, working at full-time jobs and volunteering in anti-gang programs. One person who police claimed was covered with gang tattoos had his tattoos removed three years ago and was no longer involved in a gang. Several people named in the injunction are brothers, including two who work together at a small business. Ironically, these two brothers would be barred from working together, being outside past 10 p.m., and could face jail time for associating with each other in public or wearing the color red.

Because there is no right to a lawyer in civil court, an individual named as a gang member who cannot afford a lawyer has little choice except to submit to the injunction.

The gang injunction is permanent, meaning that the person will carry the label of "gang member" for life. There is no procedure for removing one's name from the injunction and no mechanism to hold police accountable for errors.

Because these records are public, the alleged "gang member" may lose his job, as did two people named in the Bayview-Hunters Point injunction.

Public Defender Adachi is a good guy and, as far as I know, a good public defender. I often cite him as the model of the perfect candidate for electoral office. (Yes, we elect our Public Defender here; I know that is unusual.) When blocked in his path to the office by some slightly sleazy politics, he made the decision to beat the establishment at the ballot box and devoted himself to being a candidate for a year. He worked himself to the bone to win -- and knew why he wanted the office. And he stuck to his principles: of Japanese-American heritage himself, within days after 9/11 he began to speak out against anti-Arab and anti-Muslim incidents.

I'm willing to listen to Jeff about the gang injunctions. If he says they are bad policy, I trust him. ***

Assemblyman Mark Leno has scored a pretty tough hit on State Senator Carole Migden in his primary battle for her seat. (We don't do Republicans -- whoever wins the primary gets the seat.)

Leno is telling the state Fair Political Practices Commission

-- That Migden, D-San Francisco, illegally kept in her Senate account nearly $500,000 left over from her 2001 Board of Equalization campaign.

-- That she illegally transferred nearly $1 million from her Assembly re-election committee to a Senate account - spending about a fourth of it.

-- And that she failed to itemize nearly $400,000 in credit card campaign expenses on state reporting forms from 2000 to 2006.

SF Chronicle

Migden's political consultant Richie Ross isn't even denying the charges; he says they are "absolutely legitimate."

Frankly this sounds like classic Migden: she has long been able to raise bundles of cash; she has often acted as if rules and limits were for someone else.

Don't know whether the electorate will care about this; San Francisco is used to stringent election finance laws being evaded by winning candidates. If Leno can convince enough voters that she's a bit contemptuous of the law, it might help him, as will any restrictions on her use of her war chest. But I don't doubt her ability simply to raise more.

I remain neutral on the race. I didn't like either of them on the Board of Supervisors; both of them, in their own ways, have been good reps at the State Capital. All very interesting.

"I am become Death..."

I looked around for thoughts on this 62nd anniversary of the dropping of first atomic bomb -- and found this among the letters in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Hiroshima karma
Editor - The biblical karmic warning, "As you sow so shall you reap," or the modern street version "What goes around comes around," both explain a deep rooted fear in the American psyche. Sixty-two years ago, in August 1945, America sowed the karmic seeds of this fear, by dropping, without warning, atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 115,000 civilians, mostly innocent women, children and elderly.

In October 2002, President Bush exploited this fear by invoking the image of a nuclear "mushroom cloud" to dramatize Iraq's threat to us, and scare Congress and the American people into war against Iraq. If a karmic debt must eventually be paid for causing the great suffering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seems unwise for America and its leaders to nurture conditions, such as creating more suffering, hatred and conflicts, which would hasten this karmic ripening.

LI CHAN
Buddhist chaplain
Juvenile Hall
San Francisco

As I wrote in my previous post, our rulers now encourage us to become a nation of quaking cowards. Perhaps they know they are tapping into deep vein of karmic anxiety carried by many.

The first test of an atomic bomb, on July 16, 1945, took place near Alamomogordo, New Mexico. The project director, the Jewish scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, named the test "Trinity". Why? He later claimed he had been thinking of the Christian religious poetry of John Donne. In 1965, Oppenheimer described the test (video is here; don't miss it!) quoting the Hindu God Vishnu:

"Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

There was a man who knew the karmic anxiety so many of us feel.

Fettered frontiers

Detail from a mural in the Buffalo, New York's City Hall depicting the U.S.-Canada border, circa. 1931.

In the age of the internet and global warming, national borders seem a little absurd -- until you or someone you know has trouble crossing one.

I've been collecting stories about our borders: here are a few.

The city has almost 10 million people, but no name.

Workers commute along its highways, while students shuttle to school. Companies buy and sell, patients get treatment and shoppers hop to their favorite spots -- doing their best to ignore the barrier that cleaves the city in two.

