That was fun!

The San Francisco Chronicle's story is so true to the event (though not nearly as good in the morning edition as in the immediate coverage) that I'll mostly quote here.

Noisy demonstrators armed with signs and outrage once again greeted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- this time at San Francisco's Ritz-Carlton Hotel -- at a Tuesday evening fund-raiser expected to raise more than $100, 000 for his proposed ballot measures.

Neophyte protesters mixed with veteran activists. Tourists on cable cars waved and snapped pictures, motorists honked, and the music ranged from "Born in the U.S.A." to "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."…

Protester Juanita Yee, 40, of Brisbane, denounced the governor for failing to support public education in the ways he had promised. "I can't afford private school," said Yee, who has four kids. "It's not an option with a stay-at-home mom and a father who's a union plumber."

Santa Clara fire Capt. Bill Stone had never attended a protest before but was spurred to do so Tuesday by proposed benefit cuts for public safety employees. "Firefighters will step up when it's an issue that affects people like teachers," said Stone, who arrived with seven other firefighters from Local 1171 in Santa Clara.

The crowd was largely middle-age, equipped with signs such as "Grope-n- ator, keep your hands off our retirement" and "Nurses heal, Arnold wheels and deals."

John Bilicska, 46, an unemployed North Beach resident who used to work at UC Irvine, said, "The governor's calling the people who do the work the special interests, while the businesses that are shipping our jobs overseas are just great. I don't trust him. He's a typical Republican politician."

This was not a crowd that police were going to beat up on -- this was the people who make the state a place where people can live. We're seeing Governor against the people.

The Mercury News also had good coverage:

While an airplane flew overhead, trailing a banner that read, ``ARNOLD: CALIFORNIA IS NOT FOR SALE!'' the protesters massed along the side entry on Pine Street, closing it several times, before police moved them aside.

When a guest did manage to enter, the protesters chanted: ``Shame on you! Shame on you!''

Former Secretary of State George Shultz, a San Francisco resident and Republican friend of Schwarzenegger, was escorted in by police. Despite the protests, the governor did manage to get into the hotel at some point.

Later, the protesters marched down Grant Street into Chinatown, while tourists gawked, and closed the intersection of California and Grant streets. They also briefly closed the cable car …

The Oakland-based California Nurses Association, which is angry at the governor for temporarily suspending rules that would require hospitals to hire more nurses, spent the past few days organizing Tuesday night's protest, even calling a press conference Monday to build media interest in it.

Tuesday's event also included firefighters, teachers, and members of engineering and construction unions. They held signs and boogied to the amplified music of Aretha Franklin's hit ``Respect.'' The protesters included a contingent of 9-feet-tall women on stilts, called ``Women Walking Tall,'' who said they had come to support the nurses.

``We started something. Now everyone's joining us,'' said Lindy Herrera, a neonatal intensive-care nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose. She carried a sign that read, ``Patients are special interests.''

Joyce Bartky, 67, a retired teacher from Pacifica, said she had never been to a protest before, but came out of anger at the governor for proposing to change the teachers' pension system. ``I'm so mad,'' she said. ``This will discourage young people from going into education.''

On to the next adventure.

When fundamentalist religion is free speech? Or is it?

This man's trial on charges of encouraging young US Muslims to hate what he believes the US stands for, and possibly to act on that hatred, is likely to define the limits of freedom of speech for Muslim opponents of US policy in the contemporary US. There is a lot to think about here.

The government and the defense seem to agree that Ali Al-Timimi didn't commit any terrorist acts against people in the US (or anywhere else) but he certainly said some condemning and hurtful things about this country. He's accused of saying that the 9/11 attacks meant that the time for Muslims to train for violent jihad had come; apparently "in 2003, he celebrated the crash of the space shuttle Columbia in a message that prosecutors say reflected his view that the United States itself should be destroyed" according to the Washington Post.

Defense attorneys acknowledged that some of Timimi's statements constituted "very obscene and offensive speech,'' …

"Some of it, frankly, rises to the level of hate speech,'' defense attorney Edward B. MacMahon Jr. told the 12-member jury. "Remember, he has a First Amendment right to have these opinions. You don't have to agree with him to realize he has a right to free speech. Ladies and gentlemen,'' MacMahon added, "that's the truth. Muslims around the world believe the United States is their greatest enemy.'' Washington Post, April 4, 2005

But, but, but…"He is not accused of anything except talking. It's all about him saying something," said Shaker Elsayed, a member of the executive committee of Dar Al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church. "If this isn't a First Amendment issue, I don't know what is."

Can the Feds really put someone in jail for inflammatory speech? Well, we've heard about the case of the crowded theater -- and that limitation makes some sense. But what about speech that is merely fairly conventional fundamentalist fire and brimstone, albeit from an unpopular minority?

Amir Butler, executive director of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee, argues this is the right way to understand Al-Timimi.

In many respects, the reaction of the Bush Administration to Islamic fundamentalism resembles the case of the child with a hammer: every problem is a nail. However, the tragedy is that by conflating Islamic fundamentalism with Muslim extremism, the Bush Administration has hindered and obstructed the only people in the Muslim world who are able to successfully engage the extremists in the ideological war: the scholars.

Butler contends that an intelligent approach to Islam would distinguish between puritanical fundamentalists who repudiate Western social values but are not terrorists and the Muslim extremists who wreak havoc primarily in Muslim countries, only infrequently carrying their indiscriminate war to the US. He asserts: "It is possible that the United States might be able to kill its way to an abatement in extremist-orchestrated violence, but it will never be able to win a war declared against Islamic fundamentalism no more than the Islamic extremists can readily win their war against the nostrums of the secular West."

But can fundamentalisms -- totalizing religious systems that admit no truth-bearing rivals -- co-exist without war? And are those of us who do not accept the hegemony of any of them just passive roadkill in their contests?

