Pelosi blows hot air

Got an email from my Congrescritter, Nancy Pelosi, today. I write her a lot, so I figure this is the current canned reply. Let's see what she has to say:

The new Democratic majority in Congress is working to take the country in a New Direction ...

Do the people that write these things believe we are such dimwits that capitalizing a meaningless adjective and noun will convince us they really have a plan? Apparently.

There is no more important task before us than to bring our troops home safely and soon, and we will continue to work to do so. However, I believe impeachment proceedings against the President or the Vice President will not contribute to attaining that goal.

This might have been the prelude for, minimally, some explanation why the Speaker doesn't not believe that an impeachment inquiry would help end the war. But this announcement of "non-impeachment" isn't the prelude to anything -- no suggestion how the Democratic majority that Pelosi leads DOES intend to end the war. They aren't even trying -- they just continue to whine about George W. Bush.

Instead the letter jumps immediately to "Congressional Oversight".

The Constitution gives the Congress a crucial role in overseeing the Executive Branch in order to protect the American people against overreaching, incompetence, and corruption. For the last six years, under Republican leadership, Congress failed to conduct its proper oversight role and did not take action to address the extent of the mismanagement of our Iraq policy, widespread corruption by contractors in Iraq, and the failed response to Hurricane Katrina. ... Please be assured that upholding Congress' constitutional responsibility to oversee the activities of the Executive Branch will continue to be among my highest priorities.

I would have been more impressed by this suggestion if I didn't know that in the last few days Pelosi (and her comrade in capitulation Rahm Emanuel of the DCCC) had stopped Rep. John Conyers from issuing subpoenas to stonewalling Bushies, Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers. The "leadership" apparently fears any confrontation with the White House "at this time." Without persistent legal pressure, there will be no oversight. Bush appointees will continue to lie to and thumb their noses at the "overseers."

Apparently there's something in the inside the Beltway air that leads to lying to people. I like better what we are hearing from Pelosi's neighboring Congressperson to the north, Rep. Lynn Woolsey. She has another idea.

"You folks should go after the Democrats," she said on a conference call last month, organized by the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

"I’d hate to lose the majority, but I’m telling you, if we don’t stand up to our responsibility, maybe that’s the lesson to be learned," Woolsey said.

Madame Speaker isn't going to like that suggestion. I imagine Woolsey, a genuine war opponent and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, got some heat on that one.

No guns here...

If you live in New York or California, you are probably not used to the idea that most states have laws that permit the carrying of concealed weapons in many public places. In most of those permissive states, private entities can regulate whether you can pack your gun on their property. The result is frequent signage that states the rules.

Here are a couple of samples:


That one was here, in Las Vegas.


Somehow, this one is even more disconcerting:


I often wonder how foreign visitors see us.

The making of one Minuteman

When the Raging Grannies theatrically exorcised "hate" from their town at the site of an announced anti-immigrant Minuteman demonstration, they found only one self-proclaimed Minuteman. Story here.

This guy was not much of a hater. In fact, I'd call him amiable. In many ways he was a normal, northern California white 40-50 year old blue-collar guy. Perhaps better informed than many. He knew that the decline of the unions began with Reagan firing the PATCO strikers; he hates the Iraq war and thinks George W. Bush is the worst President ever. That is, he fits right in, except he is a Minuteman.

Here's what he had to say, a composite of his conversation with the very polite Grannies who surrounded him and a talk the two of us had afterward. (I've recreated this conversation from memory and quick notes; I hope and believe it is accurate, but it was not recorded.)

You want to know why I'm out here? It's this simple. When my union, the Carpenters' Union, gave up residential [construction], my life was destroyed.

I was making $40 an hour. Now I make $20.88 an hour. Are you willing to give up half of everything you earn to these people for the rest of your life? Are you?

But it is worse than that. I used to love my work. I built roofs. That's technical; you have to do the math and calculate and get it right. I was thinking all the time. I'd have a crew of guys. And we'd bid a roof on one of these luxury houses, and I'd go out there with a couple of apprentices, because you have to learn your skills to do this work, and we'd knock it off and we'd make some money.

But then the union gave up residential construction. The developers on those jobs get a bunch of illegals and they throw up crummy houses real fast and don't have to pay the illegals hardly anything.

Meanwhile, all I've done for 13 years is bang away on those boxes you see in developments. I haven't had an apprentice for 13 years; sure, new hires come in, but they just set them tying steel or setting [framing] plates for four years. They don't learn how to do anything.

For the roofs, they bring in prefabricated trusses from Canada. Nobody does any thinking anymore. And the truck drivers -- they are Sikhs with those headdresses.

