An inconclusive experiment

A few weeks ago, I wrote a tongue in cheek post laying out the various class and funding implications of the foods we serve campaign volunteers. Today, as part of organizing a workshop for folks working to win the full inclusion of all the baptized in all the sacraments of the Episcopal Church, I decided to run a little experiment.


I offered donuts, pan dulce and bagels with cream cheese. Which plate would get cleared and which sit untouched by our attendees?

And hour later, I had my answer. All three had been eaten -- folks will scarf up whatever they are offered on a Saturday morning while doing heavy thinking.

Perpetua and Felicity

In the Christian calendar, March 7 is the feast of these lovely women, North Africans martyred in the arena at Carthage in the year 203. They apparently were real -- a written account has survived of their refusal to give up their faith on the order of an imperial magistrate and consequent public dismemberment by beasts and soldiers. In those days, you could get killed for being a Christian, instead of thinking your faith gave you a license to be critical of other people.

Perpetua was a respectable matron (of 22!); Felicity was her slave. Perhaps in that homosocial, patriarchal society, two women of very different statuses facing death could cling to each other as they are pictured on this modern icon. We are not well equipped to enter into their consciousness. Nor, I imagine, could they make anything of ours.

They seem good figures to watch over what I'll be part of today: a workshop about winning full inclusion of LGBT folks within the Episcopal Church. It should be interesting.

Perpetua and Felicity also gave their names to a variety of rosebush. We have some in the front yard.

Campaign musings After the March 4 primaries ...

The new could not dispatch the old -- and the old will not give way to the new. It's a stalemate and they need each other. Now what?

The telling bit of data from exit polls (prior to March 4, but I have no reason to doubt the pattern continues) is that the Obama/Clinton split is along age lines.



Obama wins younger voters. Eighteen to twenty-nine year olds break for him 60-37 percent. They are 14 percent of the electorate. The next older age group, 30-44, breaks for Obama 56-40 percent. They are 25 percent of the electorate.

Folks in demographic middle age (44-59) are 32 percent of voters and nearly tie in their preferences at 48-47 percent.

Older voters (60 and up) lean strongly to Clinton, 55-39 percent. We are 27 percent of the primary electorate.

Clearly, the different generations simply live different realities and these point them to different priorities and allegiances.

All these groups will have to vote together, reasonably enthusiastically, if we are not to end up with a President "Bomb, bomb, bomb" McCain.

There's no reason to think they won't vote together in November, unless either set decides the other is breaking the rules.

The campaigns can decide they have to teach those who are drawn to them that the other side is a bunch of scofflaws, illegitimate Democrats. They can play on the genuine age (and gender and race and economic and cultural) identity differences to make the other side the "bad guys."

This doesn't have to happen. Let's hope our leaders have the maturity to sort this out without inciting their followers to enmity. That really would be proof of ability to govern ...

Lest we forget ... Iraq

While we obsess about Democratic primaries, the agony in Iraq goes on. Last week I heard United for Peace and Justice national coordinator Leslie Cagan remind peace movement folks that we don't pay enough attention to what is happening to people there. She's right; it is so much easier to look elsewhere.

I thought I'd share some snippets from sources I use to try to keep up with Iraqi realities.

Inside Iraq is written by McClatchy News' Iraqi reporters. Here Laith and Jenan reflect on their prospects as journalists.

In Iraq, journalists are always targeted by insurgents. The last sacrifice was the head of journalist union in Iraq who was assassinated in cold blood few days ago. ...

I thought that the Iraqi government is watching this killing series with carelessness and they don’t do much to protect the life of journalists ... but today I found out that I was wrong.

Today I read in the news that the governor of Najaf allocated a piece of land for journalist. Before finishing the news, I felt happy for one second only because I thought the man had allocated properties for the journalists to build their houses in the safe city of Najaf but again, I was wrong. The land which was allocated for the journalists by his Excellency the governor of Najaf was inside the biggest graveyard in the world (Dar Al Salam cemetery)… it is allocated to build graves for us after we get killed by the insurgents. This is serious and it’s not a joke.

Is not that great? They think about us even after our death.

The chief of the McClatchy bureau, Leila Fadel, also writes a blog, Baghdad Observer. Here's a recent sample of her observations.

We walked into the Iranian embassy today to interview the ambassador. It was built 70 years ago and reoccupied by the Iranian mission after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. My translator looked at me as we walked through the double wooden doors to interview the Iranian Ambassador.