The authors of the US Constitution aimed to build a secular society, in which the state established no religion and religions in turn were free from the interference of the state. And they aimed to build a democracy by ensuring the right of (originally) male, white persons, (later the rest of us) to speak our minds freely. They saw these measures as goods in themselves, but also as the building blocks of federalist, pluralist survival in what was already a quite diverse polity.

In US history, when the country has for one reason or another been afraid, these building blocks of pluralism have been threatened. There were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, attempts to proscribe anti-slavery speech before the Civil War, Prohibition of alcoholic beverages which imposed the moral notions of one faction on the whole country, Senator McCarthy's persecution of political enemies through hysterical anti-communism -- and now fear of terrorism, concurrent with the political rise of home-grown Christian fundamentalism.

This bad stew endangers Mr. Al-Tamimi (who may indeed be a hating person, though it is darn hard to tell from media accounts) and it endangers all of us. And threading our way through the maze of real dangers will take real thoughtfulness and some courage.

Mr. Butler, the Australian Muslim quoted above, has his own brave prescription drawn from a context where 'hate speech' laws are being promoted to protect Muslim rights. "Faced with offensive speech, the most appropriate responses are to ignore it or correct it. If we create an atmosphere where people cannot speak freely - however offensive that speech might be - it is impossible for these ideas to be appropriately repudiated or debunked in the public square."

People of the Wrathful Lamb

Now there's a sight that scares me. While walking in downtown San Francisco, I came across these folks today. They appeared to be Chinese, mostly adult and older women, accompanied by some small children who appeared 10 and under. The kids were handing out flyers.

As I snapped this picture, I was observed and chased down by an older woman very earnestly imploring me to understand something about "a new prophet." Like a sensible modern San Franciscan, I beat it, rudely leaving her talking to the air.

Some kind of fundamentalists I thought -- a kind that thinks that we must relate to Jesus as a wrathful Lamb. This is difficult to envision.

In fact the flyers quickly proved thoroughly bizarre. They announced "God's Chosen Holy Mount…Where is the mountain? …the Holy Land consecrated by God is no longer Jerusalem in the Middle East; it is Mount Zion in Taiwan, an isle in the East. This mountain is God's chosen holy mount in these last days.…The later day Elijah is here."

Okay, these folks have an esoteric teaching that is important to them. If you really want to know, you can visit their website or read this carefully neutral report on a visit to the Mount Zion of the Grace of Jesus Christ Crusade and New Testament Church. These formations intend to replace all existing Christian denominations, but that certainly doesn't make them unique.

But I do have to wonder, what circumstances make people think their God promises to greet them with anger? I am very grateful that I have never been able to believe such a thing.

John Paul II, RIP

So John Paul II is dying. May he rest in peace.

This pope was not someone I felt warmth toward. He denied the humanity of my core identities; I'm a woman and a lesbian. So I am not an admirer.

But actually, what dug the guy into a hole in my esteem (as if anyone cared) was his choice not to allow Catholic social teachings about the dignity of work and the blessedness of those marginalized by society to lead the Church along the path of liberation. In the 1970s, Latin American theologians began to sketch out what a Christian "preferential option for the poor" might mean in countries where the rich routinely treated the poor as sub-human. Most famously, the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza is recorded as having pronounced, upon being introduced to a Costa Rican educational and literacy program: "I want oxen, not men in my country".

John Paul II was confronted with a choice in Latin America: would he continue the practice of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of ministering to the needs of the rulers and absolving the suppression of the poor or would he throw the weight of the church behind economic and political justice? He chose the former.

The signal moment was his visit to Nicaragua in 1985, when he responded to crowds of faithful Catholics who had learned to speak for themselves through the Sandinista revolution, with an imperious "Be Silent!"

The moment was dramatic:

At six o'clock on the evening of March 4, just as the heat of the tropical sun was beginning to wane, the white-robed pope stood on a high platform before 700,000 people in Managua's vast July 19 Plaza, and read in strong, measured tones from a prepared text about Church unity. But less than halfway into his homily, shouts began to drown out polite, approving applause and finally the pope himself. The slogans quickly went from the ecclesiastical to the political: "We want a Church that stands with the poor!" "We want peace!" "Between Christianity and the revolution there is no contradiction!" And finally: "Power to the people!" An angry John Paul II three times yelled: "Silencio!"

This kind of unruly popular self-assertion was simply not something the Papal institution could allow.

A sympathetic and nuanced commentator, Roberto Suro who covered the pope for Time and the New York Times in the 1990s, describes what followed:

This set in motion a very deliberate strategy to crush liberation theology that was carried out over the course of about the next five years through a series of--looking back, you can see now--a series of very clear steps. One of the chief theologians, Leonardo Boff, a Franciscan monk from Brazil, was called to Rome for questioning in the same way that Galileo was questioned during the Inquisition--in fact, in the same building that Galileo was imprisoned in.

You had groups of bishops hauled to Rome for lecturing. And a very deliberate strategy of naming conservative, in some cases extremely conservative (politically speaking), bishops throughout the continent. …

And after that there was no further discussion of the possibility of the Catholic Church as a vehicle for real social change in Latin America.

Suro argues that the Polish experience, in which the Catholic Church survived for centuries as the repository of national Polish identity, despite invasions, changes of rulers, and even Soviet Communism, gave John Paul II a bedrock belief that the institution was to be preserved at all costs, without bending to particular social conditions and winds of the Spirit that might arise from them. And so a man committed to some quite radical social teaching, a man who often spoke up for the poor and against war, yet threw down in the end for the oppressive powers that be.

Suro quotes a Peruvian priest observing the pope speaking to an adoring audience of Incas in the mountains: "All I know is, it's not going to help them eat."

