Features
Letters to the Editor
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
Editors, Daily Planet:
When the most recent traffic circles were installed near downtown, I expected to like them. And I did for the first week, in which I happened to only bicycle. But then I walked.
Where straight traffic through never bothered me much, now all the cars veer into the crosswalk. At night especially the car headlights sweep the sidewalk. All my protective pedestrian reflexes (e.g. “there is a car coming straight at me”) are activated. And, despite the stop signs at each circle, car drivers rarely stop.
I find walking on the sidewalk much less pleasant now that circles have been installed.
Bryce Nesbitt
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HAZARDS OF TRAFFIC CIRCLES
Editors, Daily Planet:
“Calming circles.” Duh! If you want to calm down, turn on soft music in your car. I cannot see any use for them except to complicate local people’s lives. I worry about the thousands of dollars it must have cost the city to erect, plant, water and maintain these structures. In times of budget crisis, the money could have been spent on needed expenditures such as fire trucks, which, by the way, could travel a lot easier through the city without the circles. Every second of delay to firemen increases damages caused by fires. The circles are another obstruction combined with barriers and speedbumps to make emergency services more hazardous and difficult.
Andree Leenaers Smith
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SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION
Editors, Daily Planet:
Walking by the mess that is Willard School yesterday, I saw two of the newly installed sprinklers, broken, just gushing waster. I saw the asphalt driveway ripped up when the old driveway was perfectly fine. As best as I can remember, the old driveway didn’t even have a crack. A couple of years ago the school district took out the old chain link fence, and installed a brand new one closer to the sidewalk. A year ago, they removed that new chain link fence and for a year, the schoolyard was open, which was quite lovely. I discovered to my delight a very nice labyrinth, which I have enjoyed walking. Now the school district is doing more construction, whose purpose is not at all clear.
A few weeks ago, a letter writer lamented the waste on fencing at King School. Perhaps these build, tear down, rebuild with inferior quality materials and tear down again cycles is not merely poor planning, but someone feather bedding a private account? I am certainly curious as to what the school district is doing and why. How much does this all cost? I wonder if it isn’t appropriate for an investigation.
Sara Rutman
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NO ROLE MODEL
Editors, Daily Planet:
If anyone or any institution should be a role model for youth, it should be our schools and our school systems. As I watch this continued construction of new facilities in Berkeley, I am struck by all the grass that is being planted just for show, and how very little recycled materials or green building technology is being included. Solar panels anywhere? Students are taught the four Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle and rot. Our schools by and large have school gardens that compost. Yet, the very behavior of our school system demonstrates the hypocrisy of what it is teaching our children.
Grass is a mono-culture, and expensive to maintain. It is mowed with petroleum powered equipment at a time when everyone is decrying our dependence on foreign oil. Grass requires an enormous amount of water. In the Native Plants Tour this past April, thousands crowded our beautiful Berkeley gardens, as Berkeley is a regional leader in incorporating native plants into our backyards. Yet, our school system continues to act as an ostrich in the sand. We live in a Mediterranean climate. There is no justification to spend public funds on planting, maintaining and watering grass. (That huge swath of water wasting lawn in front of King and the new grass at Willard). John Selawsky, I thought you claimed to be environmentally conscious. What happened?
Now that the continued construction at Willard is killing the lawn planted last Fall, maybe instead of replanting it with water wasteful grass, BUSD can do better and replant with drought tolerant, native plants in order to practice what it teaches. And take the money it now spends on water and mowing and put into programs for students.
Lewina Ruggles
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EXTRAVAGANCE
Editors, Daily Planet:
The current community discussions of Berkeley Unified School District construction spending waste are examples of what happens when a big bureaucracy is given money without adequate safeguards and accountability measures. The school district will spend every nickel of our money, without refund, regardless of need and definitely without considering efficiency and effectiveness, as long as we taxpayers let them.
Having followed the school construction program, I have seen how endless monies are poorly used. The new school at Rosa Parks cost $12 million. So, Malcolm X school wanted $12 million for itself. Cragmont Elementary School got wood parquet floors in its cafeteria. So the high school had to get hardwood paneling in its cafeteria.
The extravagances are wild. Malcolm X school built an outdoor concrete amphitheater, so Cragmont School had to build one, then King, and Willard had to build one. But no one ever asked, is spending money like this a good idea? Malcolm X’s amphitheater is seldom used, and last year became a fishbowl twice due to flooding. King’s concrete amphitheater essentially cuts off the beautiful Edible Garden from the rest of the school. A concrete barrier. And the amphitheater is oriented so that you sit in it with your face in the sun. Everyone in Berkeley should visit King during school hours, and see that this large, expensive and ugly structure is little used. Why was it built at all?