"This is the second ruler of Iraq," she said.

I looked at her.

"After Crocker," she said, referring to the U.S. Ambassador. She never mentioned the Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al Maliki. She expressed what most Iraqis feel, Iraq is a tug of war for power between Iran and the United States.

The blog Iraq Today does a terrific job of compiling a digest of news from and about Iraq. One of their links pointed me to this recent fascinating article by an AP reporter, John Affleck, newly dropped into Baghdad.

Take a short drive with me through Baghdad.

Feel the capital's rutted roads, see the blast walls blocking the side streets off main thoroughfares. The homes we're passing, even in nicer neighborhoods, look worn. Something else sticks out — dirt, dust and garbage. It hadn't registered at first, but now it makes sense: Nobody sends a street cleaner out twice a week in a war zone.

If anything, the Green Zone is worse when it comes to civic beauty. It's a completely disorienting place to a rookie, with roads running through a maze of gray blast walls. It's as if somebody moved all the state prisons into the same neighborhood.

Outside those walls, electricity is iffy. The statistics — an estimated 7.3 hours of service a day in Baghdad — give the picture. But the meaning is given depth and personality when an Iraqi greets you one morning and comments about a pleasant surprise: In his neighborhood, power was on all night.

Electricity Minister Karim Waheed didn't have that kind of luck recently. Watching a closed-circuit feed of a news conference in which he described the state of the nation's grid, Waheed's face suddenly froze on the TV screen.

Then came word from the technicians in The Associated Press' Baghdad bureau. Power had cut out at the site of the news conference. ...

So it goes, day in and day out in occupied Iraq.

Brattleboro acts as a citizen grand jury

Voters in this Vermont town got to cast a ballot today on whether, if George W. Bush or Dick Cheney were to visit there, local police should arrest them for war crimes, perjury or obstruction of justice.

When the town leaders voted to put the advisory measure on the ballot, the Drudge Report ("a conservative-leaning Web site based in Washington, D.C. which is most famous for breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal" in the description of the Rutland Herald) instigated hundreds of angry letters and emails to the town.

I would not be surprised if the town caught another blast of right wing anger tomorrow when the votes are counted. Flinty, sensible folks those Vermonters -- a very long time ago I worked a campaign in Brattleboro and I don't think those people are going to knuckle in response to howls of right-wing anguish.

Update: George and Dick better stay out of southeastern Vermont. The Boston Globe reports:

In Brattleboro, the vote was 2,012-1,795. In Marlboro, which held a town meeting on the issue, it was 43-25 with three abstentions.

The peace movement and the election -- 2

Part two of a report on a Northern California meeting at which local peace activists tried to discern how to keep ending the Iraq war a lively part of the national election campaign. Part one, Tom Hayden's remarks, is here.

Leslie Cagan, coordinator of the national coalition, United for Peace and Justice focused on the condition of the peace movement itself. Nobody is better placed to have a sense of what organized peace forces exist in the U.S. UFPJ has over 1000 member groups, ranging in size from national organizations like the American Friends Service Committee to little local vigils. As Leslie kept saying: "There are many strands to the movement. And there are probably as many peace groups not in UFPJ as inside UFPJ -- it is a big country."

Some of her points:

• At this time of political transition, we need to understand that the interior work of strengthening our movement is legitimate, important work -- as much so as our public agitation.

• The Obama phenomenon means that a large new group of people have come to believe that what they do can make a difference. He organizes for hope and people respond.

• We can't let the election completely overrun the peace movement. There will be a Congressional vote on additional funding for the war in April. We must push back against the instinct of Democratic legislators to just get it out of the way. They need to hear from us: NO MORE.

• The peace movement must work to overturn the very notion that we are in a "war on terror." We must repudiate the underlying assumption that the U.S. can freely use military force anywhere in the world.

• The peace movement has to be genuinely open to younger people and people of color -- that means it won't look like this room. It's good that the people who are here are here -- but we can't hold on to all the space.

• Paradoxically, the movement does not talk enough about what Iraq is actually like for Iraqis -- what is really happening there. The 4.5 million uprooted refugees are often invisible, even to the peace movement. We do better at focusing on the war's harm to U.S, troops, probably better than peace movements have in the past. But we cannot be U.S.-centric. The U.S. has made a desperately dangerous failed state of Iraq.