Don't Privatize Social Security

While the wingnuts were going bonkers to protect the dead, about 1500 of us were rallying for the living in San Francisco today. The target was the Charles Schwab office in the Financial district. Schwab is a major Bush supporter and the brokerage firm stands to gain if Bush gets away with putting workers' financial security into the casino of the stock market.

Since it was Cesar Chavez day in California, many unionized workers were able to attend, along with many senior citizens.

While passing out lealets for the California Nurses Association demonstration against Schwarzenegger, I was interrogated by an AP reporter. Darned if he didn't use my comments as his lead.









This was one of those days I love San Francisco.

Democracy still denied

The "Democracy Denied in Iraq" counter on the right side of this page reads 59 today, 59 days since the election that was supposed to fix everything.

And the headline in the Washington Post reads "Effort to Form Iraqi Government Collapses." I guess the counter is likely to be around for a while longer. Maybe a long while.

The swirling stories change daily. Religious and ethnic conflict is preventing the formation of a government. Or concerns over past crimes of the Ba'ath or Allawi eras. Or over who gets to control the oil. Or over who is too corrupt.

It is easy for the Post to caricature today's aborted session of the Assembly:

" 'Why don't you give us the details of what is going on in this democratic process?" said the robed lawmaker, whose identity was not discernible from a television feed that was journalists' only access to the session.

"What shall we tell those who sacrificed their lives in the 30th of January?" lawmaker Hussein Sadr, whose own bloc has been linked to this week's latest delay, asked the assembly.

"Speed up!" Sadr said.

Assembly leaders abruptly ordered news cameras out of the hall after 22 minutes.

For the Iraqi public, television broadcasts of what was only the second session of their new parliament snapped to black, then went to a Saddam Hussein-era-style tape of a popular singer warbling an Iraqi national anthem.

But the real story is clear, if we'll just look. US administrator Paul Bremer set conditions for the formation of an Iraqi government in the Transitional Administrative Law that ensure that the elected majority cannot rule. The requirement for two-thirds of the Assembly to elect the Prime Minister is a recipe for stalemate.

And stalemate ensures the failure of the new government. Already, what passes for Iraqi government has been in limbo for two months; bureaucracies give up on working, waiting for news about who the new boss will be. The TAL requires this new government to write a constitution by August, something that becomes less likely by the day.

What indeed will the people who risked their lives to vote on January 30 think? Probably exactly what they feared already: the US occupiers had no intention of returning Iraq to its people and no plan to leave, ever.

Krugman's nightmares

Today Paul Krugman's New York Times column asserted: "it can happen here."

He lists what he sees as sign of it:

1. One thing that's going on is a climate of fear for those who try to enforce laws that religious extremists oppose.


2. Another thing that's going on is the rise of politicians willing to violate the spirit of the law, if not yet the letter, to cater to the religious right.


3. 31 percent of teachers surveyed by the National Science Teachers Association feel pressured to present creationism-related material in the classroom.


4. There is a nationwide trend toward "conscience" or "refusal" legislation. Laws in Illinois and Mississippi already allow doctors and other health providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient. Again, think of how such laws expose doctors to pressure and intimidation.

And he shares where he thinks it is leading:

America isn't yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.

Funny. We have different nightmares. I've always been more afraid of the power of the state to swoop up opponents and to terrorize communities where resistance might grow, than of the danger to politicians. But Krugman has a point: if this country is to function as any kind of democracy, politicians have to be able to act without fear of bodily harm from vigilantes, however much hatred they may inspire. When those limits are breached, it is indeed happening.

Help Nurses toss Arnold an anvil

In the immortal words of political consultant James Carville, "when your opponent is in trouble, toss him an anvil."

The San Francisco Chronicle's snotty political columnists call it Muscle Sag. The Governator's poll numbers are sinking, 10 points in the last month. They write: "after months of being up against the ropes, a newly reignited Democratic Party and labor movement are smelling blood in the water."

On April 5 at 6 p.m., nurses, students, teachers, parents, firefighters and people who care about public health, education and justice will rally at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco (600 Stockton at California) outside one of Schwarzenegger's fund raisers for fat cats. YOU ARE INVITED!

Arnold's popularity problem appears to be threefold:
-- He's now being seen as just another partisan politician.
-- His "girlie men" name calling is beginning to be seen as the same old political bickering he promised to end.
-- His "reforms" aren't connecting with voters.
"The idea of merit pay for teachers is, at best, split with voters," said one Democratic consultant who has seen the numbers. "The pension reform is at under 50 percent, and no one really cares about redistricting.

Full disclosure: I've been hired by the California Nurses Association to help build this rally. How about that for fun?

You can download a pdf flyer for the rally at the CNA website.

Now they are after our lawyer…

Thomas Burke represents my partner and me in our odyssey with the US government's "No Fly List." Now he has joined the club. Airlines tell him he is on the "terrorist watch list." Tom, we're sorry if we'd dragged you into a crazed wonderland we've come to know too well.

"From the TSA's perspective, the screening is just one of the many new layers of increased security that are designed to thwart terrorist activity. The inconvenience is regrettable, but a price that society has to pay for security. And for national security reasons, the FBI and other government agencies responsible for supplying names to the lists will not divulge the criteria they use. They say that would amount to tipping their hands to the terrorists.

"'People on the lists are known threats to civil aviation or suspected threats,' says Amy Von Walter, a TSA spokeswoman."

Burke makes the same complaint we do: "The underlying danger is not that Tom Burke can no longer get a boarding pass to get on an airline," says the First Amendment lawyer. "It's that the Tom Burkes in the world may forever more be associated [with the terrorist watch list]."
…

In August 2002, my partner and I were stopped and detained at the San Francisco airport and told we were on the "FBI no fly list." Although we were eventually able to fly, the experience was distressing even to long time political activists.