I'm not a racist. My partner I have worked with for 13 years is a Latino.

But those illegals, they are just taking our jobs. The union business agent came in the other day. I was sitting at lunch with the white guys, the old time guys, and he read off a list -- he says, "you got 3 guys using the same name on this job." That is, he is tipping off the foreman some of these guys are using phony social security numbers they stole somewhere. So the job should clean it up or maybe there might be some trouble.

It is all so rotten. I am just hanging on a few more years til I can quit and get my union pension.

[My question: how come there is any union housing built still? The way you tell it, obviously all the developers could build more cheaply without union labor?]

That's a good question. Don't know. Oh, maybe it is because the developers on these big tracts get some money from the state and then there are rules they have to use union labor. At least I have a job until I can get out of this.

But I get so mad at those politicians who say that no Americans will do this work. I love my job and so did a lot of guys. And no, you can't convert me.

Let's unpack what our "nice Minuteman" has to say. Coming from a background in working in construction myself, I hear a lot of home truths and some pretty garden variety misapprehensions and conventional racism here.

This guy has been hammered by two realities in the contemporary U.S. that trashed his expectations in life. He thought he was entitled to a path that is gone.

The first blow was that during his lifetime, construction has been "rationalized" and deskilled. If business can get things done, even shoddily, by organizing production and maintenance in ways that don't require skills, it will. This is cheaper, more profitable. Most of us see this more commonly in arenas outside construction. We see that cash registers don't have numbers any more, they have labels for menu items or even just icons to punch in what you bought. Heck, more and more stores have scanning equipment for your groceries so they don't even need to pay some one to punch in your purchases.

Similarly very few car problems actually require human diagnosis and skill to repair and maintain. Diagnosis is done by a computer; repair consists of swapping out parts. The person doing the job is still called a "mechanic" but neither years of experience nor creative thought is required of the worker.

Building houses has undergone a similar transformation in our Minuteman's lifetime. Builders always hired a good number of "construction gorillas," young males who would work their butts off doing grunt work on foundations and framing. But, for the smart and imaginative, there were advancement paths to parts of the jobs that used skill and experience. Our Minuteman was following one of those paths, and loving it, when developers were able to shut it down and replace skill with mass-produced designs and cheap labor. Building houses no longer requires or values brains. What a blow to a proud craftsman!

And the rest of us need to understand that if houses were built in ways that required more skill, housing would cost even more than it does today.

The second blow for this guy was that, though he's still in a union, it couldn't defend his wages and life path. It's true the Carpenters Union gave up on smaller luxury construction projects where skill still had commanded a premium wage. First the developers got givebacks, then, by the mid-90s, they got away with doing without union crews altogether. Whether this happened because the unions were hampered by bad labor laws, or there was union corruption, or unions just had too many fires to fight at once, the result was the end of the good jobs that gave this guy an opportunity to do work he was proud of.

On top of these real blows to his pride and his standard of living, our nice Minuteman does participate in the conventional, low level, everyday racism of white folks in this society. That is, he honestly does not hate anyone he knows or works with. He's not at all vicious. But he simply assumes he and his kind have a first right to whatever goodies the society has to offer. He suspects that any "other" person must be cheating to get treatment equal to his. That's just normal racism, something just about every white person shares in this country, unless they've worked hard to eradicate it.
***
Most Minutemen, if I'm to believe the Southern Poverty Law Center and anti-hate journalist David Neiwert -- and I do believe them -- aren't nearly such smart, nice people as our guy in Campbell. But progressives need to understand that the experiences of these folks point to a series of failures by progressives that will haunt us until we do something about them.

• We've failed to demand any better values from our social structures than "cheaper and more profitable." Climate crisis may force us to recognize this; meanwhile, our cancerously-growing capitalist societies are littered with broken human lives.

• We've allowed the destruction of the organizations of workers, the unions. Sure, placing blame can be complicated. But it is still a fact that people who have a union will live better, more securely, and happier than those who don't. Rules and regulations could make unionization easier and more common.

• This country was founded in racism. Whenever feeling threatened, it is almost instinctive for white folks to look around for someone with different skin color or different religion or a different language to blame. And the racist virus is catching -- part of assimilating to this country is developing that racist reflex. This is profoundly maladaptive in our global environment.

***
The Raging Grannies would want me to point out that this one "nice" Minuteman is not representative of the ones they've met at these protests. A Granny writes, this is

NOT true for the other Minutemen who have shown up in the past! One asked a granny "how would you enjoy being anally raped by a Mexican."