• In the United States, we need to drive home an understanding of the costs of the war. The weakness of the U.S. economy, people's struggles to get by, are a direct result of the war. Good money thrown to mercenaries and contractors is the reason our bridges are crumbling and so many don't have health insurance.

UFPJ is promoting a new slogan on stickers and buttons like the one pictured above. Available here. Several activists from progressive Democratic clubs, while agreeing heartily with the message, questioned the wording. The allusion to the Clinton campaign mantra of 1992 -- "It's the economy, stupid" -- seemed to them insider-ish. They worried some people would think they were being called "stupid." It was interesting to hear this response to a peace coalition trying to be clever.


This was a meeting of serious, competent people very determined to find ways to carry antiwar agitation through the election season.

The peace movement and the election

The Presidential election will be fought out over the Iraq war -- and unless we work hard and smart, the antiwar movement will have very little to do with how the debate happens and the outcome. In fact, on November 5, the peace movement could find itself confused and directionless, despite having seen its activists throw themselves into electing a Democratic President.

To try to avoid such a fate, yesterday Resolution Peace brought together activists from 40 or so antiwar groups all over northern California to try to hammer out plans to push a peace message in concert with this all-absorbing election campaign.

Longtime antiwar activist, former Assemblyman and State Senator, author, and Obama-endorser Tom Hayden gave us the big picture. What follows is my paraphrase of some of his talk, naturally focused on what struck me as important.

• The selection of John McCain as the Republican nominee ensures that Iraq will be at the center of the campaign. McCain will try to sell the U.S. people on the idea that we are "winning" in Iraq.

• This ensures that either Democrat will have to run against the Iraq war because, not only will McCain be arguing the rightness of the war, but also because the war is the cause of the country's precarious (or even disastrous) economic situation.

• None of the candidates mean by "ending the war" what the peace movement means. They all mean moving from combat that costs U.S casualties to counterinsurgency in which smaller U.S. forces would support Iraqis doing the fighting against whatever insurgencies and civil war opponents threaten the Baghdad "government."

• The way to tell whether the U.S. is serious about withdrawing is to watch whether there are talks with Iran. The U.S. has inadvertently delivered Iraq to the Iranian sphere of influence and Iranian actions will shape a post-occupation Iraqi regime.

• The Democratic campaign will get the benefit of millions of dollars of base-organizing work by MoveOn and labor forces out of SEIU in battleground states; these campaign efforts will be making an antiwar argument. This may enable the candidate to run against the war while making few concrete promises.

• Obama has said he will have troops out by the end of 2009 -- the antiwar movement must organize to hold him to it.

• A Democratic victory in the election will be a second "Peace Mandate," even stronger than 2006.

• It might serve the antiwar movement and other forces not visibly inside the Democratic Party apparatus to create something like "Progressives for Obama" to highlight the existence of folks to Obama's left who support his election. This will only work if folks are willing to work on the campaign.

• Everyone in the antiwar movement does not have to throw themselves into the election; parallel tracks can also help create the post-November 4 climate.

• One advantage of an Obama candidacy is that it has been embraced by the African American community; progressive things have happened in U.S. history when African Americans are on the move.

• Peace activists should join MoveOn if they haven't already. MoveOn constantly polls its members; this is one arena in which to make ourselves heard.

• Democrats in Congress are not going to be eager to oppose war funding this year. One possible tactical fight to take up might be to push Congresswoman Maxine Waters' measure to end US support for the Iraqi Security Forces -- essentially death squads -- as a violation of the 1997 Leahy Amendment barring assistance to known human rights violators. Hayden laid out the whole rationale for such a project here.

Activists conducted brainstorms on possible tactical initiatives after Hayden's speech.

In addition to Hayden, Leslie Cagan, coordinator of the national coalition United for Peace and Justice brought further thoughts on organizing. I'll report her talk tomorrow.

Guantanamo and resistance

Nell has tagged me with a meme. The instructions are:

• look up page 123 in the nearest book;

• look for the fifth sentence;

• then post the three sentences that follow that fifth sentence on page 123.

Unhappily, the nearest book to my computer is Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. It has been sitting there for several months, awaiting my finding enough energy to write something about it. It's an important, solidly documenting, distressing read. Here are the indicated sentences.