Since the TSA wouldn't (or couldn't) tell us how our names got on their list, we sued.

In October 2004, the government released some documents about the "no fly" list that revealed a picture of great uncertainty and embarrassing inefficiency in compiling agencies. Once your name gets on this list, an event that seems pretty random, there seems to be no formal process to remove anyone, nor any guarantee that some agency here or abroad may not carry on for years with the notion that you pose a threat.

The next hearing in our lawsuit is currently scheduled for April 22. If this thing ever gets finished, now we'll have to agitate to get Tom off the list. Stay tuned…

Evoking the fallen

This week the American Friends Service Committee's Eyes Wide Open exhibit on the human cost of the Iraq war was on display in San Francisco Civic Center. There was not much to say; there was much about which to weep. As of March 26, 2005, 1528 US soldiers had died in Bush's war.









And their relatives have to live on with the pain, anger and grief of this waste of lives.
Nadia McCaffrey's son Patrick was killed June 22, 2004 in Iraq. He was a weekend soldier with the California National Guard, and never thought that he would be deployed to combat. Nadia McCaffrey went on Global Exchange's trip to the Jordan and Iraq border at the start of 2005 with the Families for Peace delegation which delivered over $650,000 of medical and humanitarian aid for the thousands of refugees, mostly women and children, made homeless by the U.S. attack on Falluja.

Of course many more Iraqis than US troops have been killed in the Iraq war. The US military refuses to count how many.




Organizers created a labyrinth whose paths were outlined by civilian shoes, so that visitors to the exhibit could walk meditatively among the reminders of the fallen.

Good Friday, 2005

This makeshift crucifix just outside a fence was the backdrop today for a Good Friday commemoration called "Rolling away the stone of empire: a service of worship and witness" at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab in California.

About 200 people took part in prayers and then processed to the gates of the lab where some 30 or so volunteers crossed a line and were arrested.


Ched Myers of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries in Los Angeles preached to the crowd. A long-time social change activist, he is a board member and past contributing editor of Sojourners magazine and a leader of the American Friends Service Committee.

Familiar friends


Those who were choosing to risk arrest at the gates of the lab were given stoles. Others were asked to sign those stoles to signal our community, even when the arrests would break our fellowship.


The gathered people actively recalled Fr. Bill O'Donnell whose life long witness for peace, justice and good cheer ended unexpectedly last December. Fr. Bill ¡Presente!

Good Women of the Times, part 2

Yes, the reporters in the New York Times whose work most speaks to me are women. Not that there aren't male reporters whose work I admire: Eric Lichtblau on the Justice Department beat comes to mind, perhaps because he interviewed me about our "no fly list" case. His stuff is solid, workmanlike, and that's a complement, given the sloppy repeating of transparent official fictions that too often passes for journalism. (Think one of my least favorite women reporters, Judith Miller, for example.) But Nina Bernstein and today's subject give the news a precisely detailed, visual, and humane vitality that few others match.

Somini Sengupta

While Bernstein delves into the dark corners of welfare offices in Queens, Sengupta travels the world. Since I've noticed her work, she's has reported from West Africa, Iraq and now South Asia. Considering the long route that led her to the Times, perhaps that should not be surprising:

Somini Sengupta was born in born in Calcutta, India. She lived in midwestern Canada for three short years, then was raised mostly in Southern California. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 1988 with B.A. in English and Development Studies.

Sengupta worked as a radio producer, a cocktail waitress, and as a community organizer for a few years before joining the Metpro minority training program at the Los Angeles Times in the summer of 1992. She was employed at Newsday on Long Island for two years and came to the New York Times metro section in October 1995. She served as West Africa bureau chief based in Dakar, Senegal, until moved to New Delhi in early 2005.

Sengupta's reporting from Iraq caught my eye because it highlighted how living with the horrendous mess the US has made there feels to ordinary Iraqis. In the summer of 2004, one of her stories was headlined "In Iraq, the Most Coveted Item is Now a Passport." This story not only reports the frustration and anger of Iraqis who hope to emigrate to escape daily violence and chaos under occupation, but also the quiet desperation of young people whose only hope of employment is abroad. Just as poor South Asians and Filipinos brave the dangers of Iraq to take menial jobs for the conquerors, Iraqis are attracted to brokers who claim to offer jobs in Malaysia.

That promise brought three friends, all trained in Iraqi universities to teach Arabic, to the passport line this morning. One of them, Sami Jabbar, 29, was almost certain he would receive a two-year contract on a timber plantation in Malaysia. It would be his first trip out of Iraq.…

The company making the arrangements for Mr. Jabbar has already arranged to send 750 men from Nasariya, its chief, Abdul Rasoul Hussein, said in an interview in his office. In August, an additional 700 Baghdadis, all men in their 20's, are scheduled to be shipped off to Malaysia. Most are to be hired as loggers and drivers.

"If we found work here, we wouldn't be leaving," said Mr. Jabbar's friend, Sabah Abdul Hussein.

Brave as her reporting from Iraq seems, I found her accounts of West Africa even more audacious. Sengupta actually seemed to believe that her calling as a journalist was to communicate to ignorant readers in the United States what was behind the complex civil war in the Ivory Coast. For example, this article certainly helped me get a sense of the deadly social stew resulting from residual French meddling in its former colony mixed with indigenous greed for property and local concern for "pure bloodlines."

Now that Sengupta is in South Asia, she again is giving us a picture that mixes sociological analysis with telling detail. In Pakistan Is Booming Since 9/11, at Least for the Well-Off, she introduces readers to one of the boom's beneficiaries:

Umar Sheikh, 31, British-born, New York-trained and married to a woman from New Jersey, long dreamed of running his own restaurant. London was too expensive. New York was too risky. Karachi seemed just right.

