Page One

SCHOOL SWAP 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I want to thank Matthew Artz for his accurate reporting of the issues surrounding the lawsuit filed against the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) by the Friends of Franklin (FOF). 

As a party in this suit, I feel that it is important to state that this action was undertaken solely as a last resort, in order to protect the quality and character of the neighborhood surrounding the Franklin School site. It is not in any way meant to be retaliatory, vindictive, or punative. 

Neighbors of both the Franklin School and West Campus (the current location of Berkeley Adult School) have engaged in dialogue with BUSD for many months. These meetings, while initially encouraging, have now resulted in feelings of mistrust, frustration, and disillusionment with the school district and its staff. It is our contention that the district has inadequately addressed our concerns regarding the likely environmental impacts of this project, and have thereby violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). In addition, they have failed to connect the relocation of the Adult School to other foreseeable and related projects, also a violation of CEQA. 

We, the FOF, believe that it is possible to protect the integrity of our neighborhood and the interests of the Adult School students and faculty, if all concerned parties engage in honest and meaningful communication. That it takes a lawsuit to accomplish this is indeed unfortunate. 

When all is said and done, not just the Franklin neighbors, but all of the people of Berkeley will have to live with the outcome of the district’s decisions regarding the use of its properties and facilities. The FOF would like to ensure that due process is adhered to with regard to such decisions, and the district be held accountable for its actions. 

If, in this case, a court decides that due process has been circumvented and project funds are compromises as a result, that indeed would be a terrible waste. However, the school district chose to condone this move in opposition to overwhelming neighborhood sentiment, which asked for the final decision to be postponed in order to better evaluate the entire plan. The district then will have to look no further than itself and its representatives for a reason as to why that outcome came to pass.  

Carrie Adams 

• 

PAMPHLET-BRAINED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

While ISM member Jim Harris characterizes my letter condemning the Berkeley City Council’s call for an investigation of Rachel Corrie’s death as a “diatribe,” it’s telling that neither he nor fellow critic Gray Brechin respond to the substance of my commentary. 

As reflected in Mother Jones’ current issue, I noted that the ISM was kicked out of its shared office space by the International Red Cross in Jenin for hiding an Islamic Jihad soon thereafter arrested for plotting four homicide bombings. No response on this from Mr. Harris. Moreover, Harris made no mention of the subsequent distancing of NGO’s from his organization after they “socialized” with two Pakistanis of British citizenry who shortly thereafter blew themselves and a dozen innocent Israeli citizens up. 

At least Mr. Harris, despite his calls for “human rights,” didn’t deny what Joshua Hammer found when he investigated the ISM for his Mother Jones piece: that a good number of ISM members “embrace” Palestinian homicide bombers as freedom fighters. Were he being truthful, this is something Mr. Harris could hardly deny and therefore, he didn’t.  

And neither Mr. Harris nor Mr. Brechin deny that the ISM sent photos to Reuters of Rachel Corrie, saying that they were taken just prior to her death when in reality they were taken several hours before, thereby alienating much of the international press. They can’t pretend the ISM tried to lie to the world because through Reuters, we now know this to be a matter of public record. 

Finally, Harris and Brechin call Rachel Corrie’s death “murder,” despite the fact that the primary witness—a fellow ISM member—says it may well have been an accident. 

Of course, like a vocabulary-challenged teenager who absolutely must utter the “F-word,” Mr. Brechin can’t resist tossing in that old Pravda cliché, “Zionist imperialism.” Such language will do fine affirming his affinity with ideologues like the ISM, but like Mr. Harris, Brechin’s willingness to eschew facts for slogans confine him and his comrades to the bargain basement of Berkeley’s pamphlet-brained. 

A question for our fine progressive City Council majority: If you are going to take up the case of Rachel Corrie, how could you ignore the fact that 43 Americans have fallen victim to Palestinian suicide bombs? Is that not also worthy of investigation? Why not? It couldn’t be because they were Jews, could it? 

Dan Spitzer 

• 

PUT ‘EM BACK 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

While some street and sidewalk improvements to better provide for wheelchair users may take a long time to bring about in Berkeley, there is one improvement that the city can make right away. 

The city could immediately instruct and require sanitation and recycling workers to place emptied garbage cans, plant debris, and other recycling containers so they do not obstruct the sidewalk. 

In my neighborhood, for instance, residents are usually very good about putting out their containers where they won’t block the sidewalk. Every pick-up morning one sees neat lines of gray, green, and blue containers carefully placed either in the “verge” (the area between curb and sidewalk, or in driveways, off the sidewalk. 

Once the city workers pass by, however, the sidewalks are cluttered with containers that have been emptied and hastily swung, pushed, or tossed aside. 

This creates obstacles to pedestrians and wheelchairs throughout the day, because many residents are away at work and aren’t there to move the containers out of the sidewalk until evening. 

The city’s Public Works Department could and should require that its workers not only bring containers back to the curb but also place them where they are not blocking the sidewalk. Usually this would mean the simple act of putting a container back where the resident originally placed it for pick-up. 