Those kind of attitudes are probably more much representative of many Minutemen.

Street theater in the California 'burbs

Well, actually the location was at the Campbell-San Jose border, so the place counts as an urban area. But to a city dweller, it seems an undistinguished agglomeration of wide streets, hostile to pedestrians, and consisting mostly of malls populated by cookie-cutter chain stores. Here the Raging Grannies of the Peninsula turned out yesterday in force to greet any Minutemen who actually showed for their own demonstration against immigration. In reality there was only one Minuteman and a most amiable one at that. I'll muse on his story in another post.


These women weren't about to let all those cars whip by without noticing them!


And they understand they can create their own environment, if they are willing to be outrageous enough!




The aim was to "clean up hate," to exorcise the corner where the Minutemen would have gathered (if there had been more than one.)




Wands were waved; songs were sung.


Grannie Ruth invoked spirits.


Meanwhile supporters actually engaged a few equally out of place passersby in conversation.

When I attend events like this, I make it a practice to park some slight distance away and approach on foot. I see the gathering more as others do that way. At this one, I parked away from the gleaming Whole Foods plaza, in a seedy strip mall.

Returning to my car, I was reminded that massive immigration is bringing enormous disruptions and opportunities to people who live pretty much under the radar of both the one Minuteman and the Grannies.


Opposite where I'd parked, some people buy their familiar foods and send their remittances to families far away. Many worlds meet at the border of San Jose and Campbell, California.

San Franciscans: Join Beach Impeach 3

We may not be able to stop our Congresscritters from caving in to the Preznit on Iraq, but we can deliver our message with our bodies next Saturday, Sept. 15 at 1pm at Crissy Field.

Visit the Beach Impeach website for more information and SIGN UP. If you've ever organized anything, you know the challenges of getting a large group together on a project. So let the organizer know you are coming and you'll get humorous encouraging emails and all the necessary updates.

See you there!

Bin Laden video

Nice to see the mainstream media doing its part to spread fear and confusion by promoting the Al Qaeda brand. Above, Channel 2 in New York City sends a reporter to Ground Zero to ask people inane questions about the as-yet-unseen, but pre-announced, message from the 9/11 perp.

The NeoCons need their bogeyman partner in the crime of making wars of choice on the innocent. Wonder if they have him stuffed somewhere, ready to be pulled out as needed?

A message from a U.S. soldier

Visitors here may have noticed that I've recently added the blogroll of the Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus to the sidebar. This a group of blogs that agree on some simple propositions:

• Opposed to Iraq Supplemental Appropriations Bills.

• Opposed to funding Bush's Iraq Occupation Debacle.

• Committed to getting the troops home as soon as possible.

• Determined to end George W. Bush's Iraq and Mid-East Debacle as quickly as possible.

• Determined to restore some sanity to the world.

You know, the basics. Check some of these folks out; we all approach things differently, but we try to keep it real.

New blogs sign on to OOIBC frequently. Today Army of Dude joined up. The author has just completed a tour of duty as a grunt in Iraq. He's on his way home after 400 days. He's got a lesson he wants us to understand:

Do not wage war unless it is absolutely, positively the last ditch effort for survival.

I was a struggling senior in high school when the invasion took place, and I supported it. I was mesmerized by the way we raced across the desert and took Baghdad in less than a month. War was a sleek, glossy commercial on TV, and we always won at the end. It’s easy to be for a war when you have absolutely no connection with it. Patriotism lead me to believe what we were doing was right and noble. What a difference a deployment can make.

The public can do something about this. It doesn’t have to be a hopeless cause forever. Write your Congressmen, go to a rally, read as much as you can about Iraq to see it for what it is: a place men go to lose their minds and their lives. And most importantly, love your children. Teach them that war is not honorable, it’s no plaything cast with an indifferent hand. It’s the most terrible thing man ever brought to the world.

If you are not sure about that, read the archives at Army of Dude.

Hero: Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA

If we don't all get blown up or irradiated, this man will have a lot to do with it. Since 1997, Egyptian-born Mohamed ElBaradei has served as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a United Nations agency that tries to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and control "peaceful" nukes so they don't end up as bombs.

He is not the U.S.'s favorite guy. He was skeptical of charges that Saddam Hussein was developing nukes and debunked the Niger uranium sale forgeries that were part of the U.S. case for the Iraq war. The U.S. responded to this insubordination by trying unsuccessfully to deny him his current term as head of the IAEA.

What follows are excerpts from a much longer interview with ElBaradei recently published by the German newspaper Der Spiegel. Folks in the U.S. don't usually get to hear voices like this one.