His gamble, in this restive port city better known for its religious radicals than its ravioli, has worked so far. Limoncello, Mr. Sheikh's cozy Italian-inspired fine dining spot with lemon-colored walls and a kebab-free menu that features arugula and Norwegian salmon, is thriving.

… The well-off, at least, are living extremely well. …"I'm getting a lot of corporate heads, a lot of nouveau riche, people who come from abroad who are not necessarily wealthy but are educated about cuisine," said Mr. Sheikh, the son of Pakistani immigrants to Britain. "People want high-end products."

For some reporters, the emergence of Pakistani "yuppies" might have been enough, but Sengupta makes sure her readers know that there are other Pakistanis for whom the boom means little.

Kaneez Gazar, a housemaid in her 40's who came to Karachi to escape the grinding poverty of her own village, offered a smile when asked about her country's economic growth. "We earn, we eat," is how she put it.

Between her own earnings and those of her two daughters, also housemaids, the family brings in about $100 a month. Half of that goes to rent. The prices of sugar and butter have gone up. She must buy water from a private tanker. With her heart ailment and her daughter's chronic cough, there are medical bills to pay. Hanging over her head is a $420 debt for an older daughter's wedding.

Still, she says, life in Karachi has meant a measure of dignity. "At least I'm feeding myself," she said. "At least we get clothes and shoes."

It is Pakistan's deeply stratified society that makes some analysts skeptical of how and when the spoils at the top will filter down to those among the 150 million Pakistanis who still barely scrape by. A study last December by the Social Policy and Development Center, a Karachi-based research institute, reported that of every rupee of economic growth, 34 percent went to the richest 10 percent of the population, and only 3 percent to the poorest 10 percent.

This is the kind of reporting that makes checking out the Times every morning worthwhile.

Good Women of the Times, part 1

Every morning I read the New York Times online. I know, this is asking for morning apoplexy, but the practice has become a habit since 9/11 and I can't seem to stop. Actually I mostly skim the headlines and the two sentence descriptions of articles and figure I can skip them. But there are a few bylines that ensure I'll stop for a look.
Nina Bernstein
Nina Bernstein is a journalist I've read avidly since the 90s when I was working to preserve some shreds of "welfare" from Bill Clinton's "Welfare Reform." In her 2001 book The Lost Children of Wilder Bernstein told hard truths about a foster care system that destroys many families and children as well as saving some. Publisher's Weekly described the tale:

In this first-rate investigation, New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein explores the genesis and aftermath of the landmark 1973 legal case filed by young ACLU attorney Marcia Lowry against the New York State foster-care system. Known as Wilder for its 14-year-old African-American plaintiff, Shirley "Pinky" Wilder, the suit claimed Jewish and Catholic child welfare services had a lock on foster care funding and placements. … Bernstein illuminates broader social issues through the story of Shirley; Lamont, the son she bore at 14; and Lamont's young son--all graduates of New York's hellish child welfare system. …

It took 25 years and many more lawsuits before the reforms mandated by Wilder began to be realized. In the interim, Lamont endured the same excruciating experiences his mother had suffered, including physical and sexual abuse, homelessness, witnessing the deaths of other children in foster care and losing his own child to the foster care system. A crack addict, Shirley died of AIDS at 40. Despite these horrors, the book ends with the hopeful postscript that Lamont's son currently lives with his mother, Kisha, and visits his now self-supporting father on weekends. @ 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Bernstein stuck with the foster care story for years, while moving from a job at Newsday to one at the New York Times. And she stuck with the evolving story of the welfare "deform" long after most people in the US thought that saga was over. In 2000 she broke the story of how New York City's notion of job readiness for former welfare recipients was to train them to be telephone psychics.

The city's welfare department has been recruiting welfare recipients to work from home as telephone psychics since April. …

Clairvoyance is not among the qualifications listed on the city's recruitment flier. Any public assistance recipient with a high school equivalency degree, "a caring and compassionate personality" and the ability "to read, write and speak English" can qualify for Psychic Network's "minimum starting salary of $10 per hour, plus bonuses," the flier says. Those interested are asked to call Business Link, a division of the city's Human Resources Administration that finds and trains workers from the welfare rolls, and to sign up for a group screening session.

"What if I'm not a psychic?" a caller to Business Link asked.

"They'll train you," the city employee who answered the telephone replied. Ms. Reinecke said that applicants were trained to read tarot cards by a representative from Psychic Network at the city's Business Link office on West 34th Street.

More recently Bernstein has been digging through the accounts of people swept up and detained in the post 9/11 panic about immigrant "terrorists." In 2004, she tracked down Nepalese former detainee Purna Raj Bajracharya who fell under suspicion for making a "tourist video" of Queens office buildings and a pizzeria where he'd worked. Though quickly cleared by the FBI, he "spent almost three months in a 6-by-9-foot cell kept lighted 24 hours a day."

He said he was stripped naked in the federal jail. "I was manhandled and treated badly," he said, becoming agitated. "I was very, very embarrassed even to look around, because I was naked.…

On Dec. 6, in a secret hearing room in the prison, [Ms. Cassin, his legal aid attorney,] said, she watched him carried in by three burly officers of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, shackled so completely that he could not move. "He's tiny," she said. "His feet didn't even touch the floor.…"

Ms. Cassin said she pleaded with the prison doctor to put him in the general prison population, but the doctor said he was crying so much he would cause a riot.

After three months, Bajracharya was shipped, shackled, to Nepal, cleared of any wrongdoing except overstaying his visa.

In 2005, Bernstein has been writing about the fate of asylum seekers, refugees the US promises under international law to admit to the country, if they claim a "well founded fear of persecution." The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an agency created by Congress in 1998, reported that such people are treated like criminals.