We know part of that "city" as Buffalo. The other part is Toronto and everything in between. ...

Just how much of the crossborder traffic represents local economic activity has always been difficult to gauge. ... [Thirty] percent of weekend receipts in the register at Peppermints, a male strip club in Niagara Falls, [Canada] are U.S. currency. ...

Local businesses have long clamored for easier border crossings and more coordination of infrastructure to spur economic growth. ... But Washington takes other factors into consideration when deciding how tight to make the border. A secure frontier is integral to sovereignty and plays well politically to voters in the interior of the nation.

Buffalo News,
June 24, 2007

Now the Feds plan to require passports for those intra-metropolis "border crossings." Niagara Falls's [Canada] day-tripper traffic was down 42 percent in June from 2005 numbers. Less than 25 percent of people in the U.S. even have passports, though applications have clogged the Federal bureaucracy this year. In the Buffalo area, border obstacles are creating a further economic drag on an already depressed economy.***

DERBY LINE, Vt. -- Residents of this town and neighboring Stanstead, Quebec, are proud of the elegant granite hall that straddles the border between them. It is their rarest jewel: The Haskell Free Library and Opera House, built a century ago as a symbol of friendship between the United States and Canada and shared ever since by citizens of the two countries.

Canadians and Americans borrow books and watch plays side by side at the library, which was deliberately built half in one country and half in the other. No guards are stationed on the quiet, shady streets around the building, and Canadians who cross into Vermont to enter the library do not need to show their passports at a border station, as they do when crossing for any other purpose. Inside the library, where a strip of black tape on the floor marks the international boundary, patrons wander unchecked between the two countries on their way from the stacks to the birch-paneled reading room.

Boston Globe,
June 24, 2007

It will come as no surprise that the U.S. government wants to disturb this comfortable arrangement; a terrorist might try to pass as a book borrower?***Such comfortable co-existence is not limited to the northern border of the U.S.

[A residency checker for the San Luis, Arizona schools, explained:] "To people who live along the international border, it's similar to a county line," he said. "People don't think much about [crossing] it."

Certainly not Carla Molina, who walked her two children, 11 and 8, to school in San Luis, one recent morning.

"We're planning to move back here anyway," Molina said. She lived in San Luis years ago, and her children, born in Yuma, are U.S. citizens. She wants them to learn English. "It's important they learn it when they're young," Molina said.

LA Times,
June 25, 2007

Naturally our immigrant-averse xenophobes are mightily upset about this very human cross-traffic.***Then there are the repeated stories of border crossers who come from further away, from the "wrong" culture, or the "wrong" religion, or simply with the "wrong" last name.

Ever since Jimmy Carter was president, summer has meant one thing for Majed Shehadeh and his wife, Joanne Mulligan: time to pack. From their modest house in Bavaria, they migrate annually to their summer home in Massachusetts, where Ms. Mulligan was born and raised, with the accent to prove it....

A Syrian-born German citizen, [Shehadeh] was detained when he flew into Las Vegas in December to celebrate his daughter's passing of the California bar exam. ...

Shehadeh was taken to the North Las Vegas Detention Center, where he says he was stripped of his belongings, including $1,000 in cash, and his heart medication, which he wouldn't receive for another 36 hours. ...

Shehadeh then joined about 25 other people in a holding cell that had metal benches, concrete floors, a single toilet in public view, and no blankets or mattresses – a setup confirmed by Tim Bedwell, a spokesman for the facility.

Shehadeh was so loath to use the toilet that during his three-night detention he says he ate only a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

Sleeping also proved difficult. Court TV was blaring through the night, says Shehadeh. "You could hear the gavel pounding over and over. It was like a special kind of torture."

The next day, Shehadeh says, he was led into a room and told to strip naked. Then he was ordered to kneel down and cough while a guard inspected him from behind. ...

It wasn't until the afternoon of Dec. 31 that he was summoned for release. He quickly collected his belongings, except his $1,000 in cash. Instead, he was issued a check, which he showed the Monitor, stamped "City of North Las Vegas Inmate Deposit Account" in the upper-left corner. (Too humiliated to cash it, he keeps it on his desk.) Then he was delivered to the airport gate shackled and unshaven.

"The whole process is only humiliation over humiliation over humiliation," he says.

Christian Science Monitor,
July 11, 2007

Sounds like an ordinary U.S. jail to me -- but the Feds haven't even given a reason for this treatment of a Massachusetts home owner. He tried to cross a border.***Every once in a while, the boundary setters get their comeuppance. A Republican hack, one Dennis Schornack, was given a job in the Bush administration trying to map and fence the U.S.-Canada border. The Bushies didn't fund this effort of course; they just gave their guy the job and let the project fester.