I support funding schools. I don’t support waste and fiscal mismanagement. It is time for a complete independent audit of our school local parcel taxes and bonds, to honestly, and truthfully let us taxpayers know. What kind of job is are schools doing? Is our money well used? Are students benefiting?
Raymond Chandler
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STATIST QUO
Editors, Daily Planet:
Ah, everyone’s favorite state apologist, Mal Burnstein, rides forth again to present another self-serving non-argument as to why his bureaucratic class has further claim to our resources !
Excuse me, Mal, but taxes are not like club dues. No club collects members or funds at the point of a gun. Far from being a mark of civilization as the myopic Professor Lakoff would have it, taxes are a remnant of ancient societies where the ruling class would forcibly extract its tribute from the hides of its subjects.
Anyone is under any illusions that all the services currently monopolized by government could not be provided privately in a free market needs to read For A New Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard. Rothbard goes into detail as to how everything from roads to schools to the police could be furnished more efficiently and without infringing our freedom in a society of laissez-faire capitalism.
It’s a beautiful antidote to the Berkeley Statist Quo. Which also happens to be the intellectually braindead staus quo around here.
Lin Biao
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MARRIAGE EQUALITY
Editors, Daily Planet:
Letter writer S. Smith (July 8) is a classic example of someone picking a fight instead of working to achieve a goal. S/he accurately points out the unfairness of many legal privileges available to married people, an issue I imagine the vast majority of supporters of gay marriage will acknowledge, and then goes on the attack, seemingly accusing everyone in a committed relationship of opposing fairer policies.
I, for one, am in complete agreement with the assertion that a successful life partnership (ours passed 30 years in June) is reward enough in itself, though I would not call it the “happenstance of our sex lives.” If the objective is to recruit supporters for reform of government and business bias, count me in, though family-friendly policies making it easier for partners to care for one another probably pay for themselves by reducing the need for social services. But Smith’s letter was an attack on marriage itself, calculated to undermine any coalition between couples and single people for tax and benefit reform—a coalition that obviously will be needed if it’s true that singles are a minority.
Legal benefits are often mentioned by gay marriage proponents, because they are a concrete example of material unfairness based on gender, but many gay and lesbian couples just want their relationships acknowledged and sanctioned in the community. Spitting in the eye of these folks does zero to win their support—or mine.
Daryl Sieck
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DOG PARK PROBLEMS
Editors, Daily Planet:
Sometimes a good idea turns out to be a bad idea.
The Ohlone dog park was one of the first in our country. A place for dogs to run around without leashes. Good idea. The bad part is that it was set up in a residential area. More and more dog owners are drawn to the park, even from outside of Berkeley. I was told that there are 30,000 dogs in Berkeley alone. A small percentage of dogs bark more than exercise. Some dogs are brought at 6 a.m. and some dogs are brought as late as 10:30 p.m. Neighbors who work at home, neighbors who work nights, children are robbed of the right of a reasonably peaceful environment.
There have been more than three years of monthly meetings to work out some solution. Dog owners have refused to observe reasonable hours. The Parks Department and City Council have had representatives at these meetings, and have recognized problems. Dog trainers have testified that any dog can be taught not to bark, and offered to teach classes. Meetings, meetings, meetings—for more than three years. Anything change? No!
Dogs and dog owners are mobile. We neighbors are not. The noise at times exceeds allowable standards. I suggest that Ohlone dog park be moved to a non-residential area. Maybe City Hall would be a good place.
Harry Gans
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OZZIE’S
Editors, Daily Planet:
Yes, it’s a shame that Ozzie’s Fountain has to close after so many years and so many memories. As a native of Berkeley, I have many of those same memories as a student at Willard back in the ‘60s, getting a cherry phosphate from Ozzie. It’s odd, however to see the likes of Marty Schiffenbauer merely calling it “sad” that no one with the money has stepped forward to keep it going. He should have plenty of money himself to keep his beloved hangout going. After all, he almost single-handedly brought rent control to Berkeley so he could keep his money out of the evil landlord’s pockets. Over 25 years of savings should be just about enough. I say he should put his money where is mouth is.
Tim Cannon
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PEACE LANTERN CEREMONY
Editors, Daily Planet:
One of the many occasions in Berkeley when Norine Smith will be missed is this year’s Peace Lantern Ceremony, Aug. 6 at the north end of Aquatic Park. Norine applied her legendary enthusiasm to the success of this event, which involves three of her great loves: the quest for peace and justice; Japanese culture; and the parkland adjoining Berkeley’s Bay waterfront, which she worked so hard to protect as a Waterfront Commissioner.