In 2003, 5,585 men and 1,015 women seeking asylum were jailed. …Severe psychological damage is among the effects of throwing people seeking refuge together with criminals in "stark conditions," the report said, describing 24-hour lights, chained walks to go eat, no privacy even to use the toilet and little chance to exercise outdoors. Detainees are allowed to work but paid $1 a day.

Five of the 19 detention centers examined had mental health staff, and none had guards trained to work with victims of torture or repression. In most places the treatment for those considered suicidal was solitary confinement. A footnote pointed out that isolation was "likely to exacerbate depression," not prevent suicide.

"The whole detention system is there to break you down further," one former detainee told interviewers in the report. "You are not even allowed to cry. If you do, they take you to isolation."

Since Bernstein wrote this story, the House has passed a whole new set of hoops designed to further discourage people fleeing persecution from coming to the US. Then House leaders attached the law to the "must pass" spending bill for Iraq and tsunami aid.

Next time you see Nina Bernstein's byline, remember to take a look. The story is sure to be important, human and well told.

Glacier going, going, almost gone…

The volcanic crater at the summit of Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain, as it has not been seen before in 11,000 years. The snow and glaciers that have crowned it in all that time are melting and by 2020 are likely to have disappeared completely.

This image by Alex Majoli appears in a new book NORTHSOUTHEASTWESTa 360 degree view of climate change being sold for the benefit of The Climate Group, a leadership coalition of organizations committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

For a picture showing the shrinkage of the glacial coverage of the mountain over time, check out this.

I thought it might be fun to display some pictures of what those sublimating glaciers look like when you stand next to them near 19,000 feet above sea level. The glaciers lie around a huge crater plateau; the actual summit is on the edge of the rim. Below is kind of the ant's eye view, in contrast to the giant's view above.


Looking down on a scrap of glacier


Reusch Crater up close; it still smells of sulfur


One of the remaining vast glacial walls as seen from the actual summit, 600 feet above the plain where the crater lies.

A Failed Generational Leadership Transition

Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC) and Valencia Gardens

Eric Quezada, formerly of MHDC resident services,
speaks to "Save Mission Housing" press conference, March 21, 2005

On March 21, 2005, the new Valencia Gardens housing complex in San Francisco had its official groundbreaking. Anyone who has seen the site knows that foundations have been going in for weeks, but this was the day for the dignitaries to show themselves in this rough neighborhood. Valencia Garden’s 248 sub-standard low-income units are about to be replaced with 260 new low-income apartments, thanks to the unique partnership between a locally-based, non-profit developer Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC) and the Valencia Gardens Resident’s Council. Unlike many federally funded "improvements" to aging public housing that amount to schemes to remove poor people, this development partnership means that the folks who lived in the decayed old project will get first chance at coming back to new homes.

This seems like a happy story and we can hope that it will continue to be. But as was reported by the San Francisco Bay Guardian of March 8, 2005, "about a year ago, the nonprofit Mission Housing Development Corp. … abruptly decided to shift its basic mission and focus. Instead of concentrating on building permanently affordable housing for low-income people, the board of directors decided, the MHDC would start looking into joint ventures with for-profit developers and looking toward building higher-end housing for people who could afford to buy their own homes."

Over the last year, two thirds of the MHDC staff have been fired or quit. According to former workers who are represented by SEIU Local 790, the MHDC Board "has also eliminated services at almost all MHDC family buildings, systematically dismantling the community-empowerment services model for which MHDC was respected. They have squandered community resources on P.R. consultants, attorney fees, and management perks. They have engaged in aggressive anti-labor practices including outsourcing union jobs to consultants and temps, hiring private investigators to interrogate staff, and creating a hostile work-environment by harassing staff with guards."

Former staff and North Mission community members fear that the MHDC Board may not deliver the services promised to the residents of Valencia Gardens.

What happened to MHDC? I believe that MHDC fell victim to a failed generational transition of a sort that is afflicting many contemporary non-profit community organizations.

Back in the early 70s there were in the Mission many brave Chicano and other Latino guys (and some less visible Chicanas and Latinas too) who had had enough of being treated as brown working scum by the white establishment of San Francisco. They organized; they protested police brutality; they founded community organizations. MHDC was one of those organizations. Because it was how such things were done and because it was how you got grants, both from private foundations and sometimes the government, their community organization took the form of a non-profit; they needed a board, so the founders were the board.

Time went on and the pioneer founders turned out to be successful people who had a lot of skills that enabled them to make a success of themselves in business and government. Many of them stopped living in the Mission; they'd made it against great odds -- why shouldn't they raise their families in a nice suburb? Meanwhile the organization they had founded prospered and began to be run day to day by professional staff who had the expertise to jump the financial hoops necessary to create low-income housing in the 'hood -- but who also were starting out in life, often lived in the Mission and had a vision of empowering the diverse residents.

But the MHDC organizational structure, the primitive non-profit, had never evolved with the organization. The same good old boys were still the Board. And they thought of MHDC as their show, though they no longer worked there. And when politics in San Francisco pushed them out of the center of the action with a change of mayors, it seemed just and normal to them that they should go back to running "their" organization. There was a lot of money floating around in the housing development world; without necessarily being venal, they couldn't see why after their years of "service to the community" (after being pioneers) they shouldn't get a piece of the action, or at least a well-paid consultant's job. They also saw nothing wrong with moving the mission of MHDC toward building housing that would become privately owned; after all, wasn't that what they'd done when they succeeded in the US?

Meanwhile the professional MHDC staff responded to organizational growth by unionizing. And they began to agitate for term limits on the Board and resident representation in organizational governance. The Board looked on these demands as an attempted coup in "their" organization -- and began to get rid of the "troublemakers." The funders, including the City of San Francisco, looked at the turmoil at MHDC and turned off the taps. And now the wonderful new Valencia Gardens may be something of an orphan in a neighborhood rapidly gentrifying but without one of the historic pillars of community leadership.