But of course, careful study of how to resist "psychological pressure" and "physical mistreatment" also produces a record of how to apply the same techniques. In one of the more controversial aspects of the Administration's post-9/11 detention policy, experienced mental health professionals, who developed their defensive expertise at SERE programs, are teaching interrogators at Camp Delta and elsewhere how to apply the very techniques U.S. soldiers have been taught to resist. At a press briefing in June 2004, General James Hill, then head of the U.S. Southern Command, said that the list of coercive techniques drafted in October 2002 and approved by Secretary Rumsfeld in December resulted from a close collaboration between experts from the Army SERE school in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and interrogation teams at Guantanamo.

I've been trying to train myself not to write sentences that long, but I'm not a lawyer.

How quaintly this reads: in early 2006, author Joseph Margulies, one of the first attorneys trying to represent Guantanamo captives, believed he had to document the evolution of U.S. adoption of torture. Now the Administration proudly and openly boasts its right to these abominations. But I have to remember, there is resistance.

• Psychologists protest the perversion of their discipline.

• One of my heroes, Fr. Louis Vitale, is currently serving a short federal prison sentence for trying to unmask the Ft. Huachuca facility where the SERE training that became a school of torture is carried on. His friends tell me he'll be out for Good Friday.

• And Nell herself reports on the ongoing court cases and civil disobedience that challenge our detention and torture regime.

Not enough resistance obviously. But not nothing either. In the face of such evil, we hang on to our humanity through our resistance.

Passing the meme: go ahead Jane, Manegee, and truth if doing one this interests you.

Friday Cat Blogging

She makes it hard to get anything done.

Contemporary champion of women's health

Today Ruth Rosen posted a memorial note about the work of Barbara Seaman, one of the determined feminists of the 60s and 70s who put issues of women's health on the national agenda. That wasn't easy work. If women like Seaman hadn't demanded to be heard, simplistic medical "remedies" for female life realities -- such as universal estrogen prescribed at menopause -- might still be the order of the day.

And the struggle to ensure that women are free to make our own medical choices is not over. In this clip, contemporary Washington State Democratic Congressional candidate Darcy Burner carries on the work of those women's health pioneers. She leaves the wooden guy she is trying to unseat (Dave Reichert) close to speechless. Forthright discussion of women's health rights is clearly beyond him. Do watch.



This Wednesday First Lady Laura Bush will be in Medina WA, headlining an exclusive, $500 per person, fundraiser in an effort to jumpstart Reichert’s flailing campaign. Bloggers are organizing to match what Bush raises for Burner. Contribute here if you can. Burner seems to be one of those "more and better" Democratic office seekers we need to elect as a prerequisite to turning this country around. And she can win; she almost knocked out Reichert in 2006 and is better organized and funded now.

H/t to Orcinus for the YouTube.

Republican throws a wedge at California budget woes

Simona Garibay receives a U.S. flag from Maj. Brian Dolan during funeral services for her son, Cpl. Jose Angel Garibay, at Riverside National Cemetery, April 11, 2003.

As California wakes up to its multi-billion dollar projected deficit, Assemblyman Chuck Devore, R-Irvine, has come up with a neat trick (AB 1758) to play politics with the future of thousands of community college students.

Back when California had a Democratic governor and legislature (2001), the state opted to invest in its future. It charges in-state tuition at the community colleges, regardless of immigration status, to students who have spent three years in California high schools, graduated, and who sign an affidavit stating they have applied to become legal residents or will do so if they become eligible. That's quite a break; at California's community colleges, in-state fees run about $78 per course, while out-of-state students pay $500. Devore wants to kill this program which costs $117 million a year and instead redirect $3 million to provide members of the California National Guard with free tuition at state colleges and universities.

National Guard members undoubtedly deserve help going to college if they happen to survive intact being used as cannon fodder by our rulers. But this measure is just xenophobic grandstanding. Most obviously, some of those Guard members are immigrants serving in the military to regularize their status.

Sen. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana, has previously sponsored unsuccessful legislation to grant tuition benefits to Guard members and plans to do so again this year.

"This is not as much a budget issue as a political issue," Correa said. ...

But Correa does not support DeVore's effort to repeal AB 540 [the in-state tuition provision.]

"Absolutely not," Correa said. "You know why? Jose Angel Garibay."

The U.S. Marine Corps lance corporal from Orange County was killed in 2003 while fighting in Iraq. Garibay, whose parents entered the country illegally, was granted citizenship posthumously.