ElBaradei: The next few months will be crucial for the overall situation in the Middle East. Whether we move in the direction of escalation or in the direction of a peaceful solution. ... There are hopeful and positive signs. For the first time, we have agreed, with the Iranians, to a sort of roadmap, a schedule, if you will, for clarifying the outstanding issues. We should know by November, or December at the latest, whether the Iranians will keep their promises. If they don't, Tehran will have missed a great opportunity -- possibly the last one.

SPIEGEL: The US government has described Iran's new willingness to cooperate as a transparent attempt to distract from its true intentions and from its continued development of the capabilities to produce a nuclear weapon. Is the IAEA too gullible?

ElBaradei: I am familiar with these accusations. They are completely untrue. It's not possible to manipulate us. We are not naïve and we do not take sides. ...

SPIEGEL: You are essentially asking for a time out. The Bush administration sees the issue quite differently. It wants to turn up the heat on the pressure cooker.

ElBaradei: Careful! If we turn up the heat too high the pot could explode around our ears. ... You can only set up so many roadmaps. If there is no basis for trust, all that effort is in vain. Sanctions alone will not produce a lasting solution. What we need in the Middle East is not more weapons, but better educational opportunities and more security for people. We should remind ourselves every day of the terrible situation of Iraq's civilians. ...

***
SPIEGEL: ...But one could ... say that dictator Kim Jong Il expelled your inspectors, violated his obligations, tested a bomb and thereby blackmailed the international community.

ElBaradei: I am not defending the regime in North Korea, just as the issue is not a ranking of governments that are more or less acceptable to me. But in Pyongyang the desire to obtain the ultimate weapon also arose from a feeling of insecurity and the idea that outside forces planned to topple the regime, as well as the desire for security guarantees. The outcome of the six-party talks with North Korea was decisive. After five years of talking to each other, it remains indisputable that dialogue brought an easing of tensions and, once its nuclear arsenal has been completely eliminated, will bring Pyongyang back into the fold of the IAEA. ...

SPIEGEL: Isn't this sending the wrong message to the world's despotic rulers -- acquire nuclear weapons or seriously threaten to develop a nuclear weapons program and you'll be taken seriously?

ElBaradei: There is that risk. But, on the other hand, in order to seem credible to the nuclear wannabe states we must demand steps toward nuclear disarmament from those who have nuclear weapons -- an obligation that is stipulated in the nonproliferation treaty but is not complied with. I deplore this two-faced approach. If practically all nuclear powers are modernizing instead of reducing their arsenals, how can we argue with the non-nuclear states? ...
***
SPIEGEL: There is already speculation that al-Qaida is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. Do you think there is a real risk that terrorists will obtain the ultimate weapon?

ElBaradei: That's my greatest concern, a horror scenario. I'm not thinking about a nuclear weapon. No terrorist organization has the necessary know-how or potential to acquire these weapons. But a small, so-called dirty bomb containing radioactive material, detonated somewhere in a major city, could cost human lives and set off massive terror with serious economic consequences. Sometimes I think it's a miracle that it hasn't happened yet. I pray that it remains that way....
***
SPIEGEL: You have headed the IAEA for 10 years now. Has your job become easier or more difficult over the years?

ElBaradei: More difficult. We pay completely inadequate attention to the important threats, the inhuman living conditions of billions of people, climate change and the potential for nuclear holocaust. We stand at a crossroads, and we are moving rapidly toward an abyss. There are currently 27,000 nuclear warheads in the world. If we don't change our way of thinking, John F. Kennedy's prediction that there would be 20 nuclear powers will soon come true. And with each new player and each new weapon, the risk of a planned or accidental nuclear war increases. ...

We must never forget that the dispute over nuclear weapons is not a game, but deadly serious. It can easily lead to a catastrophe and jeopardize the basis for the existence of all mankind. We need an international system of security guarantees, in which no country depends on nuclear weapons. We cannot wait any longer for this to happen. Not a day longer.

Lots in this to consider while Bush threatens Iran and blusters about "success" in Iraq.

The rest of the world understands what a treasure this man and his agency are. In 2005, ElBaradei and the IAEA were honored with the Nobel Peace Prize.

National Domestic Worker Alliance launched

Mujeres Unidas y Activas, the Women's Collective of La Raza Centro Legal, and the Women Workers Project of POWER held a Labor Day press conference and family picnic in the Mission District to announce the formation of a new National Domestic Worker Alliance. And the women attending had a blast!