The city should also make allowances for the increases in time required to do this work with care. My impression has been that the sanitation workers are typically moving so fast down the street—presumably to stick to a schedule—that they don’t have time to do more than quickly drag or swing a container aside once the contents have been dumped into the collection truck. They perform an intricate and energetic ballet, but the end result is often sidewalk clutter. 

It was only about two decades ago in Berkeley that sanitation workers routinely came into yards, picked up garbage cans from storage areas, emptied them, and then carefully returned them to the place they came from. While the days of yard pickup are gone (in part because of the back problems caused by carrying heavy cans), it is not too much to expect that the part about “putting it back where it came from” should be among the city’s axioms for sanitation workers. 

Steven Finacom 

• 

DECISIVE ACTION 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Berkeley’s problem of black-on-white violence and racism will be tackled meaningfully in the same way white racism against blacks was tackled in the South: by the victimized class awakening, throwing off internalized self-hating ideas, and taking decisive action to change the existing culture. 

Al Durrette 

• 

VOTE TO IMPEACH 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Hey, Berkeley. Wake up! Santa Cruz and Arcata have risen to the top of the progressive communities charts by taking action on the impeachment of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. This imperial quadrumvirate must be impeached for their heinous crimes: i.e. manipulation of intelligence (lying) about weapons of mass destruction in order to rationalize the illegal preemptive war against Iraq; designating citizens as “ enemy combatants” and subjecting them to indefinite detention without charge or access to counsel; ordering and condoning assassinations, secret detentions, torture and generally violating the rights of individuals under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and furthermore, withdrawing from International treaties, e.g. Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, without consent of the legislative branch. 

These and other allegations of our civil, political and human rights make it mandatory that “President” Bush and his cronies are summarily impeached. 

Even Oakland has surpassed Berkeley with this message having been posted on the Grand Lake Theatre Marquee: “ What is an impeachable offense? 

Lying about sex. NO. Lying in order to go to war. YES” 

Vote at www.votetoimpeach.org 

Gene Bernardi 

• 

XXXXXXXX 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

It is with great sadness that I read and watch the daily updates of my native state’s recall election. What first began as my mild amusement at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign has turned into terror that a serial sexual predator will be California’s next governor. Schwarzenegger has publicly apologized for his sexual misconduct by referring to it as “bad behavior” that has “offended people.” Such an apology leads one to believe his actions were as minor as a teenager talking during class. 

Multiple women have claimed that Schwarzenegger grabbed their breasts, pinched their nipple, or otherwise engaged in what is legally considered second-degree sexual assault under the California penal code. While the mainstream press published allegations of Schwarzenegger’s history of sexual assaults just last week, the first report of his sexual misconduct surfaced in 1977. It did not end there. A 2001 article in Premiere referenced several incidents that allegedly occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s. This information was published two years before the current recall election. Therefore, this is not a smear campaign; this is a pattern of sexual abuse  

towards women. 

My older brother and I grew-up watching Schwarzenegger movies and quoting his best-scripted one-liners. My brother still lives in California, with his wife, son, and two daughters. He, like many men in the state, needs to make a decision Tuesday about what means more to him: his long-time movie hero, or a strong statement that he will not tolerate, much less reward, sexual attacks on women. 

The only pragmatic way to vote against Schwarzenegger is to vote against the recall. Please search within yourself and consider this option. 

Amber Novak 

Austin, Texas 

• 

XXXXXXXX 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Charles Spiegel’s response (Daily Planet, Sept. 30-Oct. 2) to my plea to “Save Our Canyons” (Daily Planet, Sept. 26-29) leaves me bewildered. He advocates for “no development in Strawberry Canyon” as opposed to “no new development in Strawberry Canyon” and then mistakenly suggests that the development impacts from the Panoramic Hill neighborhood are worse than the development impacts from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Hill Area Campus of UC Berkeley.  

The conclusion or point of this line of reasoning leaves me mystified: Is he saying that since there already is development that saving what’s left is a lost cause? Or is he saying that we all—i.e. neighbors, LBNL labs, UCB labs—should go away? Or is he just saying that the neighborhood should go away?  

It seems the latter is his intent as he illogically compares the traffic generated by the persons living in 265 dwelling units as worse than the traffic generated by the 4,000 employees who work at LBNL and those uncounted others who work in the Hill Area Campus of the UC Berkeley labs. And he mentions not at all the relative construction impacts from the houses in the neighborhood to the construction impacts from the numerous huge buildings at the industrial park in our city’s backyard.  

From my perspective, the real question is how worse the collective “we” will let things become. Instead, he and perhaps others will get into a pissing contest about which entity (labs or neighborhoods) is worse or better and thus fritter away a chance to save what little we have left of what is wild.  

But animal habitat arguments aside, building in an area of very high-risk earthquake-induced landslides might not be such a great place for large concentrations of humans. There are many reasons for preserving our canyons as open space.  

Janice Thomas