Moreover, punishing young people who were children when brought here by their parents and who have proved they are on the way to becoming productive members of society is simply madness. The racists can't make them go away -- in fact they often profit from their labor -- all they can do is make their lives miserable. That's no way to run a great state. ***
Looking into this story, I was not surprised to discover that Assemblyman Devore makes a practice of trying to start racial fights. Here's a 2007 item from the Los Angeles Times.

Republican plays race card
Assemblyman Chuck DeVore - the China-hating, novel writing, constant blogging, gung-ho Republican National Guard officer from Orange County - is scheming to write legislation that would divide Democrats along racial lines. In the OC Register today, columnist Frank Mickadeit writes about attending a conference of Republican lawyers at Chapman Law School last week:

"Assemblyman Chuck DeVore told the group how even as a member of the minority party in the Legislature, he's trying to be relevant. He's working a bill that would suspend the California Environmental Quality Act for five years for low-income housing, farm-worker housing and urban infill projects.

"The strategy, he said, is to split the Democrats in the Legislature into two factions: the black and Latino caucuses, which favor the bill because it would reduce housing costs 10-20 percent for constituents, and what he called 'the white, urban limousine liberals,' who oppose lowering environmental standards.

" 'I'm purposefully eff-ing with them,' DeVore said."

Not exactly a responsible policy advocate.

H/t to the newsletter of Racewire for pointing out Devore's current wedge bill. AB 1758 will have a hearing on March 4 in the Assembly Higher Education Committee. Passage seems unlikely.

Campaign tidbits As Clinton sinks...

Campaigns are brutal things. Sometimes a candidate simply gets run over by historical currents that weren't in that candidate's field of vision. It is a very unpleasant experience if you've ever been there.

I worked one of these campaigns, locally, in 2000. My candidate was a good, decent woman with an honorable history of community activism and administrative achievement. She had a grasp of the intricacies of city policy rarely seen in local candidates. She had solid endorsements from office holders in the area.

She also had a tin ear. The electorate in her district had been battered by evictions and gentrification -- a wave of anger at economic conditions that were rapidly altering their home landscape gripped many people. She didn't get it. She had a house that no one was going to take away from her. Her pocket of the neighborhood was pleasant and stable. Why didn't people care about the glut of cars, the deficit of usable public transit, the need for an environmental plan for the city?

They didn't care that year, even though she was right and forward thinking. Another, not nearly so "qualified," candidate understood and spoke the district's rage. My candidate plummeted to a dismal 3rd in a race she had led. All that experience and good sense didn't do a thing for her. ***
Obviously this is very familiar. Substitute wars and a crashing economy and we see Hillary Clinton today. Her campaign didn't comprehend where the U.S. people were going -- and might not have been able to speak to that movement even if she/they had understood.

Elections are Darwinian environments – and candidates tend to win for a reason. Tactics matter, as does an ability to tap into the larger Zeitgeist (i.e., structural forces matter too, but good campaigners recognize and tap into those underlying currents). For this reason, candidates who look great on paper (Dole, Rudy, HRC) lose if they run wretched campaigns. Similarly, candidates who don’t look so hot on paper can compensate with superior campaigning skills. In short, people who win tend to run superior campaigns. Not always, but generally.

publius,
Obsidian Wings

Candidates win who are able to catch the popular winds. To some candidates, those popular winds are unimaginable amid the clamor of conventional wisdom and political consultant advice. ***
The same winds are equally invisible to jaded political observers. I certainly didn't think Clinton could be blown off course by a well-organized hurricane of discontent with the status quo. I was wrong. I couldn't see it either. Sometimes, something unexpected can happen here. ***
By the way, the most ridiculous charge against the Clinton campaign floating around is this:

Even small expenses piled up in January: the campaign spent more than $11,000 on pizza and $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts runs.

New York Times

Whatever they may have wasted on dumb pollsters and inept media consultants, that expenditure was not waste. Pizza and donuts keep the world turning and the workers trudging on any campaign.

Bloggie news

Beginning today, I'll be doing an occasional "Gay and Gray" post over at Ronni Bennet's wonderful Time Goes By: what it is really like to get older. Ronni's blog is one I read daily: informative, sometimes opinionated, and just plain real. She has gathered a great community over there. If you don't already know that neighborhood, take a look.

McCain loves the war

The long Democratic primary contest has raised the hope that we might see an aroused people demanding more sanity from our rulers. Will all this energy go simply into electing a (much) better Democrat to replace Bush -- or can we make sure that some of it increases the chances of an end to the Iraq war?