The Board at MHDC are (like this blogger) Boomers. As insurgent youth, they broke new ground for their communities by fighting for civil rights and community empowerment. They are proud that they pried open opportunities that their families had never had before. They easily delude themselves that they are still those insurgent youths. And they have no model for gracefully allowing those who come after them to take over leadership. Insofar as their models would have been older US radicals, they followed no models, because McCarthyism had ensured that there was no visible older radical generation. And insofar as their models were immigrants, the dynamism of contemporary US society tore them away from their parents' ways as they seized a new space for themselves in the new country.

We Boomers have to give up the pretense of youth and let new generations lead. We're done as leaders, though we still know things that can be very useful to those who follow. MHDC is not at all unusual in foundering on the rock of generational transition, far too many community organizations have similar troubles. How do we make this necessary process go more smoothly?

Democracy in Iraq hobbled

What do I mean, "Democracy denied in Iraq" for a changing number of days on the right side of this page. I mean the US has managed to give Iraq a "democracy" that looks something like a jerry-built children's bike hobbled with training wheels.

Think about this for a moment. On January 30, with worldwide fanfare, trumpeted with all possible volume by the world's news purveyors, millions of Iraqis cast ballots for a new government -- and millions of other Iraqis didn't. The event was wildly contradictory. For security reasons, the whole country was locked down and driving prohibited for several days. US occupation forces stood by to blow away any visible resistance. Meanwhile newly enfranchised Shias and Kurds mobbed polling places, proudly displaying their ink-marked fingers. Sunni Arabs mostly stayed home, if anyone dared open their polling places in insurgent controlled areas.

Then it took weeks to count all those votes. Weeks. Iraqis and some around the world wondered what was happening. Finally it was announced that the list brought together by Shia religious leaders had won a narrow, but clear, majority of the 275 seats in a new Transitional Assembly.

Now in any normal parliamentary system, the party that wins a majority gets to form a government, name a prime minister, and start ruling. But the US-written Transitional Law sets up lots more hurdles for the Iraqis to jump through before they get self-rule. First they have to set up a "presidency council" endorsed by two thirds rather than a majority of the representatives. Then that council gets to elect a prime minister.

Not surprisingly, the majority Shia list is now having to scramble to make a coalition with Kurds to move toward getting a government in place. And that's not easy because they have genuinely different interests. So there is stalemate. And still no Iraqi government.

The stalemate is NOT the Iraqis doing. It should bear the label "Made in the USA."

"A second Tsunami in the making…"

Gihan Perera is an old acquaintance, currently visiting his country of origin, Sri Lanka. He is chronicling his current visit to the coastal village his people came from at his blog.

Some of his descriptions are devastating:

We headed toward Galle and the office of the Southern Fisheries Solidarity office. We did not travel far before we encountered amazing destruction. Just before Hikaduwa, in an area called Thelawatta, began a never ending campground. Literally, the entire area looked like an American national park campground. What appeared to be campground facilities were the foundations of what used to be homes. Thousands upon thousands of them all down Galle road. The only thing that remained were fragments of homes and churches with huge holes through brick walls, or just a brick wall, but mostly just brick remnants. I would say it was like a war zone, but there was little debris for the amount of destruction. The sea had taken that too. It looked more like a giant coral reef along a sea bed. Every once in a while people like fish would come out of the walls, behind which they are still living.

But bad as the tsunami was, the Sri Lankan government's push for tourist development is about to make the lives of the survivors even worse. Telling the traumatized people that another wave will certainly come soon, fisherpeople are forced to move inland.

In their place, tourist hotels will be built on the beaches. Gihan again:

It is a massive plastic reconstruction. The plan forces fishermen and entire communities to move out and make way for modern superhighways, shopping centers, and mega hotels.

It is a disaster.…Those who suffered the most are again being washed away. And it won't work. The coastal areas are already experiencing a tremendous population increase and heavy land pressures as more and more people are displaced from farming lands in the interior. This policy will result in nothing but squatter zones along the tourist belt and a never-ending process of trying to bulldoze them.

And OUR aid we've donated is going toward the forced removals:

What’s worse, the scheme is being funded by YOUR generositiy. All the international aid organizations are being forced to funnel their money and programs through the Sri Lankan government. All the good people who thought they were giving their money to help directly effected communities, may actually be helping to displace them.

The least we can do is demand that our government and the charities to which we contributed not add to human misery in Sri Lanka.

"No rational purpose for limiting marriage to opposite-sex partners"

I am supposed to have views on gay marriage. After all, I am a lesbian, happily partnered for 25 years – and my ex and her partner are plaintiffs on one of the lawsuits working their way through the California courts.

On an interim basis, we won one yesterday. A local judge, a Catholic and a Republican at that, concluded that “No rational purpose exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners.” Frankly, well duuh! And there was more: the prohibition “cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional.” So this will get appealed and opponents will howl and maybe some more states will pass bans on gay marriage.

I certainly applaud the lawyers and the plaintiffs and even the gay marriage campaigners who pushed into the public consciousness the massive inequities under which our “illegal” partnerships suffer. It actually is legally difficult and expensive to protect your joint life when you can’t get married -- think no health insurance and rapacious relatives who want to steal your property from your partner when you die.

But I have a hard time putting this issue in the foreground of my concerns, even as a lesbian. The problems visible gay folks have getting employed worry me a lot more. The danger of getting bashed by a bigot also remains real. Then there is what still happens to gay kids: thrown out by their crazy fundamentalist families, they wander to the streets of San Francisco and end up hooking and shooting dope. Now there is something to worry about!

The US federal budget (a pre-primer)and its religious critics

The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold, presiding bishop, The Episcopal Church, (left)
and the Rev. H. George Anderson, presiding bishop, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

Yeah, the US budget. Do I go to sleep now or maybe I should take up watching paint dry?