Meanwhile, Shirley-Ann and Henry Leu retired to Blaine, WA aiming to raise Pomeranian dogs at their new home. Since they were located adjacent to the border with Canada, they built a $15,000 concrete wall to keep the dogs in. Trouble was, their wall encroached on the 10 foot "obstruction-free zone" that Schornack was tasked with creating. And when Schornack sued to get the fence moved, the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation stepped in to fight for the Leu's "property rights."

Mr. Schornack hired counsel and prepared a countersuit. He says he was then tackled by Justice Department lawyers, who urged him to settle the case. ...

According to Dennis Schornack, Mr. Reyes then issued an ultimatum: he had until 3 p.m. to back down. Mr. Schornack refused. The next day, he received his two-sentence fax [firing him] from the White House.

NY Times,
July 22, 2007

Schornack is now suing the President he served. ***I can't help thinking we're overdoing this border stuff. I don't want to arbitrarily jail and humiliate people in the name of some phony "security." I don't want to live walled inside a fortress with a population of quaking cowards. But my rulers want me to live that way.

Polled TWICE today

Phone interviewers must be having a hard time finding people to talk with on such a nice Saturday. I know I'm on a lot of lists -- I vote every time and will almost always respond to surveys because I want to know what they are asking. And if I'm around, I answer my land line. As usual, since I am neither a member of the conventional media nor employed by a politician, I got by the screening questions, though I can't believe they really want someone like me in the sample.

The first poll: my views on some issues. If Gavin Newsom had any viable opposition, I'd think this one was about the fall mayor's race. But that doesn't make any sense; he doesn't. I can't quite believe Eric Jaye is taking Newsom's donors to the cleaners this obviously. This poll asked my views on the importance of various real, quasi-local, issues -- but oddly. The phrasing of the questions seemed wrong for San Francisco: did I think illegal immigration was a pressing problem? Should San Francisco bring businesses to the city even if they increase congestion? Just weird stuff.

Can Tony Hall have come up with enough money to run an issue poll? Or, perhaps a darker suspicion: is some data vendor developing a more sophisticated file of frequent voters' views in the guise of a mayoral poll?

The second poll: what would I think of a comprehensive Candlestick Point development plan that just happens to include a 49ers stadium: This poll was far more straightforward. It tested my attitudes toward various possible spokespeople and then toward various worthy items that might be included in such a measure -- things like jobs for Bayview residents, renovated public housing, retail space, more park land, new housing (maybe affordable), and, oh yes, also a stadium.

I started out responding neutrally -- "who says this would do this?" Naturally, that wasn't answered. The more claims of a rosy future I heard, the less I believed in the benefits of the plan. So I said so. If we really do see a stadium cum Candlestick development plan on the February primary ballot, I think it will have a rough ride. We've been down this track before, in more prosperous times.

Unless maybe the 49ers win the division or the conference....

Impeachment, revenge, and liberal Christians

For myself, I've given up hope for an impeachment of Bush or Cheney or even that pathetic lickspittle, A.G. Gonzales. After all, our Democratic legislators have just voted to give the Bush administration a blank check to spy, without court approval, on any U.S. resident who has the effrontery to be in contact with someone abroad -- that's the meaning of the new F.I.S.A. law. So I certainly can't expect them to formulate an indictment against the Bushies for their numerous violations of law and bring the thing to trial. (That's what an impeachment is, in case the "news" media have managed to obscure that for you.)

Mostly, I frequent the political blogs, so the arguments against impeachment I'm accustomed to seeing are prudential: "we don’t have the votes." But this morning, surfing randomly, I found myself belatedly reading a July 19 post by the progressive Christian commentator, Diana Butler Bass, in which she calls impeachment: "revenge politics rather than constructive policy."

Jesus, save me from your followers. If I were looking for the perfect specimen of how privileged Christianity comforts the powerful, this post would fit the bill.

Bass establishes her critical credentials and states her case:

I do not like George W. Bush. I never voted for him. Following Sept. 11, when Bush had a 95 percent approval rating, I was one of the skeptical 5 percent. ...

Progressive Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims ought to engage more than policy concerns. We also bring to the table dispositions and practices of faith, ways of being that strengthen the polis—things like mercy, charity, love, forgiveness, hospitality, and justice—that create more generous, loving, and honest community. ...

Impeachment is the politics of retaliation, a tool of political violence that should be used in the most extreme of circumstances (and something that was wrongly used against President Clinton). Religious progressives should not practice tit-for-tat politics.