The path to getting the U.S. out of Iraq has to lead through working to elect whichever Democrat is left standing. Why? Because John McCain is making the Iraq war his own; defeating McCain will push either Democrat to emphasize the contrast between a Democratic peace position and McCain's war mania.

Neither Democrat seems resolutely committed to reining in the empire, but the more the necessities of the campaign push that candidate to adopt an "out of Iraq" posture during the election, the more leverage an energized peace movement will have to force withdrawal in 2009.

So it serves us to hammer McCain, to tar him irrevocably as the candidate of wars past and more wars future. This is a losing stance in the current environment; some 60 plus percent of U.S. people want Iraq over. He's beginning to get that:

John McCain said Monday that to win the White House he must convince a war-weary country that U.S. policy in Iraq is succeeding. If he can't, "then I lose. I lose," the Republican said.

AP via TPM

Fortunately, McCain has chosen to make himself the candidate of war and more war. The peace movement has everything to gain by highlighting his stance. Do take a look at this video and spread it!

He's a scary guy.

Blogiversary

Sky as I completed my run tonight.

One thousand, one hundred sixty six posts have appeared here since February 25, 2005. Three years of this project; that's quite a long time and a lot of words and pictures.

Don't know how long I'll go on, but I've been told it has been useful to a few. It certainly has been fun for me.

"Taxi to the Dark Side" wins Oscar

Dilawar was just another unfortunate Afghan caught in the wrong place at the wrong time (2002) by blundering, uncomprehending U.S. soldiers -- and beaten to death. A military doctor described his death as homicide, reporters noticed, and filmmaker Alex Gibney spins a visual account of the burgeoning global U.S. torture regime jumping off from this single, small episode in a trail of horrors.

This was the only movie I saw in a theatre this year. It works as a movie. It will not shock anyone who has been paying attention -- but it might make you vomit. Or curdle in shame at what this country has become.

Perhaps the Oscar will keep this documentary in theatres long enough so that some larger number of us face what our country has become.

Information on showings here. Several days ago, HBO acquired TV rights. Let us hope they follow through on their promise of a broadcast in September. I would not be surprised if right wingers objected that exposing U.S. torture practices was objectionably "political" in this election season.

Where's the profit in the nonprofit?

It's the new thing-- let's stop this foolishness about doing good for the love of our fellows, or because the work needs to be done, or whatever other motive drives people to work under the nonprofit umbrella. Away with all that angst and inefficiency. Social betterment can make money. The New York Times reports, in an article hopefully titled "A Capitalist Jolt for Charity," that

a new breed of social entrepreneurs ... are administering increasing doses of bottom-line thinking to traditional philanthropy in order to make charity more effective.

The Times' exemplar of this happy trend is something called ePals that provides free social networking tools to schools. Sounds like it does furnish interesting software to teachers and the kids enjoy it. All good.

But where's the profit in this business model? Well -- many paragraphs later, we get this:

Like many start-up companies, the revamped ePals is still working on its business model. Mr. Gilburne, the chairman, says it will pursue corporate sponsors for certain project areas. These could be part of a company’s community and social responsibility activities, providing approved adult experts to help students online. For example, General Electric might sponsor ePals’ global warming section by providing environmental experts as online mentors...

Let's see, ePals might be able to sell youthful eyeballs to propaganda from corporate war profiteers on climate crisis. Very charitable indeed.

Or when again, ePals might just be another Web 2.0 bust, questing after a profit that must exist somewhere in a never completed business breakthrough. Hmm, perhaps it will turn out to be an ordinary nonprofit after all -- limping along doing educational work because living in human society demands that some of us invest our creativity and capital in maintaining the common good. What a concept!

The incredible shrinking man

Nader is becoming a joke. In 2000, three million people voted for him. In 2004, only 463,653 gave their heart and soul to him. There is no chance that this year he will attract even that many people to his campaign. His sell by date was over in November 2000. I wish he had the sense to realize that and work for change in other ways. He could be a force for the adoption of a more progressive agenda by the Democrats, but not as a Presidential candidate.

Steven D
Booman Tribune

Maybe we ought to start a pool. How many votes will Nader get this year?

I say about 170,000. Leave your guess in the comments.

The map tells the story...

If Sutter Health/California Pacific Medical Center has its way, the southern part of San Francisco will have NO hospital except the overcrowded, underfunded County General. That part of the city is the last area where working families, many African American, Latino and of various Asian ethnicities, hang on in this gentrified, boutique city.