And yet, and yet … people are going to live or die because of what the Congresscritters and White House conservative ideologues to get away with.

Here’s a handy guide to the process by which Congress writes one of these every year. The important thing to know is that they try, by April 15, to pass something called a “Budget Resolution.” This sets out the general plan for the actual budget. There’s a big fight over it, but things can change a lot in the next phases.

After the Budget Resolution, comes “Reconciliation.” This can mean some simple tinkering to make sure that general plan really fits with the facts – or it can be where tax cuts get proposed and programs get cut to the bone. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warns that the Republicans intend slip in making President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy permanent in this part of the process. And this is when they can decide how many people will lose their Medicaid to make up the funding gap caused by the tax cuts. Nitty gritty stuff. Reconciliation usually takes from May to August, sometimes longer.

Finally they get to the “Appropriations” phase. None of the foregoing ensures that any money is going anywhere. From September through December, Congress brings up and passes the various departmental appropriation bills, usually combined into great blockbuster monstrosities with something for everyone. These constitute the actual Federal Budget for the year ahead. The result is impenetrably complicated and ill-understood by most Congresspeople voting on it, because nobody could know all of it. If Congress can’t get it done on time, they pass “continuing resolutions” that keep money flowing to programs until they sort it out.

The process gives enormous power to Congressional leadership (all conservative Republicans) who can decide when elements will be voted on and what can be slipped in under the radar. The Democrats will do well if they can at least bring the worst budget decisions into the public light and force the Republicans to retract a very few of them.

So what are they going to do to us in this year’s budget? Well, we won’t hear about the spending they plan to do on their war in Iraq. That’s "outside the budget," a “supplemental” appropriation. Nice, huh?

But the general picture looks to include making the Bush tax cuts for rich people permanent and slashing programs for low income people from Medicaid to CHIP (children’s health plan) to the EITC (earned income tax credit). That last one is particularly vile – it would amount to a tax increase on the poorest earners.

It is not surprising that the Republican budget plan has mainline Protestant religious leaders denouncing it.

"Like many Americans, we read our daily newspaper through the lens of faith, and when we see injustice, it is our duty to say so.… The 2006 Federal Budget that President Bush has sent to Capitol Hill is unjust. … According to the White House's own numbers, this budget would move 300,000 people off food stamps in the next five years. It would cut the funds that allow 300,000 children to receive day care. It would reduce funding for Medicaid by $45 billion over the next ten years, and this at a time when 45 million Americans-the highest level on record-are already without health insurance.

…Some contend that works of mercy are not the business of the government but of private citizens. But in what other area of our national life do we formulate policies uninformed by our deepest values?

Some contend that with the proper support faith-based charities will step forward to fill the gap created by the government's retreat. But this flies in the face of the lessons that we, as religious leaders, have learned first hand. Our churches operate thousands of charities from the parochial to the international. Believe us when we tell you that neither we, nor our Evangelical brothers and sisters, nor our friends of other faiths have anywhere near the resources to turn back the rising tide of poverty in this country.

Nice to have the values guys (don’t seem to be any women among the leaders cited) on board for justice!

Revenge = Death

On March 11, the first anniversary of the terrible train bombing in Madrid which killed 191 and injured another 1900, I found this quote from a Spaniard describing what she felt after the attack.

"I saw people gathering in the streets, asking for justice, not revenge. We don't want another Guantanamo, we don't want a war, just the terrorists to be taken to court with all the constitutional guarantees. Because we are a democracy."

This year's Madrid international conference on terrorism (little reported in the US) featured speaker after speaker making the same point:
Javier Solana, EU foreign policy coordinator and former head of NATO, said respect for democracy had to be paramount. "In the struggle against terrorism we should be the first to uphold democratic values. It would be our first defeat if we resort to the methods of the terrorists."
Club of Madrid chief and former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso said states must not take a the-end-justifies-the-means approach. "One can resort to the use of force if it is necessary -- but it must strictly adhere to international law."
Mary Robinson, a former Irish president and former UN high commissioner for refugees, warned of "a knock-on effect of a lowering of (democratic) standards" by some countries.
Even George Soros, the billionaire US financier, told Spanish radio station Cadena Ser, "The attitude of creating innocent victims creates terrorists. It's as simple as that. [The Bush Administration has] violated international law by using torture."

These are not modern or novel insights: the ancient Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, called a "good emperor" for his temperate rule, advised "To refrain from imitation is the best revenge."

So what is it about contemporary US culture and society that makes us prey to leaders who responded to 9/11 by letting "loose the dogs of war?" (Yes, Shakespeare was talking about revenge too.)

Can it really be too many John Wayne movies? Surely our romantic enthusiasm for superheros is part of it. And surely another factor is that the people of this land have not suffered the reality of war in our own backyard for well over 100 years; we do not share the experiential wisdom of most peoples that almost any fate is preferable to war.

But above all, so far, our institutions have not been up to the task of restraining our lawless emotions. We were hurt, dramatically, on 9/11 and somebody has to suffer. We don't feel that legal responses, cooperation with allies, locking up terrorists, trying them, and imprisoning them up would be enough to satisfy our desire for revenge.

Can a complex and heavily armed society survive in which the rule of law is not felt good enough to govern our interactions? Much of what we consider the progress of human history has been about channeling our conflicts into non-violent institutions. We seem unable to remember that. Yes, we are cursed with elected rulers goading us to act on our base emotions; and we have chosen to reward them.

But if we actually want to survive as a species, letting ourselves be ruled by our hatreds and fears won't help us. The rest of the world seems bent on quarantining the dangerous US monster; those of us within the beast must strive as long as it takes to reshackle the lawless beast we've loosed.

Here's another solid piece of folk wisdom: While seeking revenge, dig two graves -- one for yourself.