Norine (along with various friends she recruited) helped create the annual ceremony, in which participants (including many children) decorate shades for candle-lit lanterns floated on the lagoon at dusk, after performances of Japanese music and messages from the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Until this year, her work on this event was behind-the-scenes: hosting planning meetings at her house, organizing work sessions to make lantern shades, directing volunteers assembling and lighting the lanterns at the event. This year, she was to serve as one of the event’s emcees.
The ceremony affirms our aspirations for a peaceful future and our abhorrence of atomic (and all) warfare, but it is rooted in an ancient Japanese tradition for honoring the departed. Many people decorate their lantern shades with remembrances of loved ones; the lanterns are floated as “boats” to guide their souls to the Beyond. While Norine has made that journey too early, there is no doubt she packed more passion, activism, and love into her 67 years than most of us could fit into 100.
Fittingly, the planning group is dedicating the 2005 Peace Lantern Ceremony to Norine. To honor Norine, all who have gone before us, and especially, our community’s many efforts toward a just and peaceful future, please contact the planning committee at www.progressiveportal.org/lanterns or 595-4626 and help make this all-volunteer, low-budget event a success. Wherever she’s watching from now, I know Norine will be pleased.
Steve Freedkin
•
BETH EL
Editors, Daily Planet:
I am a property owner who has lived at 1237 Oxford Street since 1965, right next door to the monstrous complex that Temple Beth El is currently constructing in what used to be a very nice neighborhood. The activities that will take place in this huge complex are threatening to have a very negative impact on the lives of those of us who live here unless Beth El will live up to the legally binding agreements it has made with LOCCNA, the neighborhood association.
I am deeply concerned about the unethical behavior of Beth El which negotiated an agreement and now seeks to ignore it. I understand that the City is preparing to issue a Certificate of Occupancy for this project even though Beth El has failed to live up to the legally binding signed agreement, the language of which was incorporated into the Conditional Use Permit to be issued for the project.
If the City fails to require that Temple Beth El live up to its agreement on the detailed parking plan and the requirements for bank- stabilization and landscaping for Codornices Creek that it signed, then the City will be derelict in its duty and responsibilities to the citizens of Berkeley in this neighborhood.
The mayor and city government should look into this matter and require full compliance with the conditions specified before allowing the buildings to be occupied.
Ruth L. Jennings
Nevada City
•
LAWSUIT
Editors, Daily Planet:
Just to keep the people abreast of what is happening in the CEQA lawsuit over LRDP, my motion for inquiry into the existence of extrinsic fraud in the obtaining of the voluntary dismissal is still pending before the court and will be heard on July 20, 2005, at 9:00 A.M.
However, the in-house counsel, Hope Schmeltzer for the university and Zach Cowan for the city, wrote a highly improper letter to the court, requesting of the court that it should return my motion to me “as improvidently filed.” Then, they asked that the court should “vacate the filing nunc pro tunc.” Any attorney reading this should recognize that these legal terms were improperly used and that the request of the parties was essentially hysterical gibberish, or legobabble.
A ruling or judgment is sometimes said to be made improvidently, if the court lacked some critical piece of information that it later obtained, but there is no record I could find of a motion being “improvidently” filed. That is because a judge does not prejudge a motion and so there is nothing that she could un-judge and re-judge, just based upon the filing. Similarly, a nunc pro tunc order is solely for correcting an error in the record, not for undoing what was actually done.
A filing can be “unified” at least in some jurisdictions, if the filing is deficient in some respect, but that is not even what the parties claimed. They went on to make extensive legal arguments in their letter addressed to the clerk of the court. This was a bizarre breach of legal ethics by the office of one who just received an award for her writings on legal ethics. I suspect that the members of the State Bar who voted to give that award to Manuela Albuquerque don’t know her like we do. They need to hear our perspective.
The scariest part of all, however, was the last paragraph. The parties said: “Please notify us as soon as possible after vacating the filing so that the court will not be burdened with a response to a motion that is beyond the court’s jurisdiction.” Not only they are making a legal argument about jurisdiction in a letter addressed to the clerk of the court, but they are certain that the court will do their bidding, will do just as they say, based upon this serious breach of civil procedure. This is arrogance of the highest order. This is complete and utter contempt for law and the rule of law. This is unfettered disdain for due process.
By the way, I was easily able to show the court, in a letter of my own written solely to counter their letter, that the arguments of the parties were lame and incorrect, as of course they always have been. My motion is correct. Assuming we get a fair hearing, we will win. All power to the people!
Peter J. Mutnick
•
ANTI-BLOTTER
Editors, Daily Planet:
Just another pitch against “cutesy” police logs. I have taught high school students for ten years, and many of them cuss quite often (or use other words I find offensive). When I object, they say “It’s OK, ‘we’ all know what we mean.” I tell them that I find it offensive, and a good rule is to avoid offending people. While it seems these days we cannot open our mouths without offending at lease one person, there have been enough letters to the Planet opposed to Richard Brenneman’s style to argue that many people are being offended by his style. We should not have to, as one writer wrote “zing up the telling of what otherwise become repetitious and boring.” A “police blotter” is not there for our entertainment, but to tell us of unfortunate events that happened in our town.