The idea for the new national coalition was hatched at the United State Social Forum held in Atlanta at end of June. Immigrant women household workers compared stories, recognized similar problems and decided to join together to campaign for state and federal laws guaranteeing them some basic rights.

Launch events took place nationwide. A Washington Post report from Maryland explained:

They'll change the diapers, wash the clothes and cook the dinner. But nannies want a little respect. They don't need "Nanny Diaries" luxuries. But a contract would do. So would minimum wage, paid vacation, sick leave and overtime pay. And notice before firing.

"We don't mind the work -- we just want to be paid for it," said Janet Osorio, who became so fed up with the long hours and low pay working as a nanny that she now works for a cleaning company. "And the opportunity to have a life."

Yesterday, Osorio met with a handful of nannies at CASA of Maryland in Silver Spring to announce that nannies across the country are organizing. Not into unions -- federal labor law prohibits domestic workers from forming unions -- but into the National Alliance of Domestic Workers. And the first thing they want is a "Domestic Worker Bill of Rights."

What is happening here is that the same energy that built the massive immigrant marches in May 2006 is getting channeled into a practical campaign for basic labor rights. Since these workers, some documented and some not, subsist pretty much outside the political system, can winning legal rights be a realistic goal? Since 1992, the Workplace Project on Long Island has campaigned, successfully, for just such legislation, as well as training workers to expect rights and capture their unpaid back wages. So it can be done. Si se puede!



Certainly the conditions of household work need improvement. Again from the Post:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which lumps nanny wages together with other child-care workers, found that of 1.3 million child-care jobs in 2004, workers were paid between $5.90 and $12.34 an hour, with a mean annual wage of about $17,000 a year.

A 2006 survey, done for the Montgomery [Maryland] council, of about 280 nannies in the county found that live-in nannies generally are paid $6.29 an hour and that a majority of live-out nannies received minimum wage or more. But the vast majority did not get overtime, 20 percent had paid vacations, 15 percent had paid sick days, 28 percent reported that money was deducted for Social Security taxes and fewer than 16 percent had health insurance.

Organizations in the campaign in addition to the three in San Francisco include:

Southern California:

• CHIRLA

• Pilipino Workers' Center

New York:

• CAAAV Women Workers Project

• DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Association

• Domestic Workers United

• Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees

• UNITY Housecleaners

• Las Senoras de Santa Maria

Maryland/District of Columbia

• CASA of Maryland

Labor Day goodies

Historical with accompaniment from Pete Seeger


Contemporary.

Labor Day update

A year ago, I wrote about the lockout at the boarded-up Real Foods store on 24th St. in Noe Valley. Real Foods fired its employees and closed for "remodeling" over Labor Day 2003. That's four years keeping the store front empty and untouched.

Since then the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that the corporate owner of Real Foods, Nutraceutical Corp. of Park City, Utah, committed an unfair labor practice -- firing the workers and closing the store -- in order to prevent union organizing by the employees. If the store were to reopen, the company would have to offer former employees their jobs back.

The company appealed and their lawyer says "the court may not reach a resolution for several years."

Obviously the system that is supposed to protect workers is broken. It needs complete reform if workers are to have a chance against well-heeled union busters.

Obama signs on with the warmongers

A couple of days ago, Barack Obama published an oped about his plans to "put pressure" on Iran.

From Obama's website, here's his rationale for "putting pressure":

The decision to wage a misguided war in Iraq has substantially strengthened Iran, which now poses the greatest strategic challenge to U.S. interests in the Middle East in a generation. Iran supports violent groups and sectarian politics in Iraq, fuels terror and extremism across the Middle East and continues to make progress on its nuclear program in defiance of the international community. Meanwhile, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared that Israel must be "wiped off the map."

It's all bullshit.

1) "Iran supports violent groups in Iraq" -- yeah, and the NYT reports this morning that the US is funneling money to Sunni tribal forces. Link. The Iranian's good buddies got elected the GOVERNMENT in Iraq in elections we imposed; not surprising they help them. We're just mucking around in the Iraqi civil war.

The only suggestion that Iran is arming anyone is coming from the same US military flacks who want us to believe "the surge is working."

2) State Department reports consistently said Iran had pretty much got out of the terror business -- until the Cheney Administration started cooking the facts. Familiar? Even now, the definition of "supporting terrorism" is that they help Shi'a movements in the region. You might too if you were a bunch of Baptists caught in a sea of hostile Roman Catholics. Sorry, just trying to use a little imagination.

Israelis, and U.S. Neo-Cons, think Iranian assistance to Hezbollah is terrorism. Many Lebanese, including many Christians, think Iranian aid to Hezbollah has helped Shi'a, long excluded as "inferiors" from the Lebanese polity, find a voice. Depends where you are sitting.

