The Opinion Pages

In the last few days we’ve heard about a lot of crime in the area near our South Berkeley office. Our neighborhood association has reported at least three nearby hold-ups in broad daylight, and a frequent correspondent in the adjacent Temescal area has sent us a letter (in this issue) about a frightening unprovoked assault on a pedestrian by a gang of young teens who didn’t even appear to be looking to rob the victim. -more-

Parking in the Elmwood hangs by a tenuous thread. The proposed retail complex to be housed at the old Wright’s Garage near Ashby and College will have no on-site parking, and the only requirement owner John Gordon must meet is to try to provide parking. He doesn’t even have to try very hard! -more-

Our community, in particular, South Berkeley, is experiencing a gnawing anxiety about the apparently unstoppable will of Verizon/Nextel to install throughout South Berkeley a cell phone antenna net. This is an expression used in the cell phone industry and now also part of the accepted and incorporated lingo of our city planning department staff. -more-

The supporters of closed borders and deportations are not a fringe minority. Millions—including a majority of “liberal” elected officials like our California senators—favor the policy of walling off the United States at the Southern border. I visited the border last month. I talked with a few of the people deported from the Sonora desert of Arizona. I saw the bottoms of their feet torn to shreds after walking day and night in the desert sun and sand, and heard of beatings and humiliation at the hands of the private militarized Wackenhut company under contract with Homeland Security. Eight people were known to have died in the desert during four days I was there. One of the men we talked with was a San Francisco chef who had had to return home to the Yucatan for family affairs. Another was a peasant woman from Morelos the soles of whose feet I had to cut off because they were just dead separated skin. She cannot survive in Mexico because U.S. imports have financially ruined Mexico’s peasant agricultural base. Is this the kind of investment that letter writer Robert Gable believes will help get the Mexican economy back on its feet—the dumping of subsidized surplus US corn and other commodities on the Mexican market under NAFTA? -more-