Elizabeth Fernandez tells the human and financial story on the front page of this morning's Chronicle. Some excerpts:

"People will suffer," said the chief of cardiology, Dr. Ed Kersh. "The day after St. Luke's closes, someone having a heart attack south of Market will have no place to go for acute or continuing care - if he or she is lucky enough to survive."

... Sutter Health, which is affiliated with Cal Pacific, invested about $200 million in St. Luke's in recent years, purchasing new equipment and adding cardiovascular and breast health centers. In 2007, Sutter transferred the administration of St. Luke's to Cal Pacific, the city's largest nonprofit hospital.

Both Sutter and Cal Pacific made cost-cutting changes at the historic hospital. The workers' compensation clinic closed, and the outpatient physical therapy program transferred to the Davies campus at Castro and Duboce streets, one of four CPMC campuses in the city. The psychiatric ward and outpatient mental health clinic at St. Luke's closed in 2005. Next month, the neonatal intensive care unit will be downgraded to a special-care nursery.

The 10th floor, primarily a surgical ward with private rooms, has in effect closed, resulting at times in four patients per room on the ninth floor. Nurses say those rooms are so crowded and noisy that at times a patient will become the self-designated "captain" who helps facilitate care for the whole room.

It presents a "nursing challenge that should never occur in a civilized country," said Mary Micalucca, a St. Luke's registered nurse for 33 years. "These patients are often left to their own devices - pulling out IVs and other tubes, creating increased costs and nursing interventions."

... The financial quandary vexing St. Luke's is familiar to municipalities across the country: How do cities and health care corporations balance soaring costs with the medical needs of the poor?

For St. Luke's there's only one answer: Take care of them.

Currently, 45 percent of St. Luke's patients are on Medi-Cal (for the poor), 45 percent are on Medicare (for the elderly), and 4 percent aren't insured, said William Miller, St. Luke's chief medical executive. The state reimburses only about half of St. Luke's Medi-Cal costs.

The St. Luke's drama is certainly an argument for a properly funded universal health care system -- but it also reveals that that pseudo-nonprofit corporations are no way to provide people the care that should be a human right. As a Sutter spokesman concedes in this article,

"We looked at what we thought the community needed from a business model."

Not good enough. This rich country's failure to provide health care to all its residents in the interests of protecting the freedom of the comfortable to make a profit (that is what stops us, you know) makes all of us accomplices in crime.

See previous coverage of the St. Luke's struggle on this blog: here and here from 2005, as well as here and here from 2007 and here in 2008.

Old timers in San Francisco may be reminded of the long running, deeply community-based struggle to save the International Hotel in Chinatown, a battle whose fierce, joyful twists and turns rocked the city for a decade. Apparently we need to do that again.

Central City Against the Wars

Pastor Eric Gabourel opened the meeting.

Last night in the Tenderloin, a dozen or so of San Francisco's long time grassroots activists came together with a slightly larger number of neighborhood folks to talk about how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan not only trash those unfortunate countries and people, but also make a hell of life in the central city.



The gathering was hosted by the Providence Christian Center aka the Hot Dog Church, which is a member of the Pentecostal Charismatic Peace Fellowship.




Organizer and poet James Tracy welcomed the assembled concerned citizens. "People in the Central City are already know struggling to get by on the streets -- so they just go right on to struggling against wars and empire...."


Lisa Grey Garcia, aka Tiny, of Poor Magazine reminded folks that they don't need a bunch of academics to tell them what to think, that they are all experts in the "scholarship of poverty."


Max Elbaum and Attieno Davis brought a stark message from War Times/Tiempo de Guerras:

If the U.S. can be forced to withdraw completely from Iraq, many positive changes become possible.

But if the U.S. continues its military occupation, every problem facing people here, in Iraq and across the globe will get worse.

Attieno tried to help people imagine what a "billion" -- 1,000,000,000 -- might mean. The cost of the U.S, war in Iraq is closing in on 500 billion dollars -- today it is roughly $496,700,000,000. The mind boggles. All that money is being stolen from the people of this country. For an accounting of what the war is costing you and me, check out the National Priorities Project.


When life is hard, art matters. This sister sang passionately to close the presentation part of the meeting.

And then, folks got down to business. After some discussion, the result is a new antiwar group in the neighborhood calling itself Central City Against the Wars -- wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and on San Francisco's poor. So the peace movement grows.