3) Mohamed ElBaradei of the United Nations says Iran is cooperating in showing that its nuclear development is peaceful. Remember ElBaradei? He's the guy who insisted Iraq didn't have WMD?

4) Ahmadinejad is a bombastic asshole. And what do we have for a President? No way the Iranian president can accomplish the destruction of Israel -- and some like Juan Cole have said that's a mistranslation anyway.

Obama is playing the warmonger; on this point, he's no better than the Neo-Cons.

Cayuga Playground

If you drive south on Geneva, turn right on Cayuga and follow the street to where it intersects with Naglee, you'll come to Cayuga Playground.



Never heard of those streets? That's not unusual for residents of San Francisco's core. This is a part of our city I wouldn't know if I hadn't been responsible for precinct walks in the far Outer Mission/Excelsior during several elections. The area presents unusual problems when you are getting out the vote: regardless of what race/ethnicity or language group the door knockers come from, they won't be a match at the majority of doors. If one household is Filipino Tagalog speakers, the next may be African American and the next Caucasian with an Italian lilt. It is a fascinating area.

And it hides one of San Francisco's most unlikely mini-parks.


The entrance seems ordinary enough, though beautifully groomed -- but soon you are in a land of the bizarre delights. As the BART trains scream by overhead, you notice strange figures among the greenery.







Intricate paths lead around the perimeter of a ball field.





Along the paths all sorts of critters lurk.






As well as various quasi-Biblical or perhaps Native American figures.


...and some San Francisco originals.


The park's artist has provided a look-out platform.


Here's the view. Better to stay inside the park.


Fortunately City Gardener Demetrio Braceros has provided a self portrait. He's been creating this magic world since 1986. See it before some bureaucrat decides it menaces the good order of our city. There are literally hundreds more of his creations than I've pictured here. The park is an idiosyncratic treasure.

In which a bishop lays into a king (well, a President...)

AP Photo

Though I'm an Episcopalian Christian, I'm also a normal individualistic resident of the contemporary United States: I don't usually expect to get my moral guidance from the clergy -- they just get a hearing, as do other moral exemplars.

So I'm moved to read the challenge Bishop Charles Jenkins of Louisiana laid down to our ostensibly pious chief executive on the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina:

Recognizing our vulnerability, not to terrorism, but to the deadly force of severe weather, I would like to ask the President how he plans to clearly demonstrate his calculation of our people’s worth and his government’s commitment to our safety? The question is one that Providence has put to this President, and it is one of those tests all human beings dread – the kind that determines who you really are....

We already know who faith-based America has proven to be. These volunteers have not sacrificed for the “safe” above-sea-level neighborhoods or the economically secure residents of this city. They have not given their time, talent, and hard-earned dollars to the recovery of communities that rest securely on higher ground.

The volunteers of this country are still coming in larger numbers than ever to help heal the lives of their fellow Americans – the same vulnerable Americans we saw trapped, suffering and dying on our televisions two years ago this week. And those “looters,” “those people down there” as the President has called us, are proving to be some of the most courageous and resilient citizens of this land....

It means, Mr. President, that a huge number of Americans love their neighbor as themselves. Not in words alone but in actions. This segment of our society, a segment whose values you claim to represent and share, has already cast its vote in the referendum on New Orleans. We clearly do not believe any of New Orleans or its people are dispensable or undesirable. We stand together in our fight to recognize and cherish the dignity and worth of every citizen of this city, and we believe how the citizens of this city are treated says who we really are as a nation. ...

We can be reconciled, Mr. President. New Orleanians are a long-suffering and forgiving people. But to be so you must show us that you see and value our humanity before it is too late.

Emphasis mine. The full text of the statement is at this link.

Via a comment at The Wounded Bird -- Grandmere Mimi's digs -- where she also shares her own Katrina experience.

Not welcome here...

The mainstream media is beginning to become aware that the U.S. is doing next to nothing for Iraqis who work with the occupation -- leaving them behind to be killed as collaborators seems to be the plan. And those are the favored few. Most of the some 700,000 uprooted people in Jordan and 1.2 million in Syria aren't even in the "favored" class of collaborators. They are just people displaced by the violence we've unleashed.

The United States is sending a clear message to the refugees and the countries sheltering them: you are on your own.

But what happens when some of the few Iraqi-origin folks who have made it to the United States volunteer to assist their adopted country? Click the image above and view a YouTube news report.

Traffic

This is a San Francisco story for a Labor Day weekend.