One hundred twenty comments quickly took apart the logical fallacies in this -- it wasn't hard. Bass seems to write out of a complete ignorance of what impeachment is: a solemn trial, full of safeguards both legal and political, that enables the enduring body politic to come to a judgment about whether its most fundamental legal and ethical underpinnings have been culpably broken.

But far worse, she writes out of the central fallacy of liberal U.S. religion: that God calls us to be "nice", to make "peace" without demanding justice.

We are supposed to be peacemakers, agents of forgiveness, and those who build bridges across human divides. ...

As a Christian, and as a religious progressive, I must move beyond revenge politics to reach deeply for spiritual dispositions and practices that nurture God’s dream for shalom.

I read this as idolatry: it makes "God" an apologist for an unjust status quo.

Don't these people read their scriptures? The psalmists say it over and over; here's one (71:33) instance: "For the Lord hears the needy ..." God has picked "a side." And it is not the side of the comfortable and the powerful. In Scripture, God is with the afflicted, the widow, the orphan; woe to those who harm them.

Yes, even comfortable, middle class, liberal Christians are enjoined to love our enemies -- but if we were honest, we'd admit we have very few enemies who afflict us personally. Our far harder calling is to place ourselves alongside those who do have real material enemies: the poor, the outcast, the national enemies of the moment, who are afflicted by our personal and systemic bigotry, greed, and violence.

And yes, we are called to "love" George W. Bush. That is, we are warned not to let our repudiation of him consume us, not to let our revulsion against the lying, bullying self-absorbed little warmonger become a vicious enjoyment of his wrongness that ratifies our rightness. Hanging on to that sort of hate would warp and destroy us. But we don't have to like him -- and we certainly don't have to absolve him from the ordinary secular consequences of his behavior. (Remember impeachment?)

This kind of namby-pamby Christian liberalism sure reminds me why most of my conscientious contemporaries run screaming from the Church. For folks whose founder was tortured and killed for simply following his truth, we liberal Christians have become a mighty equivocating lot.

Friday Cat Blogging

Who are you?


This is my fig tree.


She lives at the site of Juan Diego's hermitage within the grounds of the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

Direct mail musings

According to progressive direct mail guru Mal Warwick,

...direct mail spending in the 2008 election will run from $800 million to $1 billion. That compares with $648 million in the 2004 election.

Meanwhile, according to academic researchers who study electoral campaigns, direct mail has negligible effects on voter turnout.

Maybe it's persuasive -- that is, instead of influencing whether people vote, it influences who they vote for? Apparently not. For example, according to a tightly designed study in a hotly contested primary that turned on a nasty "wedge" issue (abortion), direct mail only helped the pro-choice candidate when coupled with intensive phone contacts.

A chi-square test of the differences of support between subjects in the control and treatment groups indicates that the results are not statistically significant.

So what is direct mail good for? Perhaps for making profits for mail "experts" and fundraisers? This seems to be a campaign method whose time has come -- and gone.

A European view: Brown meets Bush

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Kanishk Tharoor offers an interesting take on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's chat with George W.

Gone -- as has become de facto British policy now -- was any reference to the "war on terror" (indeed, Brown is now meticulous in his noun usage, eschewing the vaguely existential "terror" for "terrorism"). Instead, terrorism in Brown-speak comprises a "crime against humanity". This is a useful expression; it maintains all the spacious implication of the "war on terror" while clearly placing terrorism in the context of law and order.

Many European countries -- particularly Spain -- have been unequivocal in their rejection of the Bush administration's martial approach to counterterrorism. Terrorists must be treated as criminals, embedded as they are in shady and intricate networks that resemble those of organised crime. Terrorism is best prosecuted (and prevented) not with bombs and special forces, but judges, close detective work and a commitment to the rule of law and the international system that forms its roof. ...

The British PM is distancing himself from the folly of the neo-con enterprise, but not so far from the underlying Cold War construction of the "special relationship". It may well be, therefore, that he is deliberately helping to lay out the sheets for getting snug into bed with an old-fashioned Democratic incumbent in the White House. Then what will they do about Iran?

What can we do about them?

Developer wins at City Hall

Looks like expensive condos and not affordable housing will be the fate of the corner of Mission and Cesar Chavez streets in San Francisco, despite housing activists' protests reported here and here. Beyond Chron has the story of the Supervisor's 6-5 vote yesterday to support the developers. Richmond District Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, usually a reliable pro-affordability voter, sided with Seven Hills Properties.

UPDATE: This morning the Chronicle reports that McGoldrick received contributions from the developer. Not good. He's always been a decent guy -- if this is not downtown trashing him, it is ugly. In any case the appearances are going to hurt him if he really faces a recall. Activists hold grudges.