Lee Amosslee
•
A FEW THOUGHTS
Editors, Daily Planet:
I love Berkeley and read the Daily Planet regularly. I am grateful for the open, honest, and sincere reporting and learn much from the letters to the editor.
I am saddened at the seeming intentional lack of communication between the mayor and the city council on matters of UC Berkeley’s development plans for this wonderful city and am reminded of a quote from Gary Snyder’s poem titled, The Arts Council Meets in Eureka. The poem ends, sadly:
No one who lives here
has the power
to run this town.
On a lighter note: I suggest in place of the controversial humorous police blotter, that there be a separate column devoted to overheard conversations about town. For example, in one afternoon I heard some beautiful exchanges which make me so glad to be here:
In line at the bank, a woman explains to the bank teller: “I’m into numerology. So, it matters very much to me how much I deposit and on what date. So let me just take a moment to think it through.”
In the same afternoon: A Retail Clerk on her cell phone with her daughter: “You want to take what! Won’t that be heavy and too much luggage! ....Hangs up and exclaims...”Can you believe it! My daughter is bringing her espresso machine to Maui. Kona coffee isn’t good enough. She says she can’t live without lattes for two weeks!”
Karen Clark
El Cerrito
•
PLAME LEAK
Editors, Daily Planet:
Journalist jailed but the big story is that a high level snitch exists in the Bush administration who leaked the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak. This is treason. Valerie Plame’s name was leaked a few days after husband, former ambassador, Joseph Wilson criticized President Bush’s reasons for invading Iraq. Who is the dirty rat and why does the Bush administration continue to impede the investigation?
Ron Lowe
•
MEDIA HAVE IT WRONG
Editors, Daily Planet:
As usual, our corrupt complicit corporate media has the recent story about the jailing of the New York Times reporter Judith Miller upside-down, inside-out, backwards or in a word, wrong. Judith Miller is a war criminal. Judith Miller is an accessory before the fact to mass murder and war crimes in Iraq. Judith Miller belongs in jail, along with Rove, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Cheney and Bush and the rest of their vicious gang. In 2002 and 2003, her constant parroting of the Bush regime’s lies about the existence of Iraqi WMDs, which were printed in the New York Times as the gospel truth, were a major part of propaganda blitz used to bully and stampede the American people and the Congress into supporting the stupid invasion of Iraq. Judith Miller is now protecting some traitorous criminals in the Bush White House who illegally outed the undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame some two years ago; she is not “protecting her sources.”
Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was outed by someone in the Bush White House as retaliation against him for his earlier having revealed the Bush lie about Iraq having purchased some yellow cake uranium ore from Niger, a country in Africa. The Cheney lie was that Saddam had “reconstituted his nuclear program” and thus needed the uranium ore to make nuclear weapons. Ambassador Wilson revealed that the documents that supposedly showed the Iraqi purchase of yellow cake were merely crude forgeries. Ambassador Wilson then blew the whistle on these Bush lies by going public with this information. This was a big step in cracking the facade of all of the Bush lies about Iraq.
The Bush White House then orchestrated the outing of an undercover CIA agent, who incidentally was researching possible WMD threats, in what was an
extremely reckless act. This criminal action was meant to intimidate other potential whistle-blowers who might want to reveal other Bush regime crimes.
I guess that all the editorial pontificators prattling on about the supposed “freedom of the press” in America are not referring to the freedom of the corporate media to lie, smear, attack, distort, omit facts and act as cheerleaders in support of the illegitimate Bush regime, its thefts of presidential elections in 2000 and 2004, its vast corporate corruption, its absurd unbelievable incompetence in managing to not quite be able seal off airliner cockpits in time to stop the nine-eleven terror attacks, its overthrow of the democracy in Haiti by the kidnapping of President Aristide to Africa and his replacement by death squad leaders and its illegal
criminal war on the Iraqi people.
The only “free press” newspapers left in 21st century corporate America are a few courageous progressive alternative weekly papers. Otherwise, we are forced to go to the Internet each day to find anything resembling the truth. In this regard, some useful alternative media websites include: News from occupied Iraq at www.uruknet.info, the LeftCoaster at www.theleftcoaster.com, Nero Fiddled at /nerofiddled.blogspot.com, Common Dreams at www.commondreams.org, Truth Out at www.truthout.org, Tom Paine at www.tompaine.com, Buzz Flash at www.buzzflash.com, Bella Ciao at //bellaciao.org and the Daily Kos at www.dailykos.com.
James K. Sayre
Oakland