Once upon a time there was a freeway coming into the city that crossed Market Street and disgorged cars into a neighborhood called "Inner Haight" or "Hayes Valley" or just "north of Market." The cars mostly ended up on one-way Fell Street and streamed toward Golden Gate Park and points west. Coming east on Oak Street, cars entered the freeway at Laguna and headed off toward San Jose or the Bay Bridge.

The 1989 earthquake showed that all the local freeways needed shoring up to prepare for the next shake -- and provided an opportunity to the city's many devoted opponents of freeways to get a few torn down. Besides the collapsed Embarcadero freeway, we also got rid of the bit of the Central freeway that crossed Market as I've described in the previous paragraph.

After a couple of rounds of referenda that pitted commuters from the west side of the city against the progressive, anti-freeway east side including the residents of "Inner Haight" or "Hayes Valley," a new grooud-level Octavia Blvd. became the route across Market and onto a shored up Central freeway.

So, finally, here's my question: how do folks in the Octavia Blvd. area feel about the changes in traffic patterns? I'm a big user of Golden Gate Park who lives south of Market and (I admit shamefacedly) drives. I find that the back up on Oak leading to Octavia Blvd. encourages me to turn south on Laguna or Buchanan, or even Webster. That is, I'm part of a new traffic flow through what were previously far less trafficked residential streets.

Is the change bothering residents of the area? Does anyone have any suggestions for re-routing those of us who just pass through?

Malaise and hope

This morning San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll snaps a quick picture of the public mood at the end of this disturbing summer:

We've had enough schadenfreude in the past year. We have seen the mighty fall, or at least resign. We have grasped the nature of the idiocy. What the hell do we do about it? Where do we go from here? You gotta plan, big boy? ...

You've heard of compassion fatigue? I think we have stupidity fatigue. Yet one more administration hack does one more laughably inept or corrupt thing - at first you get mad, and then you want to get beyond the mad. The problems will be there long after the hacks have left town. Yes! Positive thinking! Solutions! And then some fresh outrage comes along, and it's just too awful not to write about - and so it goes.

... there's a lot of fear that things have become so badly screwed up that there is no coming back. Is global warming reversible in any real sense? Is New Orleans ever going to thrive again? Is there any way for the United States to develop a sensible foreign policy toward the Middle East? Will we ever get universal health care? Can Congress really be weaned from the money machine? Will government really give back the privacy it has taken from its citizens?

Boy, I'd take the negative side on each of those propositions in any casino situation. And yet despair and hopelessness are not acceptable, even if they may be realistic. No society is perfect; no answer is complete. The way to begin to save our souls and our minds is to act as if - as if there will be a brighter tomorrow, as if the next regime will be better than the previous one, as if new leadership will make a difference.

Seems about right. Those of us who do politics day in and day out need to remember that a very substantial fraction of folks who seem alienated from, or unconscious of, matters of governance aren't really opting out at all. Rather, they yearn for "something to be for."

Photo by Terry Lorant

Crisis reveals perversion of democracy

AFP PHOTO / Aris Messinis

All nations at important moments in their history face pivotal moments when they must urgently address pressing matters of great collective concern if they are to avoid regression. ... such a moment has arrived. Unfortunately, neither of the two major political parties that have taken turns to govern the nation ... have displayed the administrative competence or the intellectual understanding now required to address the ecological threat confronting the country. ...

The nation is in dire need of new, bold, courageous leadership. It urgently requires a long-term strategy that pioneers will a sea-change in the country's approach towards the environment. Shortcuts will be very dangerous. Complacency may be fatal. Moral consciousness must be awakened and a grand vision needs to be developed to avert the nation's ecological collapse. ...

It is a genuine shame that a country that gave form and shape to democracy and civil virtue and once prided itself on the cultivation of aesthetics as the true meaning of life today displays astounding mental perversity in sacrificing the environment and its ecological system on the altar of greed and political clientilism.

Has Al Gore completely lost it? It would be hard to blame him.

But no, the author is Chronis Polychroniou, head of academic affairs at Mediterranean College in Athens, bemoaning what the current inferno in his country has revealed about its polity.

On the second anniversary Hurricane Katrina, when our system let a major city drown -- probably for Republican political gain -- we should find this all sadly familiar.

What are we, and the Greeks, going to do about it?

Workers just want to get paid

Supporters of Emeryville living wage payments owed to Woodfin hotel workers troop into City Hall.

Emeryville residents, who passed a living wage ordinance by initiative in 2005, won a victory last niight when their legislators ordered the hotel to pay up.

After a tense, rowdy hearing the Emeryville City Council ordered the Woodfin Hotel to pay workers $350,000 dollars in back wages and penalties.

Fifty-six workers went after the Woodfin Hotel after an Emeryville city law which guarantees a livable wage for hospitality workers.

In last night's meeting the attorney for Woodfin might have felt he wasn't getting much hospitality - he was tossed from that meeting by the mayor. Later he returned only to hear the council say that hotel owes workers $300,000 dollars in back wages plus a $50,000 dollar fine. The City Manager ordered $250,000 dollars in back pay back in June, Woodfin wouldn't pay that and the hotel said it won't pay this fine, it said it will appeal. Source.

Unidentified persons inside the city administration building watched a worker rally anxiously.

The Emeryville situation highlights the difficulty immigrant workers have collecting even payments to which they are legally entitled. The hotel responded to worker activism by instigating the Social Security Administration to check their Social Security numbers, then firing activists for whom the Feds returned "no match" letters.

The Bush administration has responded to Congress' failure to pass its "immigration reform" package by moving to make employers to fire all workers who cannot provide proof of valid Social Security numbers. That is, by punishing workers, it hopes to force its business base to provide the muscle to get an immigration law passed over the wishes of its large, vocal, racist constituency. Labor journalist David Bacon has explained the "no match" ploy clearly in this article.


Luz Dominguez speaks out for the Woodfin workers.

Our wonderful urban park

I suppose I ought to have opinions about the San Francisco Chronicle's recent crusade against the homeless residents of Golden Gate Park. See here, or here, or here. After all, in the last 30 years, I estimate that I've logged over five thousand miles running on its paths. Probably more. The nooks and crannies of the park are some of my favorite bits of San Francisco.

Yes, there have always been homeless people living in the park. Sometimes, like most summers, there are more there. Sometimes, for example when the press and politicians are making a fuss (1997 or 2003) there may be less -- or at least the homeless are better hidden.

There was a period when I felt unsafe in the park in the '90s. A rapist was attacking women in the bathrooms. Eventually he was caught. I once ran a trail past what was clearly a stash of stolen bikes -- there are things you don't want to see. For that matter, there was a gay men's cruising path where I didn't run for years because venturing onto it felt like I was intruding in someone's bedroom.

Like anyone else who uses the park, I don't have any sympathy with people trashing it up or leaving needles lying around.

But I also can't say that the presence of the homeless has ever gotten in the way of my using the park as I do.

What's wrong here is that there isn't any realistic way for these people to get themselves into homes. Folks get down on their luck, or loose their mental equilibrium, or get hooked on drugs -- and end up on the street. Once they wear out whatever human community they had, if any, there is no longer any bottom of the barrel housing -- fleabag hotels, flop houses, seamen's hostels -- in which they can stabilize themselves and eventually crawl back into some kind of life. Cities used to have such places, awful as they were, because such decayed urban properties could make a profit for their owners. I saw them myself on the Bowery in New York in the 1970s.

Since the Reagan era, the federal government has pretty much gone out of the affordable housing promotion business, states and localities are strapped because we've hamstrung the tax system, and interest rate manipulations have made urban land simply too valuable to use to house the poor. That is, as a society, we got rid of their housing options, but we still have the poor. When poor people lose their ability to hold on to private spaces, more and more they get pushed into our public spaces -- into the parks.

Volunteer attorneys recently explained why criminalizing sleeping in the parks just makes things worse:

When a homeless person has a warrant, even for a very minor offense such as sleeping in public, she is prevented from getting the services she needs to exit homelessness. The penalty for a "quality-of-life" citation is a fine. Because homeless individuals are too poor to pay the fines, the citations turn into active warrants.

Pro bono attorneys with the Homeless Rights Project have represented homeless people who were denied public housing because they had warrants for sleeping in the park. We have had clients who would have lost Social Security benefits, General Assistance benefits, a place in a treatment program and employment opportunities, if we had not helped clear their status crime warrants.

The San Francisco Police Department claims that in issuing citations, it is trying to hold homeless residents accountable for their behavior. People camp in parks or sleep in their vehicles, however, because they have no other place to be, not because they want to defy the law.

San Francisco Chronicle,
August 24, 2007

Periodic sweeps and tickets aren't going to cut it.

Until, and unless, we can make our society deal with the causes of homelessness, I'm afraid that we park users are simply going to have to share our public spaces with those who have nowhere else to go. We deserve to be reminded of our failure to organize our society so that it works for vulnerable people. We all would be worse off if somehow we could simply lock the victims of our failed social organization out of our sight. But we can't. They are in the parks.